Laura Cang

cang@cs.ubc.ca

Laura's interest in social robotics and touch interaction brought her to the SPIN lab to build the touch recognition engine of a touch-sensitive robots designed for therapeutic use, aka the CuddleBot and family of CuddleBits. Her PhD project builds on this earlier focus - developing machine recognition and interpretation of social touch behaviour - and has evolved to feature emotion modelling and recognition of emotion transition in genuine and spontaneous emotion experiences. Laura is collaborating with Meta Reality Labs investigating machine mediated touch for communicating haptic messages.

Year Departed

2024

SPIN Publications

Hladký M, Guerra RR, Cang XL, MacLean KE, Gebhard P, Schneeberger T. Modeling the ‘Kiss my Ass’-Smile: Appearance and Functions of Smiles in Negative Social Situations. In 2024 12th Int'l Conf ACII, IEEE.
McLaren, Gao, Yin, Guerra., Vyas, Morton, Cang, Chen, Su, Li, Madden, MacLean. What is Affective Touch Made Of? A Soft Capacitive Sensor Array Reveals the Interplay between Shear, Normal Stress and and Individuality. UIST, 2024.
From Devices to Data and Back Again: A Tale of Computationally Modelling Affective Touch
Yin, X., Gao, J., Guerra, R. R., Morton, C., McLaren, D., Vyas, P., Cang, X. L., Ishizaki, R., Madden, J., & MacLean, K. E. "ShearSense: A soft flexible sensing array for capturing shear and normal stress in affective touch". Proc. Eurohaptics - Hands-On
Cang XL, Guerra RR, Guta B, Bucci P, Rodgers L, Mah H, Feng Q, Agrawal A, MacLean K. "FEELing (key)Pressed: Implicit Touch Pressure Bests Brain Activity in Modelling Emotion Dynamics in the Space Between Stressed and Relaxed." IEEE Transactions on Haptics
Nao Rojas, Daniel Chen, Rubia Reis Guerra, X. Laura Cang, Bereket Guta, Karon E. MacLean "A Tool for Capturing Customized Multi-Pass Emotion Self-Reports while Touching and Telling" Demo at Worldhaptics, 2023
Yuna Watanabe, Xi Laura Cang, Rúbia Reis Guerra, Devyani Mclaren, Preeti Vyas, Jun Rekimoto, and Karon E Maclean. 2023. "Demonstrating Virtual Teamwork with Synchrobots: A Robot-Mediated Approach to Improving Connectedness." In Extended Abstracts of the 2
Cang XL, Israr A, MacLean KE. "When is a Haptic Message Like an Inside Joke? Digitally Mediated Emotive Communication Builds on Shared History." IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. 2023 Feb 13;14(1):732-46.
Cang XL, Guerra RR, Bucci P, Guta B, MacLean K, Rodgers L, Mah H, Hsu S, Feng Q, Zhang C, Agrawal A. "Choose or Fuse: Enriching Data Views with Multi-label Emotion Dynamics." In 2022 10th Int'l Conf ACII, IEEE.
Cang, X.L., Bucci, P., Rantala, J., & MacLean, K.E. "Discerning Affect from Touch and Gaze During Interaction with a Robot Pet" in IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. 2021. pp 1-15.
Cang XL, Feng Q, MacLean KE. "What's in a name? Issues in Triangulating Self-Reported Emotion to Establish Trustable Labels." CHI '21 Workshop on Momentary Emotion Elicitation and Capture, 2021.
Bucci, P.H., Cang, X.L., Mah, H., Rodgers, L., MacLean, K.E. “Real Emotions Don’t Stand Still: Toward Ecologically Viable Representation of Affective Interaction,” Affective Computing and Intelligent Interfaces, 2019.
Zhang, L., Bucci, P., Cang, X. L., & MacLean, K. E., "Infusing CuddleBits with Emotion: Build your Own and Tell Us About it," In Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference Demonstration on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (p. D408) ACM.
Bucci, P., Zhang, L., Cang, X. L., & MacLean, K. E. "Is it Happy? Behavioural and Narrative Frame Complexity Impact Perceptions of a Simple Furry Robot's Emotions." CHI, 2018.
Cang, X. L., Dattoli, M. C., & MacLean, K. E. "The DIY Designer’s Sidekick: A Role for Robots in Personal Manufacturing." IROS 2017 Workshop paper.
Bucci, P., Cang, X. L., Valair, A., Marino, D., Tseng, L., Jung, M., Rantala, J., Schneider, O. S., MacLean, K. E. "Sketching CuddleBits: Coupled Prototyping of Body and Behaviour for an Affective Robot Pet." In CHI 2017. pp. 3681-3692.
Cang, X.L., "Towards an Emotionally Communicative Robot: Feature Analysis for Multimodal Support of Affective Touch Recognition.", M.Sc. Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2016.
Bucci P., Cang, L., Chun, M., Marino, D., Schneider, O., Seifi, H., and MacLean KE. "CuddleBits: an iterative prototyping platform for complex haptic display." Int'l Conf on Human Haptic Sensing and Touch Enabled Computer Application - Demo London UK 2016
Jung, M.M., Cang, X.L, Poel, M., MacLean, K.E., "Touch Challenge'15: Recognizing Social Touch Gestures." In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM on International Conference on Multimodal Interaction 2015 Nov 9 (pp. 387-390). ACM.
Allen, J., Cang, L., Phan-Ba, M., Strang, A., and MacLean, K.E., “Introducing the CuddleBot: A Robot That Responds to Touch Gestures,” in Proc. of ACM/IEEE Int'l Conf on Human Robot Interaction (HRI) - Demo, Portland, 2015.
Cang, L., Bucci, P., and MacLean, K.E., “CuddleBits: Friendly, Low-cost Furballs that Respond to Your Touch,” in Proc. of ACM Int'l Conf on Multimomdal Interaction (ICMI) - Demo, Seattle, WA, pp. 2, 2015.
Cang, X. L., Bucci, P., Strang, Allen, J., MacLean, K. E., and Liu, H. Y. S., "Different Strokes and Different Folks: Economical Dynamic Surface Sensing and Affect-Related Touch Recognition." In Proc of ICMI '15, Seattle, WA, USA, Nov 2015, pp. 147-154.