Sensory Perception & Interaction Research Group

University of British Columbia

Laura Cang

PhD Student
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 Facebook Reality Labs investigating machine mediated touch for communicating haptic messages.

Publication: 
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.
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.
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.
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., Feng, Q., & MacLean, K. E. "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.