Abstract
Conversational agents are becoming a part of people’s everyday life, offering the potential to support tasks, provide companionship, and promote well-being. Yet existing conversational systems—often rigid, error-prone, and socially limited—struggle to meet the needs of diverse users, particularly those who may benefit the most, such as older adults. In this talk, Amama Mahmood will present a user-centered research agenda for designing conversational agents that empower people and promote everyday well-being.
Through her research, she reimagines the design of conversation experience by investigating how voice assistants can evolve from rigid, command-based systems to adaptive, socially capable agents powered by large language models. Mahmood examines how users—particularly older adults—encounter challenges and breakdowns while interacting with traditional, off-the-shelf voice assistants, how LLM-powered voice assistants reshape their conversation experience, and how we can design agents that better align with individual needs and preferences. To achieve this, she involves end-users throughout the design of their conversation experience, builds interactive systems—LLM-powered voice assistants—to support personal health, and evaluates them in both lab and longitudinal field settings. Together, these efforts yield design insights and guidelines for creating more purposeful, adaptive, and meaningful conversation experiences. This research envisions a future in which conversational agents evolve from simple tools into empowering partners—attuned to people’s lived realities and capable of supporting the well-being of diverse users.
Speaker Biography
Amama Mahmood is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins University advised by Chien-Ming Huang. Her research interests lie at the intersection of human-computer interaction and health, focusing on the design of conversational agents to empower people and promote well-being. She holds an MSE in robotics from the Johns Hopkins University and is a Fulbright Scholar.