Katrin Fischer is a quantitative social scientist and human-machine communication scholar with a focus on human-robot interaction and the usability of social robots.

Her research explores the cognitive, social, and technology-based processes that affect expectations and decision-making when humans communicate with embodied artificial intelligence systems. She uses experimental and data science methods to investigate how users perceive and experience emerging technologies by analyzing behavior as well as identifying and predicting variables of interest for technology use. Her research is interdisciplinary, and she collaborates with the Interaction Lab at Viterbi.

She previously obtained a master’s degree in quantitative methods in the social sciences from Columbia University and was a visiting researcher in the Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Lab (SIRRL) at the University of Waterloo. Prior to that she spent several years working in human factors engineering at Apple focusing on user experience research.

She has presented her work at the annual conferences of the International Communication Association (ICA), National Communication Association (NCA), and the IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN). Her work has been published in peer-reviewed conference proceedings as well as in the International Journal of Communication and Computers in Human Behavior.