Enabling Meaningful Communication Through Personalization

Technology has vastly increased our ability to communicate with others, regardless of geographical location. Yet, while the quantity of communication available for users has increased, loneliness, polarization, and miscommunication are still rampant in technologically mediated communication. In this paper, we discuss our work on making communication with technology more meaningful by increasing the clarity and impact of the intended message through personalization. We outline our work and goals for three types of communication, machine-to-human, human-to-machine, and human-to-human, briefly summarizing our completed and planned work for each form. Our work develops techniques to personalize each form of communication through a modality traditionally under-researched for interpersonal interaction, such as music and physiology. This work will contribute to existing literature by generating methods and frameworks to make communication through technology easier to understand and important to users through personalization.