CMU logo

Human-Centered AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) brings amazing capabilities and challenging risks. Human-centered AI (HAI) works to maximize AI’s benefits and minimize its harms by attending to AI capabilities and their impact on users, service providers, impacted stakeholders, and society at large. This area of research: 

  • Improves AI innovation processes to reduce project failure and bad outcomes
  • Creates new methods for people to interact with computing systems
  • Advances AI Literacy
  • Informs policy and the regulation of AI systems
  • Improves how innovators can team with AI to co-innovate
     

Machine Learning (ML) is a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) that involves training algorithms to learn from and make predictions or decisions based on data. Applied ML in the context of HAI focuses on designing AI systems with human needs, behaviors, and social contexts in mind.
 

Students who want to learn more about HAI might be interested in the following HCII courses: 

  • Group shot of the students on Team Resnik, holding their poster and the NASA SUITS seal.

    Navigating the Moon

    NEWS

    CMU Students Design Autonomous System for NASA Challenge - When Carnegie Mellon University's Team Resnik arrived in Houston, they reveled...

  • Portrait of Ken Koedinger.

    Koedinger Wins Lifetime Achievement Award

    NEWS

    SCS faculty member Ken Koedinger received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Artificial Intelligence in Education Soc...

  • Hong Shen stands in front of an audience and holds a microphone while presenting about AI safety at the World Economic Forum annual meeting.

    Hong Shen Discusses AI Safety at WEF Annual Meeting

    NEWS

    Hong Shen, an assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, presented this summer at the World Economic ...

  • Many members of the CMU community stand near a blue 2026 Festival of Learning banner.

    CMU at Festival of Learning 2026

    NEWS

    Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) had a strong showing at the Festival of Learning...

  • A human leg wearing a lightweight leg brace.

    Stepping Toward Better Mobility

    NEWS

    A CMU team created a mobility aid that combines functionality with wearability to support people with mobility issues, such as those who e...

  • Intelligent User Interfaces logo - contains the letters IUI and the year 2026

    HCII at IUI 2026

    NEWS

    Research at the ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces focuses on the intersection of AI and HCI, and covers both the computational...

  • a small group of 5 community members stand near ACM FAccT signage

    CMU Work at ACM FAccT 2026

    NEWS

    The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FAccT) was held June 25-28, 2026, in...

  • David Lindlbauer

    Lindlbauer Receives NSF CAREER Award for Adaptive Extended Reality Interfaces

    NEWS

    David Lindlbauer, an assistant professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, has received a Faculty...

  • Randi Williams stands on a stage beside large red TED letters, a screen nearby displays a robot

    Randi Williams Delivers Play@TED Talk: How to Raise Kids Who Question AI

    NEWS

    As artificial intelligence (AI) makes its way into toys, cultivating a new era of digital literacy with children is a necessity.

  • two children seated at the NoRILLA science table, the one raises his hands in the air after getting an answer correct

    NoRILLA Wins Global Competition

    NEWS

    Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science won an international competition aimed at transforming kindergarten...

  • a student presents a research paper at DIS, the title on the large screen behind her reads "Surfacing Design Tensions and Opportunities for AI-Mediated Pre-diagnostic Risk Communication for Breast Cancer Care"

    CMU at DIS 2026

    NEWS

    The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) was held June 13-17, 2026, in Singapore. ...

  • UI for AI visual, designing interfaces for an AI-native world

    Looking Ahead: AI Needs UI

    NEWS

    There is a distinct tension when opening an artificial intelligence (AI) tool and facing that empty text box with its blinking cursor. Wha...