HCII Seminar Series - Qian Yang
Speaker
Qian Yang
Assistant Professor in Computing and Information Science at Cornell University
When
-
Video
Panopto
Description
"Designing AI for Societal Good in a World of Money, Policy, and Politics"
Generative AI (genAI) is increasingly influencing the properties of our society (e.g., how readily people seek and give help in hard times, how many good jobs exist). These influences are equivocal and hard to measure before they become entrenched, but likely hard to reverse once they are. This talk asks: How might we, as professionals who build AI systems, act on these influences before it is too late? How might we go beyond calling for AI regulation by leveraging our ability to build AI things to move toward this end?
This talk opens with empirical studies of history and industry practice, from which I propose a new way of thinking about designing AI for societal good: seeing it as planting seeds of better business models, policy, and politics. I then demonstrate how this new way of thinking can change what AI things we design and how, using genAI chatbots’ influence on public mental health as a case study. I close with a call for professional designers to embrace such thorny, ill-defined societal problems, in an age when simpler problems can increasingly be addressed by software that users and communities build for themselves.
Speaker's Bio
Qian Yang is an assistant professor in Computing and Information Science at Cornell University and a human-computer interaction (HCI) design researcher. She is best known for her research on profiling AI as a material for software design innovation, and on designing AI applications that help users make measurably better high-stakes decisions (e.g., heart implant candidate selection, cancer diagnosis, cyberbullying intervention). She is a Schmidt Sciences AI 2050 Fellow. Her group's work has been supported by the NIH, the NSF, and Google, among others. Find her group's work at designAI.cis.cornell.edu.
The talk will include joint work with Dan Adler, Ned Cooper, Ibrahim Emara, Meir Friedenberg, Thomas Gilbert, Jose Guridi, Margaret Hagan, Angel Hwang, Steven Jackson, Sabine Junginger, Beth Kolko, Emma McGinty, Tony Wang, Talia Wise, Richmond Wong, and John Zimmerman.
Host
John Zimmerman