Past Seminars

"Design of Human-AI Systems to Augment Human Potential"

At the Human-AI Integration Lab (HAL), we design, build, and study human-AI systems that amplify human potential by enhancing cognitive, creative, physical, and social capabilities. This talk will explore the challenges of… Full Details

"How to Build a New Generation of AI Native Products"

We’ve seen an explosion of investment in AI infrastructure and foundation models, yet a commensurate surge of popular AI products has yet to follow. In this talk, we’ll explain the dearth of existing products, examine building… Full Details

"Decolonizing LLMs: An Ethnographic Framework for AI in African Contexts"

We examine LLM deployment through African lenses, utilizing and reflecting on ethnographic methods to engage with the continent’s unique technolinguistic landscape. Drawing from primary research in Ethiopia… Full Details

"People and Online Research, Now That They’re Doing AI"

Given all of the press that LLMs have garnered, it’s worthwhile asking if they’re changing the ways people find information.  Are LLMs pulling traffic away from the search engines?  Just as importantly, how do… Full Details

"Human-Centered Explainable AI"

Artificial intelligence systems are increasingly involved in high-stakes decision-making, such as healthcare, financial, and educational determinations. Many have called for explainable AI (XAI), which are AI systems that provide human-… Full Details

"The Human Quotient for Better AI Systems"

 The unprecedented rise in the adoption of artificial intelligence techniques and automation in many contexts is concomitant with the shortcomings of such technology concerning robustness, interpretability, usability, trustworthiness… Full Details

“AI For Good” Isn’t Good Enough: A Call for Human-Centered AI

AI for Good initiatives recognize the potential impacts of AI systems on humans and societies.  However, simply recognizing these impacts is not enough. To be truly Human-Centered, AI development must be user-… Full Details

"Designing Accessible Virtual Reality Experiences for People with Limited Mobility"

Virtual Reality (VR) offers compelling ways for people to interact with digital content in various domains such as education, gaming, communication, and design. However, VR platforms can be… Full Details

"Digital Dreams Have Become Nightmares:  What We Must Do -- A Call to Action"

For 80 years, digital technology visionaries have imagined and created systems to support human knowledge, learning, creativity, medicine, health, communications, community, commerce, power, and… Full Details

"Understanding the Complexity of Social Interactions at the City Scale"

The quantity and quality of social encounters in urban environments are crucial elements that drive economic mobility and build social capital. Where in cities do we observe the most and least diversity in… Full Details

"Wikipedia as a Social Computing Laboratory: 20 Years of Research (and Counting)"

I’ve been doing research in Wikipedia for almost 20 years. It has been a laboratory where my collaborators and I have studied the social dynamics of the peer production of knowledge and introduced a… Full Details

"Responsible AI (h)as a Learning and Design Problem"

To address the potential harms of AI systems, prior work has developed resources (e.g., toolkits) to support responsible AI (RAI) development and studied how AI practitioners use such resources in their development practices.… Full Details

"Forms of Accountability at the Intersection of Science and Design: Implications for Health and Wellness Technologies"

Computing holds the promise of alleviating the negative impact of chronic disease and mental health disorders by scaling human effort over time and space. Four in… Full Details

"Intercepting User’s Brain and Nervous System: A New Paradigm for Haptic Output"

When outputting information to our senses, almost all wearable interfaces follow the same principle: externally generating stimuli (e.g., lights, sounds, vibrations) and then presenting them via… Full Details

"Creativity, Productivity and Communication"

Before AI showed up, software engineers spent only 20-30 percent of their time coding, with the remaining time dedicated to discussing their code. With the AI revolution, stakeholders expect that ratio to decrease even more. Therefore,… Full Details

"Towards Artificial Users: Rethinking Predictive Modeling in HCI in the Era of ML" 

Predictive models are used to infer users’ preferences, predict behavior, and generate and adapt user interfaces. Such models are hard to create, however, fundamentally because human behavior… Full Details

"Behavior-Driven Optimization for Interactive Data Exploration"

Analysts need the ability to intuitively explore their data before deciding how to clean it, model it, and present it to key decision makers. With the abundance of massive datasets in industry and science, analysts… Full Details

"Creating Ethics Infrastructures for Design"

Design is a social and cultural practice (as well as a technical one). Developing ethical systems requires more than creating technical ethical design tools for individual designers; it also requires consideration of social and cultural… Full Details

"From Cadavers to Categories: Unpacking Upstream Assumptions in AI"

All technical systems depend on assumptions: about how the world works, about what the system is expected to do, about how we know if the system works (or not). Thus understanding systems–and if they work, and if… Full Details

"The Crisis in 'Knowledge': What HCI Practitioners Need to Know, and What We Can Do"

What is “knowledge” and how do we find it in the presence of a growing number of epistemically unreliable agents? In the title chapter of my book Should You Believe Wikipedia?, I explain how… Full Details

"Computing Taste: Care and Control in Algorithmic Music Recommendation"

The people who make music recommender systems have lofty goals: they want to broaden listeners' horizons and help obscure musicians find audiences, taking advantage of the enormous catalogs of music streaming… Full Details

"Harnessing (big) data and (AI) technology in shaping HCI research for real impact"

With the recent advancement of AI technology, we frequently encounter AI-based systems with impressive demonstrations. However, despite the remarkable demonstrations, building systems that can… Full Details

"Intelligence Augmentation: Effective Human-AI Interaction to Supercharge Scientific Research"

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence are powering revolutionary interactive tools that will transform the capabilities of everyone, especially knowledge workers. But in order to… Full Details

"Craft, Culture, and Computing"

Craft practices and communities are embedded in histories and cultures of knowledges and innovations. Many of these practices, histories, and knowledges are at risk of disappearance due to dying practitioners, erasure, and technocentric developments… Full Details

"From Haptic Illusions to Beyond Real Interactions in Virtual Reality"

Advances in audiovisual rendering have led to the commercialization of virtual reality (VR) hardware; however, haptic technology has not kept up with these advances. While haptic devices aim to bridge this gap… Full Details

"Algorithmic Realism: Data Science Practices to Promote Social Justice"

Data scientists have confronted a gap between their desire to improve society and the harmful impacts of their creations. While algorithms once appeared to be valuable tools that advance social justice, today… Full Details

"Bridging AI and Visual Analytics"

Visualization research has long been dedicated to finding innovative approaches to represent complex data sets and convey insights to analysts. However, the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) introduces a paradigm shift, presenting new… Full Details

"Harnessing Data for Social Impact: Empowering Communities through Visualization and Social Computing"

Abstract: Today’s world faces several complex problems, such as climate change, transportation, infrastructure, education, and healthcare. Technology, if designed right, can play… Full Details

 "Advancing Human-Machine Interactions: Multimodal Learning in Densely Sensed Spaces"

The proliferation of ubiquitous computing and instrumented environments has catalyzed multimodal learning as a pivotal paradigm for enhancing real-world applications and interactions. From… Full Details

Astro will speak on what makes "moonshot" innovation; how organizations embrace or resist innovation; and what leadership may look like in the age of AI. Come prepared to ask questions and engage in conversation!