Past Seminars

"Challenges and Opportunities for Designing Health Technologies for Men in Religiously Conservative, Patriarchal and Low-Income Societies"

This talk will address the design challenges and opportunities in creating health technologies for men to improve the lives of women in… Full Details

"UXR for Responsible, Human-Centered AI"

AI-enabled systems that are responsible and human-centered, will be powerful partners to humans in the very near future. User experience research (UXR) is necessary to create systems that people are willing to be responsible for. This… Full Details

"Making Uncertainty Cognitively Accessible"

We live in an uncertain world. From extreme weather events to pandemic forecasts, we are confronted with uncertainty every day. Unfortunately, uncertainty is highly challenging for both the general public and trained experts to understand, which… Full Details

"Invitations and Intentions: A Creative Practice informed by Queer Autonomy"

Through the format of an artist talk Nica Ross will share select projects from their body of work through the lens of Queer cultural production. In addition they will discuss how their socially engaged… Full Details

“De-Visualizing Images and Data: A Community-based Approach to Tactile Graphics Creation and Exploration"

Tools and processes for creating tactile graphics (raised images usable by Blind and low vision people) have been available for decades, but the equipment and practices used to… Full Details

“(De)evolving Towards Inaccessibility? Exploring the Evolution of In-Vehicle Information Systems (IVIS) and the Implications for Human-Machine Interfaces in Emerging Self-Driving Vehicles”

Fully autonomous or “self-driving” vehicles have been described as a potentially transformative… Full Details

"Towards More Meaningful Personal Tracking"

Personal tracking through digital technologies like pedometers, mood monitoring apps, and food journaling apps has great potential to help people begin to change their behaviors, understand their habits, connect with others and advocate… Full Details

"Advancing Socio-Technical Systems for Community-Driven Creativity"

As the world’s problems increase in scope and complexity, the practice of design has been shifting. Designers are seen less as saviors and more as facilitators of problem-solving processes. As the practice of design… Full Details

"Human-centered Machine Learning for Dangerous Mental Illness Behaviors Online"

Research and industry both use machine learning (ML) to identify and intervene in physically dangerous health behaviors discussed on social media, such as advocating… Full Details

"Friends Don’t Let Friends Deploy Black-Box Models: The Importance of Intelligibility in Machine Learning"

In machine learning sometimes tradeoffs must be made between accuracy, privacy and intelligibility: the most accurate models usually are not very intelligible or private,… Full Details

"That Quiet Little Voice: When Design and Ethics Collide"

The design industry’s relationship to the field of business has long been established and continues to become further entangled each year. But designers aren’t just satisfied with only disrupting the business sector—they’re keen to… Full Details

"Opportunities Matter: Hybrid Human-Computer Tutoring Toward Educational Equity"

Across 27 datasets of students learning online, we find an astonishing regularity in the rate they learn. That’s the good news. When given quality practice opportunities with feedback and as-needed… Full Details

"CodeWalk: Facilitating Shared Awareness in Mixed-Ability Collaborative Software Development"

COVID-19 accelerated the trend toward remote software development, increasing the need for tightly-coupled synchronous collaboration. Existing tools and practices impose high coordination… Full Details

"Descriptive Languages to Help Non-programmers Create their own Web Applications"

The web is teeming with data, and interacting with that data is a key part of modern knowledge work. But traditionally, only programmers have been able to create the tools to support those… Full Details

"Building Anti-Racist Technologies: A Critical HCI Approach"

From soap dispensers and pulse oximeters that don’t see dark skin, to surveillance and incarceration systems implemented in ‘smart’ cities, our current technologies are racist. Authors in HCI and in the social studies… Full Details

"Playful Co-Located Interactions with Mobile Augmented Reality"

It is common to spend hours on our digital devices connecting with people far away while disconnecting from those right beside us. Even before the pandemic, researchers have argued that digital technologies make us… Full Details

(Virtual presentation)

… Full Details

Pallavi Chhabra

CMU Postdoc, faculty advisor Ken Koedinger

Title:  Improving Motivation and Learning Outcomes in Math in an Intelligent Tutor Environment

Abstract:  … Full Details

"Blending Virtual and Physical Realities with RealityShader"

The metaverse is about more than VR headsets and always has been. At Microsoft Research we have been exploring the use of depth cameras and projectors to blend virtual and physical realities without headsets. Projects… Full Details

"Extended Reality for Everybody"

Technical advances in virtual, augmented reality, and mixed reality (XR) have paved the way for these immersive technologies to become increasingly mainstream; however, from a design perspective, there is still a high barrier to entry. A lot of… Full Details

“Technology for Social Good? AI, Human Rights, and Harm Reduction”

Abstract 
The volume of information available to human rights practitioners has grown steadily since the globalization… Full Details

The HCII regularly gives our postdocs an opportunity to present during the HCII Speaker Series. This Friday’s seminar will feature four presentations in a hybrid format -- three will be presenting in person in NSH and one will be presenting remotely. If you are available, we hope you will join… Full Details

The HCII regularly gives our postdocs an opportunity to present during the HCII Speaker Series.  This week we will hear from three postdocs from the learning sciences: Adetunji Adeniran, Danielle Chine and Tricia Ngoon.  Each person will present for approximately 15… Full Details

Human-AI Systems for Making Videos Useful

Video is becoming a core medium for communicating a wide range of content, including educational lectures, vlogs, and how-to tutorials. While videos are engaging and informative, they lack the familiar and useful affordances of text for… Full Details

"Hand and Machine"

I believe that by making technology more accessible and building artifacts that look and feel different from anything that has been built in the past, I can change and broaden the culture of technology. I can get a diverse range of people… Full Details

"Superception : Exploring new “Self” in the integration of humans and computers"

When computers and humans integrate, to what extent are we ourselves? Computers are already no longer tools of humans, but are gaining the ability to make decisions and actions beyond… Full Details

"What if We Could Design Games to Reduce Biases and Enhance Compassion?"

Virtual reality (VR) and other types of games have been developed for educational purposes, with mixed results. We are still learning the best practices (and limitations) for designing games for skill… Full Details

"Harnessing Scientific Literature for Boosting Discovery and Innovation"

In the year 1665, the first academic journal was published. Fast forward to today, there are millions of scientific papers coming out every year. This explosion of knowledge represents an opportunity to accelerate… Full Details