Past Seminars

"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!

"Learning by Teaching a Synthetic Peer: Lessons Learned, Now, and Then"

A teachable agent (TA) coupled with an online learning environment where students learn to solve problems by interactively teaching the TA while receiving adaptive scaffolding is a unique implementation of… Full Details

"Elevating Access to Remote Health Monitoring Fairly"

Many of today’s healthcare solutions do not provide access to the poor and are not racially fair. To address this, my group is leveraging the proliferation of mobile technology, particularly smartphones, as a ready-made… Full Details

"Ubiquitous Computing Considered Harmful: A Two-Act Story of Getting Things Right for the Wrong Reason"

I have been speaking and writing about the idea of an Internet of Materials for nearly a decade. It started as a way to rethink Mark Weiser's vision of ubiquitous computing in… Full Details

"From Socially Useful to Responsible Tech: Learning From Histories of Environmental Justice and Labor Rights in Silicon Valley and Beyond"

At a time when “climate tech” has attracted the interest of venture capitalists and disaffected, laid-off tech workers alike, it seems… Full Details

"A Tool, A Teammate, A Coach:  Human+AICollaboration in Design"

Increasingly powerful artificial intelligence (AI) resources are accelerating the pace of engineering and design. At the same time, interacting with these AI resources stands to fundamentally change the way… Full Details

"Game Theory and Machine Learning for Addressing Societal Challenges: From Theory to Real-World Impact"

Societal challenges spanning security, environmental sustainability, food security, and transportation often involve complex decision-making by multiple self-interested… Full Details

The Sujeath Pareddy Memorial Lecture and HCII Speaker Series Presentation

Talk: "Searching for Justice in Programming Language Design"

From its earliest days, computing has been an eclectic project of capitalism, war, colonialism, and white supremacy. Its central… Full Details

"Rethinking the AI-UX Boundary for Designing Human-AI Experiences"

In conventional software development, the boundary between user experience (UX) design and engineering is well defined: designers create specifications based on end-user needs, then engineers build to those… Full Details

"Technology's Child: Digital Media's Role in the Ages and Stages of Growing Up"

Abstract: What happens to the little ones, the tweens, and the teenagers, when technology, ubiquitous in the world they inhabit, becomes a critical part of their lives? Technology’s Child brings… Full Details

"The Work of Data Annotation and Annotator Diversity"

Diversity in datasets is a key component to building responsible AI/ML. Despite this recognition, we know little about the diversity among the annotators involved in data production. Additionally, despite being an… Full Details

"Changing Tides: Using Technology to Bridge Human-Nature Gaps and Spur Environmental Advocacy"

Despite heightened societal awareness of climate change and its impact on biodiversity loss, human efforts to mitigate such threats remain stagnant for various reasons, namely the… Full Details

"Integrating Interactive Devices with the User's Body"

The main question that drives my research is: what is the next interface paradigm that supersedes wearable devices? I argue that the new paradigm is one in which interactive devices will… Full Details

"Why Do Students Think They're Bad at Programming? Towards Intelligent Systems to Support Motivation and Learning in CS1"

In this talk, I will introduce a surprising motivational challenge in the domain of computer science education: students often think they're bad at… Full Details

"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