Past Seminars
The HCII Seminar Series has been a weekly tradition at CMU since 1990. Details of our seminars from 2014 to present, as well as many of their recordings, are available below. A few years ago, we held a year of special programming in celebration of the seminar's 25th anniversary.
| Date | Title | Speaker | Talk title and Abstract |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seminar: Amy J Ko | 
Professor, The Information School, University of Washington, Seattle |
"Critical Computing Education" Computing can be a wondrous, powerful tool, bringing us information, experiences, and connections that transform our lives for the better. However, as many of us have learned, computing has also contributed to great injustices, increasing surveillance of our most… Full Details | |
| Seminar: Karthik Ramani | 
Donald W. Feddersen Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Purdue University |
"Augmenting Humans in Design Fabrication, Robotics, and Workflows Through Spatially Aware Interfaces" The convergence of many factors such as low-cost sensors, electronics, computing, fabrication, and more recently machine learning, aided by new designs for human interactive interfaces, has… Full Details | |
| Seminar: Niloufar Salehi | 
Assistant Professor, School of Information, UC Berkeley |
"From content moderation to school assignment: What do theories of justice teach us about design?" Computational systems have a complex relationship with justice: they may be designed with the intent to promote justice, tasked to resolve injustices, or actively contribute to injustice itself. In… Full Details | |
| Seminar: Parmit Chilana | 
Assistant Professor, Computing Science, Simon Fraser University, Canada |
Beyond "One-Size-Fits-All": Designing for User Diversity in Software Learning and Help-Seeking Learning to use feature-rich software, such as 3D design tools and video editors, is a challenging endeavour. Novice users often find it difficult to gain awareness of what is possible in the application… Full Details | |
| Seminar: Chris Martens | 
Assistant Professor of Computer Science, NC State |
"The politics of programming: towards convivial and liberatory digital tools" The software industry and corresponding educational pipeline maintains a number of well-documented power imbalances, including hierarchies of pay and respect afforded to “technical” and “non-technical” fields of study,… Full Details | |
| Seminar: Post Doctoral Fellows | Alex Ahmed Title: "Community-based design of open source software for transgender people" Abstract: From the surveillance of undocumented people to the algorithmic management and exploitation of gig economy workers, people are increasingly alienated from how technologies are designed and how they… Full Details | ||
| Seminar: Molly Lewis | 
Research Scientist, Department of Psychology and Social & Decision Sciences |
What are we learning from language? Cognitive and social biases are encoded in the structure of natural language Natural language provides speakers with information about the world through both explicit messages (e.g., "Mongolia is cold"), and through implicit messages present in the… Full Details | |
| Seminar: HCII Post Doctoral Fellows |
4 Guest Speakers from the HCII Post Doctoral Fellows |
Cynthia Bennett "The Care Work of Access" ABSTRACT: Current approaches to AI and Assistive Technology (AT) often foreground task completion over other encounters such as expressions of care. Our paper challenges and complements such task-completion approaches by attending to the care work of… Full Details | |
| Conversation, Design, and Wicked Problems | 
Professor of Practice, CMU HCII |
The Colloquy of Mobiles was designed by Gordon Pask in 1968, a magnificent mechatronic expression of the sexual revolution at the dawn of personal computing. Colloquy’s male and female forms interact in delightful and unexpected ways to "satisfy" their “drives." Replicated by Paul… Full Details | |
| Building a future for theatrical play: Designing for Expressive Participatory Mixed Reality Performance |
Tess Tanenbaum Assistant Professor, Transformative Play Lab, Department of Informatics, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California Irvine |
In this talk I'm going to discuss my approach to the theory and practice of “Theatrical Play” through the lens of three prototype systems currently under development in my lab. Digital media and games have long drawn on models and practices from the performing arts. Similarly, theatrical production… Full Details | |
| Augmenting Designers: Developing tools and methods to help designers do what they do better | 
HCII - CMU / Assistant Professor |
Recent advances in technologies such as conversational agents, robotics, machine learning, mixed reality, and the internet-of-things are allowing designers to create more interactive and intelligent products and services. These technologies bring up new questions around human-machine interaction… Full Details | |
| The MAGIC of Semantic IxD | 
Adjunct Professor UX Design, at San Jose State University | Founder of RCDO UX LLC |
Do you know how much cognitive load your design ideas will place on the user even before you sketch out the first screen? If the cognitive load of your UX design is too high, users will find your product difficult and unpleasant to use. It's possible to measure cognitive load in a usability lab,… Full Details | |
| Mobile, Social, and Fashion: Three Stories from Data-Driven Design | 
Chief Research Scientist, UserTesting | Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
Having access to the right types of data at scale is increasingly the key to designing innovation. In this talk, I'll discuss how my group has created original datasets for three domains — mobile app design, fashion retail, and social networks — and leveraged them to build novel user experiences.… Full Details | |
| Understanding Human Behavior for Better Assistive Robots | 
Assistant Professor Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University | Human And Robot Partners (HARP) Lab |
Human-robot interaction has the potential to transform the way people work and live, particularly when it comes to assistive robots that help people with activities of daily living. To be effective, these robots must be able to recognize aspects of their human partners such as what their goals are… Full Details | |
| Near-living Spaces: Paradigms and Methods | 
Principal, Philip Beesley Architect Inc. | Primary Investigator, Living Architecture Systems Group |
Using detailed illustrations of recent projects of the Living Architecture Systems Group, this talk will offer renewed working methods that can contribute to increasingly precarious far-from-equilibrium environments. Detailed case studies that range from couture collaborations to architectural-… Full Details | |
| Doing Inclusive Design: From GenderMag to InclusiveMag | 
OSU Distinguished Professor, Oregon State University |
How can software professionals assess whether their software supports diverse users? And if they find problems, how can they fix them? Although there are empirical processes that can be used to find “inclusivity bugs” piecemeal, what is often needed is a systematic inspection method to assess… Full Details | |
| Who is in the Crowd? Characterizing the Capabilities of Prize Competition Competitors | 
Associate Professor of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering and of International Affairs, The George Washington University |
This seminar presents findings from a recent field experiment designed to characterize who in the crowd is willing and able to solve complex engineering design problems for the prospect of a prize. Contrary to popular skepticism, we find that the crowd is highly capable of not only providing… Full Details | |
| The Big Picture of Quantum Technologies | 
Research Scientist, Alphabet's X (formerly Google X) |
Jack Hidary of Alphabet's X (formerly Google X) will update on current quantum computing approaches from industry & academia in the NISQ (near term) regime and outline future prospects for the fields of quantum computing, sensing and communications. | |
| City Complex | 
Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation |
Cities have always been complex, but in recent years, technology has inadvertently changed the nature of that complexity. Websites like Yelp and Airbnb direct people to preferred restaurants or reprogram homes into vacation rentals, resulting in new emergent behaviors. Autonomous vehicles influence… Full Details | |
| Computational Interventions for Behavior Change | 
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Statistics, Harvard University |
In the US, unhealthy behaviors—such as sedentary lifestyle, overeating, substance use, and tobacco use—account for approximately 40% of the risk of premature deaths. While successful changes to these unhealthy behaviors can mitigate the risk of harm, behavior change is often difficult because of… Full Details | |
| Scaffolding Robust Intelligent Systems with Crowds | 
Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering / Founding Director, Center for Hybrid Intelligence Systems, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor |
Intelligent systems hold the potential to enable natural, fluid, and efficient ways to achieve users’ objectives — but being able to understand and reason generally about nuanced, real-world settings is beyond the capability of current AI/ML approaches. Rethinking the way in which people interact… Full Details | |
| “Knowledge Embodied in Artifacts”: A Problem in Design Epistemology | 
Professor of Informatics and Director of the HCI/Design program in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University--Bloomington |
Among the most exciting developments in HCI research today is the rise of designerly approaches to research: research through design, practice-based research, constructive design, etc. In a 1994 article seeking to establish such an agenda, Christopher Frayling used the provocative phrase, “… Full Details | |
| Cautionary Tales and Better Futures for Social Technologies | 
Visiting Professor, Institute of Design in Chicago |
This talk will explore the "human" in HCI, and offer ways to bring what people (just plain folk) care about (their passions and frustrations) into how we make and evolve social technologies. In the field of HCI, technologists and designers are increasingly engaged in projects that go beyond "… Full Details | |
| How to Think About the Future | 
Associate Professor, CMU School of Design, and Director of Situation Lab |
"Everyone thinks about the future. They just don't do it very well." – Jake Dunagan, Institute for the Future All design activity is future-oriented, but that does not mean that everyone who designs is automatically equipped with the skills and habits that would let them shape preferred futures… Full Details | |
| The case for self-sovereign personal AI | 
CTO, Patient Privacy Rights Foundation |
Whether it’s a smartphone that filters notifications or a brain implant that manages a neurological problem, connected personal technology tests the definition and limits of “self.” Our human identity is a combination of attributes managed by ourselves and attributes that relate to us but are… Full Details | |
| Teamwork with Robots | 
Assistant Professor in Information Science, Cornell University |
Research on Human-robot Interaction to date has largely focused on examining a single human interacting with a single robot. This work has led to advances in fundamental understanding about the psychology of human-robot interaction (e.g. how specific design choices affect interactions with and… Full Details | |
| Asocial Design Yields Antisocial Agents | 
Assistant Professor of Computer Science, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley |
Agentic technologies are increasingly emerging in intrinsically social settings; yet, the social capacities of such systems remain critically deficient. Lacking the ability to navigate antisocial dynamics in particular, artificial agents have profound potential to cause harm. For example, Microsoft… Full Details | |
| Smart Interfaces for Human-Centered AI: HCII Special Seminar | 
Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University |
AI has the potential to automate people out of their jobs, and in some cases, it will. But while we should carefully consider the risk of replacing human capabilities, it’s important to realize that AI has enormous potential to augment them as well: it can boost the creativity of our work, help us… Full Details | |
| The Design of Ethical Interfaces | 
Professor of Practice, Human-Computer Interaction Institute |
This talk proposes to the design community that we define and follow implementable principles for ethical interfaces. Such pragmatic principles could evolve in resonance with efforts in education and industry that raise awareness of the designer’s ethical responsibilities. They could… Full Details | |
| Post Design Thinking: Designing for the Consequences of Innovation | 
Etsy |
Design is practiced along a spectrum. Practicing at any point along the spectrum comes with different kinds of uncertainties and risks. On the pragmatic end of the spectrum, designers apply Design Thinking to drive down value-risk—will people spend their time, attention, or money on this today? On… Full Details |