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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Designing Everyday Things as Collaborative Partners in the Context of Childhood Oncology | 
Assistant Professor of Interaction Design, Delft University of Technology |
In this talk I will report on the results of a four-year design research project that focused on how to support children and families dealing with childhood cancer. In two PhD projects, we explored different ways to foster children’s physical and psychosocial development through interactive… Full Details | |
| Situated Interaction in the Open World: New Systems and Challenges | 
Researcher (Microsoft Research) |
In this talk, I will introduce a research effort at MSR we call “Situated Interaction,” in which we strive to design and develop intelligent technologies that can reason deeply about their surroundings and engage in fluid interaction with people in physically and socially situated settings. Our… Full Details | |
| Human+AI Collaboration: Improving the FATE of High Stakes Decision Making | 
Principal Researcher, Microsoft |
What do telepresence and bias have in common? Not much. After 20+ years of thinking about how to help people connect and engage with others over time and distance, I have recently become drawn to issues of “Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics” (FATE) and the impact that… Full Details | |
| Can I Use That?! Ethics, Law, and Norms for Other People’s Data | 
Assistant Professor of Information Science, University of Colorado Boulder |
Your tweets, blog posts, photos, reviews, and dating profiles are all potentially being used for science. Though much of this research stems from social science and purposefully engages with the human aspects of online content, in many cases this human-created content simply becomes “data… Full Details | |
| User, Agent, Subject, Spy: Information Systems for Human Flourishing | 
Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Boise State University |
Every day, information access systems mediate our experience of the world beyond our immediate senses. Google helps us find what we seek, Amazon and Netflix recommend things for us to buy and watch, Apple News gives us the day's events, and BuzzFeed guides us to related articles. These systems… Full Details | |
| How the Information Revolution is Changing Design Practice | 
Principal, Dubberly Design Office |
The proliferation of sensors, smart-connected products (IoT), the measurements they generate (big data), on-demand computing (the cloud), and pattern-finding software (AI) are changing how individuals and organizations interact. New distributed structures challenge established centralized… Full Details | |
| Learning Programming at Scale: Code, Data, and Environment | 
Assistant professor of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego |
Modern-day programming is incredibly complex, and people from all sorts of backgrounds are now learning it. It is no longer sufficient just to learn how to code: one must also learn to work effectively with data and with the underlying software environment. In this talk, I will present three… Full Details | |
| From personal informatics to personal analytics: personalized decision-support in health | 
Florence Irving Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University |
The increasing abundance of personal data related to health and wellness presents new opportunities for discovery and insight and can help individuals learn from their own experiences, as well as from experiences of others. These trends inspired active research in machine learning and data mining;… Full Details | |
| The Reflect! platform: A cognitive system for dealing with wicked problems in teams | 
Associate Professor for Philosophy in the School of Public Policy & Co-Director of the Center for Ethics and Technology, Georgia Tech |
Wicked problems are complex problems whose complexity results from the fact that they can be framed in a number of different ways, depending on who is looking at them. Wicked problems are framed differently by different stakeholders depending on their interests, needs, knowledge, available methods… Full Details | |
| Synthetic Teammates | 
Senior Cognitive Scientist & Cognitive Models Core Research Area Lead, Airman Systems, Air Force Research Laboratory |
The rise in autonomous system research and development combined with the maturation of computational cognitive architectures holds the promise of high-cognitive-fidelity agents capable of operating as team members for training. Such Autonomous Synthetic Teammates (ASTs) have been promised to… Full Details | |
| HCI Behind the Hospital Doors: EHR Challenges and Human Machine-Learning Interaction | 
Human Factors Scientist, University of Pennsylvania Health System |
This talk will address two aspects of hospital systems that sorely need attention from the human-computer interaction community. The first aspect, electronic health record usability and safety, is often treated as a vendor problem but poses unique and critical challenges when the EHR is implemented… Full Details | |
| Ethical Engagement and the Dark Side of User Experience Design | 
Assistant Professor of Computer Graphics Technology, Purdue University |
The profession of user experience (UX) design has rapidly expanded in the past decade, impacting the design of user interfaces, the larger strategic goals of organizations, and ultimately, the relationships of humans and society to technology. While knowledge of user needs and human psychology is… Full Details | |
| Interaction Design and Imaginaries: Beyond Behavior Change | 
Assistant Professor & Chair of Design Studies, Carnegie Mellon University School of Design |
How we think about the world affects what we do. The imaginaries we have—the stories we tell ourselves and each other, the mental models, language, framings and metaphors we use, the associations and mental imagery that come to mind when we think about concepts—make a difference to the way we… Full Details | |
| Can We Design Machines to Be More Humane? |
Paul Pangaro Chair and Associate Professor, MFA Interaction Design, College for Creative Studies |
Billions of people use digital machines every day and we are all subject to their qualities. Who would question a quality that allows a digital network to transform text into a connection to everyone we love? Or to transform keywords into a vast volume of rich content? Designers and… Full Details | |
| Deep Learning for Understanding Driver Behavior in 275,000 Miles of Semi-Autonomous Driving Data |
Lex Fridman Research Scientist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Today, and possibly for a long time to come, the full driving task is too complex an activity to be fully formalized as a sensing-acting robotics system that can be explicitly solved through model-based and learning-based approaches in order to achieve full unconstrained vehicle autonomy.… Full Details | |
| If the Shoe Fits: Towards A Conceptual Model for Applied Deep Learning in Social Computing |
Carolyn P Rose Professor, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University |
For more than a decade, a growing interest in automated processing of behavior traces has been in evidence across areas in HCI, perhaps especially in Social Computing. Each new wave in computational modeling paradigms raises hopes of new possibilities, most recently Deep Learning. This talk… Full Details | |
| Supporting People with Low Vision with Augmented Reality |
Shiri Azenkot Assistant Professor, Cornell Tech, Cornell University |
About 19 million people in the US report difficulty seeing even with glasses or contact lenses. Many of these people have low vision, which means that while they have functional vision, they have a visual impairment that affects their ability to perform daily activities. The vast majority of… Full Details | |
| Computational Ecosystems: Tech-enabled Communities to Advance Human Values at Scale | 
Allen K. and Johnnie Cordell Breed Junior Chair of Design, Assistant Professor in Computer Science, Northwestern University |
Despite the continued development of individual technologies and processes for supporting human endeavors, major leaps in solving complex human problems will require advances in system-level thinking and orchestration. In this talk, I describe efforts to design, build, and study Computational… Full Details | |
| How to Design with Openness: Shaping a Design Approach for Open and Growing Systems |
Joep Frens Assistant Professor, Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology |
In this lecture I argue that (interaction) design is changing from a “one product – one user” perspective towards a more “multiple products – multiple users” perspective, a systems perspective. I posit that this systems perspective brings new challenges to design, like ‘growth’ and ‘openness’, and… Full Details | |
| Special HCII Seminar: Soft Materials for Human Compatible Machines and Electronics |
Carmel Majidi Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University |
Professor Carmel Majidi directs the Integrated Soft Materials Lab at CMU, Mechanical Engineering department. Currently, his group is focused on filled-elastomer composites and soft microfluidic systems that exhibit unique combinations of mechanical, electrical, and thermal properties and can… Full Details | |
| Design at the Interface |
Daniel Cardoso Llach Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University |
At the dawn of the information age Herbert Simon advanced a view of design as a ‘science of the artificial’ that could be expressed by statements of declarative logic, and thus formalized as a scientific, measurable practice. While Simon’s bold claim manifested larger techno-cultural changes, it… Full Details | |
| Prototyping a More Positive Future |
Sophia Brueckner Assistant Professor, Stamps School of Art & Design, University of Michigan |
Sophia Brueckner is a futurist artist, designer, and engineer. Inseparable from computers since the age of two, she believes she is a cyborg. At Google, she designed and implemented products used by tens of millions. At RISD and the MIT Media Lab, she combined the understanding… Full Details | |
| User Research: The Designer’s Ticket to Informing Strategy |
Jeremy Koempel Co-Founder and Design Lead, Bessemer Alliance |
The rate of change in our world is breathtaking. Many organizations simply cannot evolve quick enough to capitalize on this change and prepare for the future. Left to their own devices, they will continue to address their markets and customers with the traditional processes and tactics with which… Full Details | |
| Practical Learning Research at Scale (and Relevance to HCI Education) |
Ken Koedinger Professor, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University |
Massive scale education has emerged through online tools such as Wikipedia, Khan Academy, and MOOCs. The number of students being reached is high, but what about the quality of the educational experience? As we scale learning, we need to scale research to address this question. Such learning… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series: Post-Doc Talks |
Paulo Carvalho, Irene-Angelica Chounta, Patrick Carrington, Sang-Won Bae Post-Doctoral Researchers, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University |
Speaker 1: Paulo Carvalho Talk Title: Beyond reading in educational contexts: Spending more time on practice activities as a better way to learn. Abstract: Learning by doing refers to learning practices that involve completing activities as opposed to explicit learning (e.g., reading).… Full Details | |
| Morphing Matter: Designing Bioinspired Transformative Materials and Interfaces | 
Assistant Professor, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University |
Technology, one might claim, is designed to recapitulate biology: as we strive to design physical objects and architecture that are adaptive, responsive and ever evolving, we find ourselves immersed in Nature’s way. Yet, after years of practice in transforming materiality for adaptive physical… Full Details | |
| Tracking Behavioral Symptoms of Mental Health and Delivering Personalized Interventions Using Mobile and Wearable Devices |
Tanzeem Choudhury Associate Professor, Computing and Information Systems, Cornell University |
Mobile and ubiquitous computing research has led to new techniques for cheaply, accurately, and continuously collecting data on human behavior that include detailed measurements of physical activities, social interactions and conversations, sleep quality and duration and more. Continuous and… Full Details | |
| All the World's a Stage: Mobile Computing Across Multiple Contexts to Support Science On-The-Go |
Chris Quintana Associate Professor in Educational Studies, School of Education, University of Michigan |
As computing devices continue to evolve from personal computers to mobile and wearable technologies, new learning opportunities are opening up. Specifically, we have been interested in supporting science learning, and considering how a range of these technologies can be designed in a supportive… Full Details | |
| Deception and Trust in a Post-Truth World |
Jeff Hancock Professor, Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, Stanford University |
How is the rewiring of communication in the network age changing how we deceive and trust one another? How can we trust that news story, or a hotel’s online review, or that text message about someone being on their way? In this talk we’ll go over how principles from psychology and communication… Full Details | |
| TALK CANCELED: How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design |
Katherine Isbister Professor, Computational Media Department, University of California Santa Cruz |
Designers know games can evoke empathy and intense connection. But everyday non-expert conversations about games still rarely touch on this truth. In this talk, Isbister shares insights from her recent book aimed at bridging this gap, toward raising the quality of discourse about games as an… Full Details |