Past Seminars

"The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child"

Drawing on her book, The Charisma Machine, Ames chronicles the life and legacy of the One Laptop per Child project and explains… Full Details

"The hierarchy of knowledge in machine learning and related fields and its consequences"

Feminist and race and gender scholars have… Full Details

"Designing Trans Technology"

Transgender and nonbinary people face substantial challenges in the world, ranging from social inequities and discrimination to lack of access to resources. Though technology cannot fully solve these problems, technological solutions may help to… Full Details

"Community Wellness Informatics: Designing Technology for Health Equity"

In the United States, there are serious and persistent disparities in health outcomes. For example, socioeconomic status is predictive of mortality and disease, with low-SES households… Full Details

"Understanding and Mitigating Bias and Human Overtrust in Robotics and AI"

People tend to overtrust sophisticated computing devices, including robotic systems. As these systems become more fully interactive with humans during the performance of day-to-day activities, the… Full Details

"A Tale of Two Cities: Software Developers in Practice During the COVID-19 Pandemic"

The mass shift to working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic radically changed the way many software development teams collaborate, communicate, and define productivity. Since the early… Full Details

Today’s Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are designed to address one of society’s most pressing problems---unemployment.… Full Details

"Dreams of (Black) Tech Futures Past"

Abstract: This is what could have been. If the computer geeks at MIT in 1960 had just held on just a little while longer with our Mississippi freedom riders. If our uprisings in Watts, and Detroit, and Newark and Kansas… Full Details

"Rethinking Intersectionality in the Field of Computing: A Black Woman's Perspective"

Intersectionality, a critical framework that examines how interconnected systems of power oppress marginalized populations, is currently receiving new garnered attention in the context of Human… Full Details

"Beyond Visualization: Theories of Inference to Improve Data Analysis & Communication"

Data analysis is a decidedly human task. As Tukey and Wilk once wrote, “Nothing—not the careful logic of mathematics, not statistical models and theories, not the awesome arithmetic power of modern… Full Details

"Rethinking Design for Accessibility"

Approximately 61 million Americans, or one in four U.S. adults, have a disability that affects daily life. Despite the prevalence of disability across the lifespan, accessibility is typically an afterthought in technology design. Discussions of… Full Details

"Designing Socio-technical Systems for Learning in the Third Place"

Oldenberg (1989) characterizes Third Places as the gathering places outside of home, work, and school where informal public life (e.g., friendship, laughter, light-heartedness, civic participation) develop dynamically.… Full Details

"Supporting opportunistic learning in software development with Wikipedia"

Programmers are continually in situations where they must discover what they do not know and learn new concepts. Based on my recent research in this area, this talk… Full Details

"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… Full Details

"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,… Full Details

"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… Full Details

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… Full Details

"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… Full Details

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… Full Details

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… Full Details

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… Full Details

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… Full Details

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

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… Full Details

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

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… Full Details

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

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