Past Seminars

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.

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… Full Details

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

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… Full Details

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

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… Full Details

"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… Full Details

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… Full Details

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

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,… Full Details

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… Full Details

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

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?… Full Details

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

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

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

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 “… Full Details

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

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

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

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… Full Details

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… Full Details

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

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… Full Details

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… Full Details

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

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?

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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

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… Full Details