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	Seminar Video	Abstract
October 16, 2015 1:30pm	Evidence-oriented Programming	Andreas Stefik Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Nevada, Las Vegas	Seminar Video	Computer science has a long and complex history with programming languages. Historically, we have conducted evaluations using proofs, to ensure they give us the answers we intend, and performance data, to ensure they perform efficiently. While these two techniques are well established and… Full Details
October 9, 2015 1:30pm	From Paid to Organic Crowdsourcing	Krzysztof Gajos Associate Professor of Computer Science, Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences	Seminar Video	Human computation systems seamlessly combine human perception, creativity and knowledge with machine-driven algorithmic computation. Such systems have been demonstrated to accomplish tasks that could not previously be accomplished by either machines or by non-experts alone. Contemporary… Full Details
October 2, 2015 1:30pm	Barbarians	Ambra Trotto Studio Director, Interactive Institute Swedish ICT	Seminar Video	In an age of massive transnational migrations, it becomes relevant to explore the concept of Barbarians. Where do they come from? From afar or from within? Barbarians are the ones that do not speak the language, they do not share the same system of representations of the accepted situated… Full Details
September 25, 2015 1:30pm	Debiasing Decisions: Improved Decision Making With a Single Training Intervention	Carey Morewedge Associate Professor of Marketing, Questrom School of Business, Boston University	Seminar Video	From failures of intelligence analysis to misguided beliefs about vaccinations, biased judgment and decision making contributes to problems in policy, business, medicine, law, education, and private life. Early attempts to reduce decision biases with training met with little success, leading… Full Details
September 18, 2015 1:30pm	Data-Driven Healthcare: Visual Analytics for Exploration and Prediction of Clinical Data	Adam Perer Research Scientist, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center	Seminar Video	Healthcare institutions are now recording more electronic health data about patients than ever before, including data about patient conditions, lab tests, genomics, treatments, and outcomes. However, an open question remains on what one can do with all of this data. Many hope… Full Details
September 11, 2015 1:30pm	Designing At The Intersections	Austin Lee Assistant Professor, School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University	Seminar Video	Despite growing interest in interdisciplinary educations, many young art students still fear the idea of learning about technology. One of the missing pieces in enabling art students to get excited about learning something beyond their comfort zone is helping the students figure out how other… Full Details
September 4, 2015 1:30pm	Design History: The Bauhaus	Karen Berntsen Associate Teaching Professor, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University	Seminar Video	The Bauhaus was the first academy for design in the world and has played a significant role in the history of design, art, and new media. The motivations behind the creation of the Bauhaus lay in 19th century anxieties about the soullessness of manufacturing and its products. Many historians… Full Details
April 29, 2015 4:00pm	HCII Seminar: Yao Cheng
April 29, 2015 4:00pm	A Glance at Design Education and Practice in China	Cheng Yao Deputy Director of Information Product Design Program, Zhejiang University	Seminar Video	In recent years, China is more and more focused on innovation and design as it's desired to transform itself from "Made in China" to "Designed in China" or "Created in China". How are we doing in this dramatic change? In this talk, I introduce the development of design education of Zhejiang… Full Details
April 15, 2015 4:00pm	When New Technology Is Old: Organizing Surgery in the Face of Legacy Robotic Surgical Systems	Matt Beane Doctoral Student, Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
April 8, 2015 4:00pm	Enabling Creativity Through Better Tools for Designers and Developers	Joel Brandt Senior Research Scientist and Engineering Manager, Adobe Research	Seminar Video
April 1, 2015 4:00pm	HCII Seminar Series: Nicole Kramer
March 25, 2015 4:00pm	Exploring the Universe with Immersive Virtual Reality	Scott Davidoff Human Interfaces Manager, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab	Seminar Video
March 18, 2015 4:00pm	Behavioral Science at Disney Research	Maarten Bos Research Scientist, Disney Research	Seminar Video
March 4, 2015 4:30pm	Your Brain on Typography	Ellen Lupton Senior Curator, Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum	Seminar Video
February 27, 2015 1:30pm	Tasty Technology: Creating Multisensory Experiences	Marianna Obrist Lecturer in Interaction Design, Department of Informatics, University of Sussex	Seminar Video
February 25, 2015 4:00pm	Going Beyond Code Search	Steven Reiss Professor, Computer Science Department, Brown University	Seminar Video
February 18, 2015 4:00pm	Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as Components of Rich Landscapes of Learning	Gerhard Fischer Adjunct Professor and Professor Emeritus, Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder	Seminar Video
February 11, 2015 4:00pm	The Continuing Quest for Secure and Usable Passwords	Lorrie Cranor Professor, Computer Science and Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University	Seminar Video
February 4, 2015 4:00pm	Humanizing the Enterprise: Delivering Best in Class Experience to Business Software Users	Janaki Kumar Head of Strategic Design Services, Design & Co-Innovation Center, SAP Labs	Seminar Video
January 28, 2015 4:00pm	Toward Gender-Inclusive Software: A Tale of Five Facets	Margaret Burnett Professor, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Oregon State University	Seminar Video
January 21, 2015 4:00pm	Walgreens Customer Experience: From "At" to "Through"	Pete Wendel UX Manager, Walgreens	Seminar Video
January 14, 2015 4:00pm	Robots as ‘Companion Species’? Designing for Disability and the Mixed Spaces of Human-Robot Interactions	Mark Paterson Visiting Lecturer, University of Pittsburgh	Seminar Video
December 3, 2014 4:00pm	Socio-technical Systems Under Stress	Brian Keegan Computational Social Scientist and Research Associate, Harvard Business School‘s HBX	Seminar Video	Socio-technical Systems Under Stress Socio-technical systems can face intense stresses arising from unusual patterns of human social behavior. Misinformation can propagate rapidly through social networks like Twitter despite the availability of fact-checking websites. Wikipedia's encyclopedia… Full Details
November 19, 2014 4:00pm	Motivational Environments: Strategies for Personalized Learning, Intelligent Creativity Support,and Open Health Innovation	Winslow Burleson Associate Professor, College of Nursing and Computer Science Department, New York University	Seminar Video	Motivational Environments:Strategies for Personalized Learning, Intelligent Creativity Support,and Open Health Innovation Advances in wearable and ambient sensors, responsive spaces, robots and relational agents present transformative opportunities to develop context and affect aware systems for… Full Details
November 5, 2014 4:00pm	Expanding Games	Robin Hunicke Co-Founder, Funomena	Seminar Video	Games, now more than ever, are expanding. Reaching new audiences via new devices and technologies, exploring deeper subjects via evolving modes of interactivity, and empowering bright new voices from all over the world. In this talk I will cover my history as a researcher, maker and evangelist of… Full Details
October 29, 2014 4:00pm	HCII Seminar Series: Jon Froehlich	Jon Froehlich Assistant Professor, Computer Science, University of Maryland College Park	Seminar Video	"Characterizing Physical World Accessibility at Scale Using Crowdsourcing, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning" Roughly 30.6 million individuals in the US have physical disabilities that affect their ambulatory activities; nearly half of those individuals report using an assistive aid such as a… Full Details
October 22, 2014 4:00pm	HCII Seminar Series: Yao Cheng
October 15, 2014 4:00pm	HCII Seminar Series: Laurel Riek	Laurel Riek Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, University of Notre Dame
October 8, 2014 4:00pm	HCII Seminar Series: Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson	Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson Associate Professor of Computer Science, Director of the Center for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents, Reykjavik University	Seminar Video