Past Seminars

"Developing a New Public Media and Open Research Platform with Video Games"

Joan Cooney and her contemporaries transformed 1970s television into a platform for public education and inclusion. Programs such as Sesame Street coordinated designers, artists and researchers to not only… Full Details

"Designing with AI: The Next Frontier in Human-AI Collaboration"

Abhijit Thosar, a seasoned design leader, invites students to explore how Agentic AI is reshaping how we design digital systems. As AI shifts from passive tools to autonomous agents, Human-Computer Interaction enters… Full Details

* TALK POSTPONED - Will be rescheduled at a later date *

"Mentoring as a Way of Life:  Scholarship in a Post-LLM World"

The role of the teacher-scholar includes a significant component of mentoring junior students or colleagues to become… Full Details

Sujeath Pareddy Memorial Lecture

Sujeath Pareddy was a PhD student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute from 2018 to 2022. He brought his passion for computing systems and physics to bear on hard, long-standing challenges in accessibility for people with… Full Details

"CreAItivity: The Creative Process, AI, and the Place Between"

The role of AI in the creative process is a difficult prospect for many people in creative… Full Details

"AI Supply Chains: Tools to Locate Power and Responsibility in AI Production for Critical, Accountable Computing"

Contemporary AI production is structured to enable ignorance of harm for those who want it, and complicate resistance for those who don’t. Through case studies of the… Full Details

"HCI and the Search for Life in the Universe"

The biggest science questions – like whether life arose multiple times in the universe – are profoundly team efforts, even though many of our scientific tools and customs are oriented around disciplinary silos. This talk will describe… Full Details

"A Decade of Research on Interaction Under Time-Pressure: Key Insights and Future Directions"

Research on time-pressured interactions in the history of HCI has been surprisingly scarce. In this talk, I will present a decade of my research, arguing that the rapid growth of related… Full Details

"Accelerating Research Translation into Design Practice Using Generative AI"

Many valuable insights embedded in scientific publications are siloed and rarely translated into results that can directly benefit humans. This contributes to the so-called research-practice gaps, impedes… Full Details

"Design of Human-AI Systems to Augment Human Potential"

At the Human-AI Integration Lab (HAL), we design, build, and study human-AI systems that amplify human potential by enhancing cognitive, creative, physical, and social capabilities. This talk will explore the challenges of… Full Details

"How to Build a New Generation of AI Native Products"

We’ve seen an explosion of investment in AI infrastructure and foundation models, yet a commensurate surge of popular AI products has yet to follow. In this talk, we’ll explain the dearth of existing products, examine building… Full Details

"Decolonizing LLMs: An Ethnographic Framework for AI in African Contexts"

We examine LLM deployment through African lenses, utilizing and reflecting on ethnographic methods to engage with the continent’s unique technolinguistic landscape. Drawing from primary research in Ethiopia… Full Details

"People and Online Research, Now That They’re Doing AI"

Given all of the press that LLMs have garnered, it’s worthwhile asking if they’re changing the ways people find information.  Are LLMs pulling traffic away from the search engines?  Just as importantly, how do… Full Details

"Human-Centered Explainable AI"

Artificial intelligence systems are increasingly involved in high-stakes decision-making, such as healthcare, financial, and educational determinations. Many have called for explainable AI (XAI), which are AI systems that provide human-… Full Details

"The Human Quotient for Better AI Systems"

 The unprecedented rise in the adoption of artificial intelligence techniques and automation in many contexts is concomitant with the shortcomings of such technology concerning robustness, interpretability, usability, trustworthiness… Full Details

“AI For Good” Isn’t Good Enough: A Call for Human-Centered AI

AI for Good initiatives recognize the potential impacts of AI systems on humans and societies.  However, simply recognizing these impacts is not enough. To be truly Human-Centered, AI development must be user-… Full Details

"Designing Accessible Virtual Reality Experiences for People with Limited Mobility"

Virtual Reality (VR) offers compelling ways for people to interact with digital content in various domains such as education, gaming, communication, and design. However, VR platforms can be… Full Details

"Digital Dreams Have Become Nightmares:  What We Must Do -- A Call to Action"

For 80 years, digital technology visionaries have imagined and created systems to support human knowledge, learning, creativity, medicine, health, communications, community, commerce, power, and… Full Details

"Understanding the Complexity of Social Interactions at the City Scale"

The quantity and quality of social encounters in urban environments are crucial elements that drive economic mobility and build social capital. Where in cities do we observe the most and least diversity in… Full Details

"Wikipedia as a Social Computing Laboratory: 20 Years of Research (and Counting)"

I’ve been doing research in Wikipedia for almost 20 years. It has been a laboratory where my collaborators and I have studied the social dynamics of the peer production of knowledge and introduced a… Full Details

"Responsible AI (h)as a Learning and Design Problem"

To address the potential harms of AI systems, prior work has developed resources (e.g., toolkits) to support responsible AI (RAI) development and studied how AI practitioners use such resources in their development practices.… Full Details

"Forms of Accountability at the Intersection of Science and Design: Implications for Health and Wellness Technologies"

Computing holds the promise of alleviating the negative impact of chronic disease and mental health disorders by scaling human effort over time and space. Four in… Full Details

"Intercepting User’s Brain and Nervous System: A New Paradigm for Haptic Output"

When outputting information to our senses, almost all wearable interfaces follow the same principle: externally generating stimuli (e.g., lights, sounds, vibrations) and then presenting them via… Full Details

"Creativity, Productivity and Communication"

Before AI showed up, software engineers spent only 20-30 percent of their time coding, with the remaining time dedicated to discussing their code. With the AI revolution, stakeholders expect that ratio to decrease even more. Therefore,… Full Details

"Towards Artificial Users: Rethinking Predictive Modeling in HCI in the Era of ML" 

Predictive models are used to infer users’ preferences, predict behavior, and generate and adapt user interfaces. Such models are hard to create, however, fundamentally because human behavior… Full Details

"Behavior-Driven Optimization for Interactive Data Exploration"

Analysts need the ability to intuitively explore their data before deciding how to clean it, model it, and present it to key decision makers. With the abundance of massive datasets in industry and science, analysts… Full Details

"Creating Ethics Infrastructures for Design"

Design is a social and cultural practice (as well as a technical one). Developing ethical systems requires more than creating technical ethical design tools for individual designers; it also requires consideration of social and cultural… Full Details

"From Cadavers to Categories: Unpacking Upstream Assumptions in AI"

All technical systems depend on assumptions: about how the world works, about what the system is expected to do, about how we know if the system works (or not). Thus understanding systems–and if they work, and if… Full Details

"The Crisis in 'Knowledge': What HCI Practitioners Need to Know, and What We Can Do"

What is “knowledge” and how do we find it in the presence of a growing number of epistemically unreliable agents? In the title chapter of my book Should You Believe Wikipedia?, I explain how… Full Details

"Computing Taste: Care and Control in Algorithmic Music Recommendation"

The people who make music recommender systems have lofty goals: they want to broaden listeners' horizons and help obscure musicians find audiences, taking advantage of the enormous catalogs of music streaming… Full Details