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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| HCII Seminar Series - Amy Ko | 
Professor, The Information School, University of Washington, Seattle |
The Sujeath Pareddy Memorial Lecture and HCII Speaker Series Presentation Talk: "Searching for Justice in Programming Language Design" From its earliest days, computing has been an eclectic project of capitalism, war, colonialism, and white supremacy. Its central Western values of utility,… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Hari Subramonyam | 
Assistant Professor (Research) at the Graduate School of Education and Computer Science (by courtesy), Stanford University |
"Rethinking the AI-UX Boundary for Designing Human-AI Experiences" In conventional software development, the boundary between user experience (UX) design and engineering is well defined: designers create specifications based on end-user needs, then engineers build to those specifications. However… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Katie Davis | 
Associate Professor, University of Washington Information School |
"Technology's Child: Digital Media's Role in the Ages and Stages of Growing Up" Abstract: What happens to the little ones, the tweens, and the teenagers, when technology, ubiquitous in the world they inhabit, becomes a critical part of their lives? Technology’s Child brings clarity to what we… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Ding Wang | 
HCI Researcher at Technology and Society Collective (TaSC), Responsible AI, Google Research |
"The Work of Data Annotation and Annotator Diversity" Diversity in datasets is a key component to building responsible AI/ML. Despite this recognition, we know little about the diversity among the annotators involved in data production. Additionally, despite being an indispensable part of AI, data… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Danny Pimentel | 
Assistant Professor of Immersive Media Psychology, University of Oregon |
"Changing Tides: Using Technology to Bridge Human-Nature Gaps and Spur Environmental Advocacy" Despite heightened societal awareness of climate change and its impact on biodiversity loss, human efforts to mitigate such threats remain stagnant for various reasons, namely the psychological distance… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Pedro Lopes | 
Assistant Professor in Computer Science, University of Chicago |
"Integrating Interactive Devices with the User's Body" The main question that drives my research is: what is the next interface paradigm that supersedes wearable devices? I argue that the new paradigm is one in which interactive devices will integrate with the user’s biological senses and… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Eleanor O'Rourke | 
Assistant Professor in Computer Science and the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University |
"Why Do Students Think They're Bad at Programming? Towards Intelligent Systems to Support Motivation and Learning in CS1" In this talk, I will introduce a surprising motivational challenge in the domain of computer science education: students often think they're bad at programming, even when they… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Mustafa Naseem | 
Clinical Assistant Professor, University of Michigan School of Information |
"Challenges and Opportunities for Designing Health Technologies for Men in Religiously Conservative, Patriarchal and Low-Income Societies" This talk will address the design challenges and opportunities in creating health technologies for men to improve the lives of women in religiously… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Carol J. Smith | 
Sr. Research Scientist, Human-Machine Interaction in the AI Division, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University |
"UXR for Responsible, Human-Centered AI" AI-enabled systems that are responsible and human-centered, will be powerful partners to humans in the very near future. User experience research (UXR) is necessary to create systems that people are willing to be responsible for. This talk describes the UXR… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Lace Padilla | 
Assistant Professor in the Cognitive and Information Sciences Department at the University of California Merced |
"Making Uncertainty Cognitively Accessible" We live in an uncertain world. From extreme weather events to pandemic forecasts, we are confronted with uncertainty every day. Unfortunately, uncertainty is highly challenging for both the general public and trained experts to understand, which is why… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Nica Ross | 
Director, Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry & Associate Professor of Video & Media Design, School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University |
"Invitations and Intentions: A Creative Practice informed by Queer Autonomy" Through the format of an artist talk Nica Ross will share select projects from their body of work through the lens of Queer cultural production. In addition they will discuss how their socially engaged practice applies… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Chancey Fleet | 
Assistive Technology Coordinator at the New York Public Library and the Dimensions Project |
“De-Visualizing Images and Data: A Community-based Approach to Tactile Graphics Creation and Exploration" Tools and processes for creating tactile graphics (raised images usable by Blind and low vision people) have been available for decades, but the equipment and practices used to produce them –… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Julian Brinkley | 
Assistant Professor of Human-Centered Computing, School of Computing, Clemson University |
“(De)evolving Towards Inaccessibility? Exploring the Evolution of In-Vehicle Information Systems (IVIS) and the Implications for Human-Machine Interfaces in Emerging Self-Driving Vehicles” Fully autonomous or “self-driving” vehicles have been described as a potentially transformative advance in… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Daniel Epstein | 
Assistant Professor in the Department of Informatics, University of California at Irvine |
"Towards More Meaningful Personal Tracking" Personal tracking through digital technologies like pedometers, mood monitoring apps, and food journaling apps has great potential to help people begin to change their behaviors, understand their habits, connect with others and advocate for their… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Steven Dow | 
Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, UC San Diego |
"Advancing Socio-Technical Systems for Community-Driven Creativity" As the world’s problems increase in scope and complexity, the practice of design has been shifting. Designers are seen less as saviors and more as facilitators of problem-solving processes. As the practice of design evolves, so… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Stevie Chancellor | 
Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Minnesota |
"Human-centered Machine Learning for Dangerous Mental Illness Behaviors Online" Research and industry both use machine learning (ML) to identify and intervene in physically dangerous health behaviors discussed on social media, such as advocating for self-injury or violence. There is an urgent need… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Rich Caruana | 
Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA |
"Friends Don’t Let Friends Deploy Black-Box Models: The Importance of Intelligibility in Machine Learning" In machine learning sometimes tradeoffs must be made between accuracy, privacy and intelligibility: the most accurate models usually are not very intelligible or private, and the most… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - George Aye | 
Cofounder and Director of innovation at Greater Good Studio. Full Professor (Adj) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago |
"That Quiet Little Voice: When Design and Ethics Collide" The design industry’s relationship to the field of business has long been established and continues to become further entangled each year. But designers aren’t just satisfied with only disrupting the business sector—they’re keen to disrupt… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Ken Koedinger |
Ken Koedinger Hillman Professor and METALS Program Director, Carnegie Mellon University |
"Opportunities Matter: Hybrid Human-Computer Tutoring Toward Educational Equity" Across 27 datasets of students learning online, we find an astonishing regularity in the rate they learn. That’s the good news. When given quality practice opportunities with feedback and as-needed instruction, all… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Andrew Begel | 
Associate Professor, Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University |
"CodeWalk: Facilitating Shared Awareness in Mixed-Ability Collaborative Software Development" COVID-19 accelerated the trend toward remote software development, increasing the need for tightly-coupled synchronous collaboration. Existing tools and practices impose high coordination overhead on… Full Details | |
| HCII Special Seminar - David Karger | 
Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department and member of the Computer Science and AI Laboratory at MIT |
"Descriptive Languages to Help Non-programmers Create their own Web Applications" The web is teeming with data, and interacting with that data is a key part of modern knowledge work. But traditionally, only programmers have been able to create the tools to support those interactions. Others,… Full Details | |
| HCII Special Seminar - Josiah Hester | 
Breed Chair of Design and Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering at Northwestern University |
"Batteries Not Included: Reimagining Computing for the Next Trillion Devices" In this talk, I'd like to upend the notion that a computing system needs reliable power to support useful computation, sensing, and interaction. For decades, typical computing systems have generally assumed stable,… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Janet Vertesi | 
Associate Professor, Sociology Department, Princeton University |
"Building Anti-Racist Technologies: A Critical HCI Approach" From soap dispensers and pulse oximeters that don’t see dark skin, to surveillance and incarceration systems implemented in ‘smart’ cities, our current technologies are racist. Authors in HCI and in the social studies of technology have… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Andrés Monroy-Hernández | 
Principal Research Scientist at Snap Inc., Asst. Professor at Princeton Computer Science |
"Playful Co-Located Interactions with Mobile Augmented Reality" It is common to spend hours on our digital devices connecting with people far away while disconnecting from those right beside us. Even before the pandemic, researchers have argued that digital technologies make us feel “alone… Full Details | |
| SCS DEI Seminar: Data-Driven Diversity with Kody Manke and Kevin Jarbo |
Kody Manke, Psychology Department and Kevin Jarbo, Social and Decision Sciences Both are CMU Faculty |
(Virtual presentation) https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=c635e915-f4dc-4aab-b882-ae68014d2e66 The Data-Driven Diversity Lab (https://www.d3lab.org/) uses data and insights from psychology and behavioral economics to understand how different groups… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Postdocs | Pallavi Chhabra CMU Postdoc, faculty advisor Ken Koedinger Title: Improving Motivation and Learning Outcomes in Math in an Intelligent Tutor Environment Abstract: Digital technologies in education can create engaging learning environments that can help in reducing the… Full Details | ||
| HCII Seminar Series - Andy Wilson | 
Partner researcher, Microsoft Research |
"Blending Virtual and Physical Realities with RealityShader" The metaverse is about more than VR headsets and always has been. At Microsoft Research we have been exploring the use of depth cameras and projectors to blend virtual and physical realities without headsets. Projects such as Illumiroom… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Michael Nebeling | 
Assistant Professor of Information, University of Michigan |
"Extended Reality for Everybody" Technical advances in virtual, augmented reality, and mixed reality (XR) have paved the way for these immersive technologies to become increasingly mainstream; however, from a design perspective, there is still a high barrier to entry. A lot of my prior work was… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Nithya Sambasivan | "All Equation, No Human: The Myopia of Model Centrism" AI models seek to intervene in increasingly higher stakes domains, such as cancer detection and microloan allocation. What is the view of the world that guides AI development in high risk areas, and how does this view regard the complexity of… Full Details | ||
| HCII Seminar Series - Jay Aronson | 
Founder and director of the Center for Human Rights Science at Carnegie Mellon University and Professor of Science, Technology, and Society in the History Department |
“Technology for Social Good? AI, Human Rights, and Harm Reduction” Abstract The volume of information available to human rights practitioners has grown steadily since the globalization of Internet access and the widespread adoption of smartphones across geographies, cultures, and… Full Details |