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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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HCII Seminar Series - Lace Padilla | 
Assistant Professor in the Cognitive and Information Sciences Department at the University of California Merced |
Seminar Video | "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 to… Full Details | ||
| HCII Seminar Series - Chancey Fleet | 
Assistive Technology Coordinator at the New York Public Library and the Dimensions Project |
Seminar Video | “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 |
Seminar Video | “(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 |
Seminar Video | "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 |
Seminar Video | "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 |
Seminar Video | "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 |
Seminar Video | "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 |
Seminar Video | "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 |
Seminar Video | "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 |
Seminar Video | "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 |
Seminar Video | "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 |
Seminar Video | "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 |
Seminar Video | "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 | Seminar Video | 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 |
Seminar Video | "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 |
Seminar Video | "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 | Seminar Video | "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 |
Seminar Video | “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 | |
| HCII Seminar Series - 4 HCII Postdocs | 
HCII Postdocs |
Seminar Video | The HCII regularly gives our postdocs an opportunity to present during the HCII Speaker Series. This Friday’s seminar will feature four presentations in a hybrid format -- three will be presenting in person in NSH and one will be presenting remotely. If you are available, we hope you will join us… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - featuring HCII Postdocs |
Adetunji Adeniran, Danielle Chine and Tricia Ngoon Postdoctoral Researchers |
Seminar Video | The HCII regularly gives our postdocs an opportunity to present during the HCII Speaker Series. This week we will hear from three postdocs from the learning sciences: Adetunji Adeniran, Danielle Chine and Tricia Ngoon. Each person will present for approximately 15 minutes with limited… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Amy Pavel | 
Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas, Austin |
Seminar Video | Human-AI Systems for Making Videos Useful Video is becoming a core medium for communicating a wide range of content, including educational lectures, vlogs, and how-to tutorials. While videos are engaging and informative, they lack the familiar and useful affordances of text for browsing, skimming… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Leah Buechley | 
Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of New Mexico |
Seminar Video | "Hand and Machine" I believe that by making technology more accessible and building artifacts that look and feel different from anything that has been built in the past, I can change and broaden the culture of technology. I can get a diverse range of people excited by the ways that computers and… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Shunichi Kasahara | 
Researcher, Group leader at Sony Computer Science Laboratories |
Seminar Video | "Superception : Exploring new “Self” in the integration of humans and computers" When computers and humans integrate, to what extent are we ourselves? Computers are already no longer tools of humans, but are gaining the ability to make decisions and actions beyond humans. Furthermore,… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Kat Schrier Shaenfield |
Kat Schrier Shaenfield Associate Professor/Director of Games, Marist College, School of Communication and the Arts; Consultant, Game Designer, World Health Organization (WHO) |
Seminar Video | "What if We Could Design Games to Reduce Biases and Enhance Compassion?" Virtual reality (VR) and other types of games have been developed for educational purposes, with mixed results. We are still learning the best practices (and limitations) for designing games for skill development, such… Full Details | |
| HCII Seminar Series - Tom Hope | 
Postdoctoral researcher at The Allen Institute for AI (AI2) and The University of Washington |
Seminar Video | "Harnessing Scientific Literature for Boosting Discovery and Innovation" In the year 1665, the first academic journal was published. Fast forward to today, there are millions of scientific papers coming out every year. This explosion of knowledge represents an opportunity to accelerate innovation… Full Details | |
| HCII Speaker Series - Daragh Byrne |
Daragh Byrne Associate Teaching Track faculty, School of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University |
"Storytelling with data and devices: making sense of the quantified self" Stories about our everyday experiences are one of the main sensemaking methods we use to find meaning in our lives. As our lives are increasingly documented through smartphones, social media, and digital devices, we have… Full Details | ||
| HCII Seminar Series - Nazanin Andalibi | 
Assistant Professor, University of Michigan School of Information |
Seminar Video | "Where is the Human in Emotion Recognition/AI Technologies?" Emotions are powerful, mediate humans’ experiences with their surroundings, and impact decision-making and attention online and off. Sharing and signaling one’s emotions to other humans can be beneficial, but involves privacy… Full Details |