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Seminar Series

March 11

HCI Seminar - Amy Bruckman - Patterns of Polarization: Parallels Between Online Discussion of Men’s Rights and Gun Policy

Amy Bruckman
Georgia Institute of Technology

Part Of

4:00P
- 5:00P

Location

32-D463
Add to Calendar 2025-03-11 16:00:00 2025-03-11 17:00:00 America/New_York HCI Seminar - Amy Bruckman - Patterns of Polarization: Parallels Between Online Discussion of Men’s Rights and Gun Policy Abstract:Why do people join online groups that promote extreme views? What draws people in, and what value do they find in their participation? In this talk, I will draw connections between our results from mixed-methods studies of groups on Reddit for discussing men’s rights, and groups for discussing gun politics. In both, the reward for expressing more extreme views is social approval, and a strong and supportive sense of membership in a community. However, we find that many members privately articulate more moderate views than they would be comfortable expressing online.  I’ll review the social and political science literatures showing that the same person may express different views in different contexts. One possible solution is to create a context that validates moderate views and civil discussion across difference. Towards this end, we launched the subreddit r/guninsights in 2022. I’ll review our results to date, and suggest broader implications for understanding and remediating polarization. Bio:Amy Bruckman is Regents’ Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on social computing, with interests in online communities, the nature of knowledge construction online, content moderation, CSCW, and technology ethics. Bruckman received her Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab in 1997, and a B.A. in physics from Harvard University in 1987. She is a Fellow of The ACM and a member of the SIGCHI Academy. She is the author of the book “Should You Believe Wikipedia? Online Communities and the Construction of Knowledge” (2022). This talk will also be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/98000061929. TBD

February 25

HCI Seminar - Rahul Bhargava - Data Beyond the Visual

Rahul Bhargava
Northeastern University

Part Of

4:00P
- 5:00P

Location

32-D463
Add to Calendar 2025-02-25 16:00:00 2025-02-25 17:00:00 America/New_York HCI Seminar - Rahul Bhargava - Data Beyond the Visual Description:Our standard toolkit of chart and graphs is poorly suited for the new community-oriented settings where data is now commonly used. Inspired by the arts, we can break free from outdated data practices and embrace creative, community-centered approaches that empower and engage people in public settings. Data sculptures, data murals, data theatre, and multi-sensory data experiences offer a broader and more appropriate set of approaches. Using this larger toolbox of data viz techniques can bring people together around data in ways that more fully reflect, embrace, and uplift their communities.Bio:Rahul Bhargava is an educator, designer, and artist working on creative data storytelling and computational journalism in support of goals of social justice and community empowerment. He has run over 100 workshops on data literacy, designed arts-based data murals and theatre, built award-winning museum exhibits, co-created AI-powered civic technologies with CSOs, and delivered keynote talks across the globe. Rahul’s first book, “Community Data: Creative Approaches to Empowering People with Information”, is now available from Oxford University Press.  He leads the Data Culture Group as an Assistant Professor of Journalism and Art + Design at Northeastern University.This talk will also be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/95955852702. TBD

February 04

HCI Seminar - Shriram Krishnamurthi - The Human Factors of Formal Methods

Shriram Krishnamurthi
Brown University

Part Of

4:00P
- 5:00P

Location

32-D463
Add to Calendar 2025-02-04 16:00:00 2025-02-04 17:00:00 America/New_York HCI Seminar - Shriram Krishnamurthi - The Human Factors of Formal Methods Abstract:"Formal methods" include specification, programming, and more: from logics to express desired program behavior to algorithms to check correctness. Lean is a formal method, SMT is a formal method, LTL is a formal method, Rust's type system is a formal method. As formal methods improve in expressiveness and power, they create new opportunities for non-expert adoption. In principle, formal tools are now powerful enough to enable developers to scalably validate realistic systems artifacts without extensive formal training. However, realizing this potential for adoption requires attention to not only the technical but also the human side—which has received extraordinarily little attention from formal-methods research. This talk presents some of our efforts to address this paucity. We apply ideas from cognitive science, human-factors research, and education theory to improve the usability of formal methods. Along the way, we find misconceptions suffered by users, how technically appealing designs that experts may value may fail to help, and how our tools may even mislead users.Bio:Shriram is the Vice President for Programming Languages at Brown University in Providence, RI, USA. He’s not, really, but that’s what it says on his business card. At heart, he's a person of ill-repute: a Schemer, Racketeer, and Pyreteer. He believes tropical fruit are superior to all other kinds. He is terrified of success, because he may be forced to buy a suit. On a more serious note, he's a professor at Brown who has created several influential systems (such as DrRacket, Margrave, Flapjax, and Lambda-JS) and written multiple widely-used books. He has won SIGPLAN's Robin Milner Young Researcher Award, SIGPLAN's Software Award (jointly), SIGSOFT's Influential Educator Award, SIGPLAN's Distinguished Educator Award (jointly), and other recognitions. This talk will also be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/97298991671. TBD

December 16

Alexander Lex - The reVISit User Study Platform and Applications in Studying Misinformation

Alexander Lex
University of Utah-School of Computing

Part Of

4:00P
- 5:00P

Location

D463 (Star)
Add to Calendar 2024-12-16 16:00:00 2024-12-16 17:00:00 America/New_York Alexander Lex - The reVISit User Study Platform and Applications in Studying Misinformation Abstract:In this talk I introduce the reVISit framework for designing and running empirical studies online. Traditional survey tools limit the flexibility and reproducibility of online experiments. To remedy this, we introduce a domain-specific language, the reVISit Spec, that researchers can use to design complex online user studies. reVISit Spec, combined with the relevant stimuli, is compiled into a ready-to-deploy website that handles all aspects of a user study, including sophisticated provenance-based data tracking, randomization, etc. reVISit is a community focused project and ready to use! Visit https://revisit.dev/ to get started. I will then pivot to talk about data-driven misinformation in the form of charts shared on social networks. I will demonstrate that “lying with charts” doesn’t work the way we (used to) think about it, and introduce a few strategies to “protect” charts and charting tools from being abused by malicious users. I will connect back to reVISit by illustrating how we leveraged it to run a series of crowd-sourced experiments. Bio:Alexander Lex is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute and the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah. He directs the Visualization Design Lab where he and his team develop visualization methods and systems to help solve today’s scientific problems. Recently he is working on visualization accessibility, visual misinformation, provenance and reproducibility, and user study infrastructure. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and multiple best paper awards or best paper honorable mentions at IEEE VIS, ACM CHI, and other conferences. He also received a best dissertation award from his alma mater. He co-founded datavisyn, a startup company developing visualization solutions for the pharmaceutical industry.This talk will also be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/99703652090. D463 (Star)

November 19

Jeff Huang - Reshaping the Creative Process through Peer Review, Media Formats, and Copyright

Jeff Huang
Brown University

Part Of

4:00P
- 5:00P

Location

D463 (Star)
Add to Calendar 2024-11-19 16:00:00 2024-11-19 17:00:00 America/New_York Jeff Huang - Reshaping the Creative Process through Peer Review, Media Formats, and Copyright Abstract:Digital artists compose and share their work on online platforms that are meant to support creativity. Recently, collaboration and AI tools have been the primary new features in these platforms, enabling teams to do more, with or without artists. I propose shifting the focus back towards the individual artist by exploring three aspects of these platforms: peer review, media formats, and copyright. I share examples of platforms, Sketchy and UX Factor, incorporating peer review that provides self-assessment along with peer feedback for the artist or designer. Filtered.ink extends an existing media format to enable new capabilities for the artist without depending on the platform or proprietary format. Finally, I propose a workflow for generative AI platforms that can support artists' authorship of the finished work based on the idea-expression doctrine in copyright law.Bio:Jeff Huang is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Computer Science at Brown University. His research is in Human-Computer Interaction, focusing on building personalized systems based on behavior data. These systems enable new user-centric capabililties and are applied to attention, mobile, user experience, and health. Jeff is primarily funded by the NSF, NIH, and ARO, and he has received the NSF CAREER award, Facebook Fellowship, and ARO Young Investigator Award.This talk will also be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/99877634306. D463 (Star)

October 29

Amber Horvath - Meta-Information to Support Sensemaking by Developers

Amber Horvath
CSAIL

Part Of

4:00P
- 5:00P

Location

32-D463 (Star)
Add to Calendar 2024-10-29 16:00:00 2024-10-29 17:00:00 America/New_York Amber Horvath - Meta-Information to Support Sensemaking by Developers Abstract:Software development requires developers to juggle and balance many information-seeking and understanding tasks. From determining how a bug was introduced, to choosing what API method to use to resolve the bug, to how to properly integrate this change, even the smallest implementation tasks can lead to many questions. These questions may range from hard-to-answer questions about the rationale behind the original code to common questions such as how to use an API. Once this challenging sensemaking is done, this rich thought history is often lost given the high cost of externalizing these details, despite potentially being useful to future developers. In this talk, I discuss the design principles necessary to capture and make useful this rich set of data and the different systems I have developed that instantiate these principles. Specifically, I have developed systems for annotating to support developers’ natural sensemaking when understanding information-dense sources such as software documentation and source code. I then demonstrated how to automate and scale the capturing of other forms of meta-information to assist with reasoning about design. Lastly, I explored how this information can be utilized by LLMs to assist in the applied developer sensemaking task of print debugging. In looking towards the future of developer information needs, I discuss how these processes and systems may change to adapt to the new classes of information needs that the shift towards AI-driven software engineering are creating. Bio:Amber Horvath is a post-doctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working with Arvind Satyanarayan and David Karger. She received her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, where she was advised by Brad Myers. She works at the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI), software engineering, and applied AI. She uses human-centered methods to design and build novel tools to help developers better manage their information. She has also done work related to fostering more inclusive environments for underrepresented populations in computing, using novel methodologies and large-scale data analysis. She publishes at premier venues in the fields of HCI and software engineering, including CHI, UIST, ICSE, and CSCW, with award-winning papers at CHI and CSCW.This talk will also be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/98354678322. 32-D463 (Star)

October 22

Kim Marriott - Visualization without Vision

Kim Marriott
Monash University

Part Of

4:00P
- 5:00P

Location

32-D463 (Star)
Add to Calendar 2024-10-22 16:00:00 2024-10-22 17:00:00 America/New_York Kim Marriott - Visualization without Vision Abstract:Tactile graphics have been used by blind people for hundreds of years and remain the recommended method for blind people to access to graphics in which spatial layout is important, such as maps or charts. In this talk I will sketch the history of tactile graphics and explore the cognitive and perceptual similarities and differences between tactile and visual graphics. Finally, I will look at how new technologies such as 3D printing and refreshable tactile displays are transforming the provision of tactile graphics.Bio:Kim Marriott leads the Monash Assistive Tech & Society (MATS) Centre at Monash University in Australia. MATS is a multidisciplinary centre bringing together more than 100 researchers and educators interested in technology and disability. Kim's research is in both data visualization and accessibility with a particular focus on the use of emerging technologies to support people who are blind or have low vision to access graphical materials. He has just published a history of data visualization, The Golden Age of Data Visualization: How Did We Get Here?, which includes a chapter on the history of tactile graphics. This talk will also be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/91729958241. 32-D463 (Star)

October 08

Remco Chang - Conceptualizing Visualizations as Functions, Spaces, and Grammars

Remco Chang
Department of Computer Science, Tufts University

Part Of

4:00P
- 5:00P

Location

D463 (Star)
Add to Calendar 2024-10-08 16:00:00 2024-10-08 17:00:00 America/New_York Remco Chang - Conceptualizing Visualizations as Functions, Spaces, and Grammars Abstract:Visualization is often regarded as a static artifact – an image-based representation of data. However, from a mathematical and programmatic perspective, it can be more accurately described as a function: an action that transforms data and parameters into visual form. By framing visualization as a function, we can investigate its properties by examining its inputs (domain) and outputs (range), both of which can be conceptualized as distinct spaces. In this talk, I first present our work on learning the input and output spaces of visualizations using neural networks. I then introduce other spaces considered by the visualization research community, such as pixel space, interaction space, and design space. Finally, I discuss our research on viewing visualizations through the lens of grammars, demonstrating how this approach helps us uncover key properties and delineate the boundaries between data, task, and visualization spaces.Bio: Remco Chang is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Tufts University. He received his BA in Computer Science and Economics from Johns Hopkins University, his MSc from Brown University, and his PhD from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Charlotte. Prior to his PhD, he worked at Boeing, developing real-time flight tracking and visualization software, and later served as a research scientist at UNC Charlotte. His research interests include visual analytics, information visualization, human-computer interaction (HCI), and databases. His work has been supported by the NSF, DARPA, Navy, DOD, Walmart Foundation, Merck, DHS, MIT Lincoln Lab, and Draper, and he is a co-founder of two startups, Hopara.io and GraphPolaris. He has received best paper, best poster, and honorable mention awards at InfoVis, VAST, CHI, EuroVis. He served as program chair of the IEEE VIS conference in 2018 and 2019 and is the general chair of VIS in 2024. Additionally, he is an associate editor for the ACM TiiS and IEEE TVCG journals and received the NSF CAREER Award in 2015. He has mentored 11 PhD students and postdocs who now hold faculty positions at institutions such as Smith College (x2), DePaul University, Washington University in St. Louis, University of Washington, University of San Francisco, University of Colorado Boulder, WPI, San Francisco State, the University of Utrecht, and Brandeis, as well as 7 researchers working in companies and government agencies like Google, Draper, Facebook, MIT Lincoln Lab (x2), the National Renewable Energy Lab, and Idaho National Lab.This talk will also be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/99222844035. D463 (Star)

October 01

Suresh Venkatasubramanian - Moles, Turtles, and Snakes: On what it means to do practical AI governance research

Suresh Venkatasubramanian
Brown University

Part Of

4:00P
- 5:00P

Location

32-D463 (Star)
Add to Calendar 2024-10-01 16:00:00 2024-10-01 17:00:00 America/New_York Suresh Venkatasubramanian - Moles, Turtles, and Snakes: On what it means to do practical AI governance research Abstract:Over the last decade or so, we've built an impressive list of examples of AI gone wrong, and a fairly comprehensive list of reasons why. Critique of technological systems, especially those based on ML and AI, are a common and arguably necessary counterweight to the hype around AI. But I'd argue that perhaps our desire to critique has gone a little too far, in that we seem unwilling to answer the question "if not this, then what" with anything but "nothing". I think we can do better than that, while still not falling into the trap of technosolutionism. We're at a moment where the door has been opened to provide methods, tools, and general sociotechnical systems - for auditing, for measurement, and for mitigation. These will necessarily be imperfect, and will have to iterated over and improved, again and again. But they can help us reimagine more expansively what's possible, and more importantly help show policymakers what's possible, when thinking about the next wave of AI governance work. I'll illustrate this with a few examples from my own recent research.Bio:Suresh Venkatasubramanian directs the Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination, and Redesign (CNTR) with the Data Science Institute at Brown University, and is a Professor of Computer Science and Data Science. He recently finished a stint in the Biden-Harris administration, where he served as Assistant Director for Science and Justice in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In that capacity, he helped co-author the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights.Prior to Brown University, Suresh was at the University of Utah, where as an assistant professor he was the John and Marva Warnock Assistant Professor. He has received a CAREER award from the NSF for his work in the geometry of probability, a test-of-time award at ICDE 2017 for his work in privacy, and a KAIS Journal award for his work on auditing black-box models. His research on algorithmic fairness has received press coverage across the globe, including NPR’s Science Friday, NBC, and CNN, as well as in other media outlets. He is a past member of the Computing Community Consortium Council of the CRA, spent 4 years (2017-2021) as a member of the board of the ACLU in Utah, and is a past member of New York City’s Failure to Appear Tool (FTA) Research Advisory Council, the Research Advisory Council for the First Judicial District of Pennsylvania and the Utah State Auditor's Commission on protecting privacy and preventing discrimination. He was recently named by Fast Company to their AI20 list of thinkers shaping the world of generative AI. This talk will also be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/94023976132. 32-D463 (Star)

September 24

HCI Seminar - Lane Harrison - Shaping Visualization Ecosystems in a Changing Technosocial Landscape

Lane Harrison
Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Part Of

4:00P
- 5:00P

Location

32-G882 (Hewlett)
Add to Calendar 2024-09-24 16:00:00 2024-09-24 17:00:00 America/New_York HCI Seminar - Lane Harrison - Shaping Visualization Ecosystems in a Changing Technosocial Landscape Abstract:Progress across visualization systems, data journalism, and social media has brought charts and interactives into peoples’ daily lives. But this progress brings new challenges: How do people engage with visualizations they encounter? How might people differ in their ability to read and use visualizations, and can these skills be improved? Do visualization tools and creators favor audiences with particular social or cultural characteristics over others? This talk will cover research initiatives that interrogate these challenges through experiments and design, and propose how we might anticipate and respond to coming shifts in visualization ecosystems.Bio:Lane Harrison is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Before joining WPI, Lane was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Computer Science at Tufts University. Lane directs the Visualization and Information Equity lab at WPI (VIEW), where he and students leverage computational methods to understand and shape how people engage with data visualizations and visual analytics systems. Lane’s work has been supported by the NSF, DoED, DoD, and industry.This talk will also be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/91991608861 32-G882 (Hewlett)

September 17

Ethan Zuckerman - The Quotidian Web

Ethan Zuckerman
University of Massachusetts Amherst

Part Of

4:00P
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Location

Virtual Event
Add to Calendar 2024-09-17 16:00:00 2024-09-17 17:00:00 America/New_York Ethan Zuckerman - The Quotidian Web Abstract:Internet researchers have a bias towards the extraordinary. We pay special attention to unusual phenomena like mis/disinformation, to successful activist campaigns, to authors and creators who reach large audiences - and for good reason. But what might we learn from studying ordinary online behavior? Our lab has developed tools to take random samples of YouTube and TikTok by guessing at valid video addresses. The videos we collect often have fewer than 100 views and frequently were not intended for viewership by broad audiences. What can we learn about the role of online video in different languages and cultures from this data? How does an archive of random videos allow us to study cultural change over time? What are the ethical pitfalls of studying data that is public but obscure? Bio:Ethan Zuckerman is associate professor of public policy, information and communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and director of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure. His research focuses on the use of media as a tool for social change, the use of new media technologies by activists and alternative business and governance models for the internet. He is the author of Mistrust: How Losing Trust in Institutions Provides Tools to Transform Them (2021), Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (2013) and co-author with Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci of "The Illustrated Field Guide to Social Media" forthcoming on MIT Press. With Rebecca MacKinnon, Zuckerman co-founded the international blogging community Global Voices. It showcases news and opinions from citizen media in more than 150 nations and 30 languages, publishing editions in 20 languages. Previously, Zuckerman directed the Center for Civic Media at MIT and taught at the MIT Media Lab. He and his family live in Berkshire County in western Massachusetts. This talk is remote over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/97272203935. https://mit.zoom.us/j/97272203935

July 09

Wendy Mackay - WWW: Wendy’s Words of Wisdom

Wendy Mackay

Part Of

4:00P
- 5:00P

Location

32-G882
Add to Calendar 2024-07-09 16:00:00 2024-07-09 17:00:00 America/New_York Wendy Mackay - WWW: Wendy’s Words of Wisdom Abstract:The original title for the SIGCHI Lifetime research award was: “The Design of Interactive Things: From Theory to Design and Back”. However, after I joked that I should just entitle it “WWW” for “Wendy’s Words of Wisdom”, I was surprised to see the latter title appear in the CHI '24 program. Yet when I considered how to structure this talk — Just how do you compress 40 years of research into 40 minutes? — I realized that I can trace both my history and SIGCHI’s through a series of insights that each launched a new research theme.This talk offers a whirlwind tour of my research interests, including interactive video, tangible computing, multi-disciplinary design, collaborative systems, human-computer partnerships, and generative theories of interaction. Of course, such research is highly collaborative and I appreciate this opportunity to show off the contributions of the many students, colleagues, friends and mentors who have influenced my thinking and collaborated on this work.Bio:Professor Wendy Mackay is a Research Director, Classe Exceptionnelle, at Inria, France's national research laboratory for Computer Science and a full Professor at the Université Paris-Saclay, where she also served as Vice President of Research for the Computer Science Department. She runs the joint ExSitu research lab in Human-Computer Interaction with five faculty members plus 20 Ph.D. students, post-doctoral fellows and research engineers. She received her Ph.D. from MIT and managed research groups at Digital Equipment and Xerox EuroPARC, where she pioneered research in customizable software, interactive video and mixed reality systems. In addition to receiving the ACM/SIGCHI Lifetime Research award, she was the 2021-2022 Annual Chair for Computer Science for the Collège de France, and is a Doctor Honoris Causa, Aarhus University, an ACM Fellow and a member of the ACM CHI Academy. She received a six-year European Research Council Advanced Grant for her research on human-computer partnerships, where she introduced the theory of reciprocal co-adaptation. She has published over 200 peer-reviewed research articles in the area of Human-Computer Interaction. Her work combines theoretical, empirical and design contributions with a current focus on re-envisioning the interaction between human users and intelligent systems. She has introduced numerous multi-disciplinary design and evaluation methods, and is currently exploring how to design systems where users and intelligent agents share agency, both interactively and over long time periods, to avoid deskilling and instead increase human capabilities. Current application areas range from work with creative professionals (choreographers, designers, and musicians) to safety critical settings (smart cockpits, hospitals and emergency control rooms). This talk will also be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/96939675190. 32-G882

May 07

Siva Vaidhyanathan - Digital Hegemony and Digital Sovereignty

Siva Vaidhyanathan
University of Virginia

Part Of

4:00P
- 5:00P

Location

Kiva (G449)
Add to Calendar 2024-05-07 16:00:00 2024-05-07 17:00:00 America/New_York Siva Vaidhyanathan - Digital Hegemony and Digital Sovereignty Abstract: Through the first 30 years of the development of the internet, we were promised a global “network of networks” that would offer free speech, democratic empowerment, and the spread of democracy. Leaders from Ronald Reagan to Margaret Thatcher to Barack Obama all promised that technology would unite and enlighten the world. Somehow it all went differently, and now we live in a world traversed by networks dominated by hegemons like the United States, Russia, and China. In this talk, Professor Siva Vaidhyanathan will explain the idea of “digital sovereignty,” the ways that a nation state creates and enforces its own sense of what should be allowed and watched on digital networks, resisting digital hegemony through strategies of digital sovereingty. There are many models of “digital sovereignty,” each offering a distinct set of value and opportunities, as well as methods of oppression. This talk will focus on how the Russian invasion of Ukraine exposes the dangers and necessities of digital sovereignty.Bio:Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (2018), Intellectual Property: A Very Short Introduction (2017), The Googlization of Everything -- and Why We Should Worry (2011), Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity ( 2001), and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (2004). He also co-edited (with Carolyn Thomas) the collection, Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies (2007). Vaidhyanathan is a columnist for The Guardian and has written for many other periodicals, including The New York Times, Wired, Bloomberg View, American Scholar, Reason, Dissent, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Magazine, Slate.com, BookForum, Columbia Journalism Review, Washington Post, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Book Review, and The Nation. He is a frequent contributor to public radio programs. And he has appeared on news programs on BBC, CNN, NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, ABC, and on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central. In 2015 he was portrayed on stage at the Public Theater in a play called Privacy. After five years as a professional journalist, he earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Vaidhyanathan has also taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Columbia University, New York University, McMaster University, and the University of Amsterdam. He is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He was born and raised in Buffalo, New York and resides in Charlottesville, Virginia.This talk will also be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/95568018736. Kiva (G449)

April 23

Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao - Designing Hybrid Skins

Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao
Cornell University

Part Of

4:00P
- 5:00P

Location

Star (D463)
Add to Calendar 2024-04-23 16:00:00 2024-04-23 17:00:00 America/New_York Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao - Designing Hybrid Skins Abstract:Hybrid Skins are an emerging form of conformable interface situated at all scales of the human experience. These conformable interfaces are hybrid in their integration of technological function with social and cultural perspectives, blending historical craft with miniaturized robotics, machines, and materials in their development. The resulting skins also serve social, cultural, and technological purposes while supporting the construction of individual identities. This seminar examines recent work from the Hybrid Body Lab in designing Hybrid Skins through under-explored approaches of textile robotics, bio-fluid sensing, modular flexible electronics, and sustainable materials exploration. With their seamless and conformable form factor, Hybrid Skins afford unprecedented intimacy to the human experience and an opportunity for us to carefully rethink and redesign how our relationship with technology can, should (or should not) be. By blending engineering, design, and committed engagement with diverse communities, Kao and her lab’s research aims to foster inclusive design for future wearable technology that can celebrate (instead of constrict) the diversity of the human experience. Bio:Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao is an assistant professor at Cornell University. She directs the Hybrid Body Lab, which focuses on integrating cultural and social perspectives into the design of on-body interfaces. Through her research, she aims to foster inclusive designs for soft wearable technologies, like smart tattoos and textiles and develops novel digital fabrication methods. Kao, honored with a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, has received accolades in major ACM Human-Computer Interaction venues and media attention from Forbes, CNN, WIRED, and VOGUE. Her work has been showcased internationally, including at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and New York Fashion Week, earning multiple design awards. Kao holds a Ph.D. from MIT Media Lab.This talk will also be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/99183558682. Star (D463)

April 16

Joshua Miele - Blindness and Displays – a quick survey of non-visual methods for presenting spatial information

Joshua Miele
University of California Berkeley

Part Of

4:00P
- 5:00P

Location

Star (D463)
Add to Calendar 2024-04-16 16:00:00 2024-04-16 17:00:00 America/New_York Joshua Miele - Blindness and Displays – a quick survey of non-visual methods for presenting spatial information Abstract:In this rapid overview of non-visual techniques for displaying qualitative and quantitative data, Dr. Miele offers perspectives on the pros and cons of a variety of tools and techniques. Using examples and counterexamples from his own projects and the wider field, he will discuss insights on tactile methods and materials, auditory displays, sonification, haptics, description, and multimodal approaches to the non-visual presentation of information. Bio:Dr. Miele is a blind scientist, designer, and disability activist, focusing on the overlap of technology, disability, and equity. He is Distinguished Fellow of Disability, Accessibility, and Design at UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, as well as a Principal Accessibility Researcher at Amazon’s Lab126. He has a bachelors degree in physics and a Ph.D. in psychoacoustics from the University of California at Berkeley. For over 20 years he based his work at the Smith-Kettlewell Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Blindness and Low Vision in San Francisco. There he led a team of engineers, scientists, and designers dedicated to addressing a wide variety of accessible information challenges in education, employment, and entertainment. His work integrates universal and inclusive design, accessibility engineering, education research, psychophysics, disability studies, and other disciplines, applying emerging technologies and ideas to a wide range of social and information accessibility challenges. He is most well-known for his work on Tactile Maps Automated Production (an award-winning tool that makes tactile street maps accessible for blind and visually-impaired travelers), YouDescribe (a crowdsourcing tool that allows anyone to add audio description to any YouTube video to make it more accessible for blind viewers), Show and Tell (an Alexa experience that uses computer vision to identify packaged pantry items), and the Blind Arduino Project (a collaborative community building and disseminating knowledge to support blind makers to independently design and build their own accessible devices). He is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow, father of 2, and lives in Berkeley California.This talk will also be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/93279380914. Star (D463)

April 09

Christina Harrington - Considering Design’s Role in Health Equity and Access Among Marginalized Populations

Christina Harrington
Carnegie Mellon

Part Of

4:00P
- 5:00P

Location

Virtual Event
Add to Calendar 2024-04-09 16:00:00 2024-04-09 17:00:00 America/New_York Christina Harrington - Considering Design’s Role in Health Equity and Access Among Marginalized Populations Abstract:Smart and intelligent systems have the opportunity to be more accessible ways of interacting with information online. Particularly, these systems have the ability to address issues of health equity that impact many marginalized groups. Research on the use of intelligent systems among these populations is growing, however most findings suggest that racial disparities exist within current intelligent technologies. Scholars have begun to call for a more intersectional framing of marginalized communities' experiences with technology, suggesting a need to understand the impacts of both race, age, and cultural background on how intelligent systems are conceptualized and understood. For example, when investigating the intersection between age and race, researchers have found that Black older adults perceive smart technologies such as voice assistants to be inequitable and not designed with them in mind. My research looks at how we can consider aspects of cultural identity in how people conceptualize intelligent technologies for health and wellness. Through a community-based participatory research approach and co-design methods, I explore questions like "How do individuals from marginalized communities conceptualize intelligent systems in regard to personal health and wellness?" and "How do we consider constructs of identity in the research we conduct on health technologies?". I'll discuss these questions as well as equitable considerations for community-based research with historically marginalized groups in HCI and design. Bio:Dr. Christina N. Harrington (she/her) is a designer and qualitative researcher who works at the intersection of interaction design and health and racial equity. She combines her background in electrical engineering and industrial design to focus on the areas of universal, accessible, and inclusive design. Specifically, she looks at how to use design in the development of products to support historically excluded groups such as Black communities, older adults, and individuals with differing abilities in maintaining their health, wellness, and autonomy in defining their future. Christina is passionate about centering communities that have historically been at the margins of mainstream design. She looks to methods such as design justice and community collectivism to broaden and amplify participation in design by addressing the barriers that corporate approaches have placed on our ability to see design as a universal language of communication and knowledge. Dr. Harrington is currently an assistant professor in the HCI Institute at Carnegie Mellon University where she is also the Director of the Equity and Health Innovations Design Research Lab.This talk will only be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/94590101061. https://mit.zoom.us/j/94590101061

March 12

Elena Glassman - AI-Resilient Interfaces and the Value of Variation

Elena Glassman
Harvard University

Part Of

4:00P
- 5:00P

Location

Star (D463)
Add to Calendar 2024-03-12 16:00:00 2024-03-12 17:00:00 America/New_York Elena Glassman - AI-Resilient Interfaces and the Value of Variation Abstract:AI is powerful, but it can make both objective errors and contextually inappropriate choices. We need AI-resilient interfaces that help people be resilient to the AI choices that are not right, or not right for them. Existing human-AI interaction guidelines recommend that interfaces include user-facing features for efficient dismissal, modification, or otherwise efficient recovery from AI choices that the user does not like. However, users cannot decide to dismiss or modify AI choices that they have not noticed, and, without sufficient context, users may not realize that some of the noticed AI choices are wrong or inappropriate. In this talk, I discuss the challenges and benefits of designing AI-resilient interfaces, and how two complementary theories of human concept learning—Variation Theory and Analogical Learning Theory—can provide design guidance. I will illustrate these concepts with the design and evaluation of novel interactive systems in a variety of domains, including document summarization and LLM prompt engineering.Bio:Elena L. Glassman is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, specializing in human-computer interaction. From 2018-22, she was the Stanley A. Marks & William H. Marks Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and, more recently, she was named as a 2023 Sloan Research Fellow. At MIT, she earned a PhD and MEng in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a BS in Electrical Science and Engineering, supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the NDSEG Graduate Fellowship. Before joining Harvard, she was a postdoctoral scholar in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received the Berkeley Institute for Data Science Moore/Sloan Data Science Fellowship.This talk will also be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/93757463260. Star (D463)

March 05

Michael Bernstein - Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior

Michael Bernstein
Computer Science Department, Stanford University

Part Of

4:00P
- 5:00P

Location

Star (D463)
Add to Calendar 2024-03-05 16:00:00 2024-03-05 17:00:00 America/New_York Michael Bernstein - Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior Abstract:Believable proxies of human attitudes and behavior can empower applications ranging from immersive environments to social policy interventions. However, the last quarter century has seen a slow recession of human behavioral simulation as a method, in part because traditional simulations have been unable to capture the complexity and contingency of human behavior. I argue that modern artificial intelligence models allow us to re-examine this limitation. I make my case through generative agents: computational software agents that simulate believable human behavior. Generative agents enable us to populate an interactive sandbox environment inspired by The Sims, where end users can interact with a small town of twenty five agents using natural language. Our generative agent architecture empowers agents to remember, reflect, and plan — enabling them to act in ways reflective of their jobs and personalities, notice and remember each other, and even plan coordinated events. Extending this line of argument, I explore how proxying human behavior and attitudes can help us design more effective online social spaces, understand the societal disagreement underlying modern AI models, and better embed societal values into our algorithms.Bio:Michael Bernstein is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he is a Bass University Fellow. His research focuses on human-computer interaction and social computing systems. This research has been reported in venues such as The New York Times, Wired, Science, and Nature, and Michael has been recognized with an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, UIST Lasting Impact Award, and the Computer History Museum's Patrick J. McGovern Tech for Humanity Prize. He holds a bachelor's degree in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, as well as a master's degree and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT.This talk will also be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/91879206220.Jointly sponsored by CSAIL and the Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI). Star (D463)

February 13

Tamara Munzner - Marks Revisited: Beyond Bertin

Tamara Munzner
University of British Columbia

Part Of

4:00P
- 5:00P

Location

Zoom only
Add to Calendar 2024-02-13 16:00:00 2024-02-13 17:00:00 America/New_York Tamara Munzner - Marks Revisited: Beyond Bertin Abstract:For decades, a core tenet of visualization theory has been to break down the structure of visual encodings into marks and channels: geometric marks that represent data items, whose visual appearance can be controlled by visual channels such as position, color, shape, and size. Very extensive empirical work has been carried out to characterize the expressiveness and effectiveness of these visual channels and their relative rankings, resulting in sophisticated models for how to use them. However, the situation with marks is much less well studied; researchers have continued to simply divide them into the mathematically-inspired categories of point, line, area, and volume, following proposals by Jacques Bertin dating back to the 1960s. I will present and discuss many scenarios where this conventional model falls short, in some cases even for well known chart types. I will introduce ideas about alternative models that may provide better descriptive and generative power, to resolve ambiguities and help visualization designers reason about visual encoding possibilities.Bio: Tamara Munzner is a Professor at the University of British Columbia Department of Computer Science, and holds a 2000 PhD from Stanford. She has been active in visualization research since 1991 and has published over ninety papers and chapters. She has been papers chair for IEEE InfoVis, EuroVis, and VIS, on the steering committees for InfoVis and BioVis, and the chair of the VIS Executive Committee. Her book Visualization Analysis and Design is widely used to teach visualization world-wide, and she is the co-editor of the A K Peters Visualization book series at CRC/Routledge. She received the IEEE VGTC Visualization Technical Achievement Award, multiple Test of Time Awards from InfoVis, and is an IEEE Fellow.This talk will be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/99804195917. Zoom only

February 06

Haijun Xia - Redesigning the Information Space to Unleash the Power of AI

Haijun Xia
UC San Diego

Part Of

4:00P
- 5:00P

Location

32-D463 (Star)
Add to Calendar 2024-02-06 16:00:00 2024-02-06 17:00:00 America/New_York Haijun Xia - Redesigning the Information Space to Unleash the Power of AI Abstract:When electricity was first invented, factory engineers rushed to replace steam engines with electric motors. This switch, however, made little impact on the factory's productivity due to the factories' layouts and workflows being optimized for steam power. It wasn't until thirty years later that a new generation of engineers reconfigured the layouts and workflows for electrical manufacturing, leading to a tripling of productivity. History repeats itself as we encounter a similar paradigm shift with the advent of AI. Instead of integrating AI into individual applications, my recent work explores how information spaces should be redesigned to harness AI's potential fully. In this talk, I will share some of the early work that we have been doing toward this direction. Bio:Haijun Xia is an Assistant Professor in the Cognitive Science, Design Lab, and Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He also directs the Creativity Lab. His research area is Human-Computer Interaction, where he investigates several fundamental aspects of human-computer interfaces, such as information representation, interaction modality, and intent recognition. His work has received Best Paper Awards or Honorable Mentions at ACM CHI, UIST, and IEEE VIS conferences. He received his Master's and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, and his Bachelor degree from the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University.This talk will also be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/91325960176. 32-D463 (Star)