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Seminar Series

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)