2023 Spring Brown Bag Speakers

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An Upcycled IoT: Creating Tomorrow's Internet of Things Out of Today's Household Possessions

Jan 19, 2023

Abstract: The Internet-of-Things (IoT) promises to enhance even the most mundane of objects with computational properties. Yet, IoT has largely focused on new devices while ignoring the home’s many existing possessions. Requiring households to replace their possessions to adopt IoT yields substantial costs. Beyond financial, these include waste, work to arrange and orchestrate objects to suit households, and attention investment to acquire new skills. To address these costs, this project worked with 10 American families to design an upcycled approach to IoT that makes use of existing household possessions and then built a system responsive to these findings. The results 1) describe patterns of families’ socio-material practices, 2) develop a framework for designing lightweight modification, and 3) presents The IoT Codex—a book of programmable and inexpensive, battery-free interactive devices—to support customizing everyday objects with software and web services using stickers. The presented work offers a lightweight approach to end user programming of everyday objects for customizing IoT to suit idiosyncratic socio-material practices.

Speaker Bio: Kristin Williams is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in Emory University's College of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on making programming the Internet of Things approachable to casual end user programmers. This work builds on Kristin's longstanding interests in agency, DIY publishing, and access to information. In the past, Kristin has worked closely with community organizations to shape and evaluate assistive technologies for individuals with visual and cognitive disabilities, managed an archive of Soviet dissident literature on the political abuse of psychiatry, and created a 10+ year book project on Central Asian civil society as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kazakhstan. She has a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University's Human Compter Interaction Institute, an MS in Human-Computer Interaction from both Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland, College Park and a BA in Philosophy from Reed College.  She was a 2021 EECS Rising Star, an NSF EAPSI Fellow, and an AAUW Career Development Grantee.

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Raise Your Hand – An Electrical Engineer’s First Effort at Interactive Multimedia Digital Art

Jan 26, 2023

Abstract: The Raise Your Hand exhibit, shown in the lobby of the Ferst Center on 1-14 November, 2022, used LIDAR and camera-based pose detection from participants to control parameters in Arduino-controlled mechatronics and in original music and video.  The combination of interactive mechatronics along with interactive music and video distinguish this exhibit different from many other reported interactive art installations in recent years.  The purpose of the exhibit was to entertain participants and to investigate what aspects of the exhibit were most effective.  The talk will describe the exhibit and the results collected from four focus groups and 200+ online survey responses.

Speaker Bio: Mary Ann Weitnauer has been a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech since 1989 and was Senior Associate Chair there from 2016-2021. After decades of wireless communication research and some teaching of design courses, often involving art, she decided in 2021 to begin, with Tom Martin of GTRI, the Electronic ARTrium VIP team, and shifted her focus to interactive digital art with mechatronics, music, and video.

 

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Multi-Party Human-Robot Interaction: Towards Robots with Increased Social Context Awareness

Feb 9, 2023

Abstract: Many real-world applications require that robots handle the complexity of multi-party social encounters, e.g., delivery robots may need to navigate through crowds, robots in manufacturing settings may need to coordinate their actions with those of human coworkers, and robots in educational environments may help multiple people practice and improve their skills. How can we enable robots to effectively take part in these social interactions? At first glance, multi-party interactions may be seen as a trivial generalization of one-on-one human-robot interactions, suggesting no special consideration. Unfortunately, this approach is limited in practice because it ignores higher-order effects, like group factors, that often drive human behavior in multi-party Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

In this talk, I will describe two research directions that we believe are important to advance multi-party HRI. The first direction focuses on understanding group dynamics and social group phenomena from an experimental perspective. The other one focuses on leveraging graph state abstractions and structured data-driven methods for reasoning about social contexts, which include individual, interpersonal and group-level factors relevant to human-robot interactions. As part of this talk, I will also describe our recent efforts to scale HRI data collection for early system development and testing via online interactive surveys. We have begun to explore this idea in the context of social robot navigation but, thanks to advances in game development engines, it could be easily applied to other HRI application domains.

Speaker Bio: Marynel Vázquez is an Assistant Professor in Yale’s Computer Science Department, where she leads the Interactive Machines Group. Her research focuses on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), especially in multi-party and group settings. Marynel is a recipient of the 2022 NSF CAREER Award and two Amazon Research Awards. Her work has been recognized with nominations to paper awards at RO-MAN 2016, IROS 2018, HRI 2021, and RO-MAN 2022. Prior to Yale, Marynel was a Post-Doctoral Scholar at the Stanford Vision & Learning Lab and obtained her M.S. and Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, where she was a collaborator of Disney Research. Before then, she received her bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas, Venezuela.

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2023 Doctoral Dissertation Research Lightning Talks

Feb 23, 2023

Presentations:

How, When, and Should Robots Deceive Humans? 
Kantwon Rogers is a fifth-year PhD student (advised by Ayanna Howard) and has also served as an instructor for the undergraduate introduction to Matlab course for the past six years. His interests include human-computer/robot interaction, teaching, and baking cupcakes.

Building and Evaluating Controllable Models for Text Simplification
Mounica Maddela is a sixth-year PhD student advised by Wei Xu. Her broad interests are natural language processing and machine learning with focus on natural language generation.

Guidance Communication in Mixed-Initiative Visual Analytics
Arpit Narechania is a fourth-year Computer Science PhD student, advised by Alex Endert. He loves to apply techniques from information visualization, visual analytics and human-computer interaction to design systems that help users interact with and make sense of their data; these users span automobile engineers, digital marketers, database engineers, data scientists, and most recently geographic information system experts.

Creative Wand: A System to Study Effects of Communications in Co-Creative Settings
Zhiyu Lin is a sixth year PhD student advised by Mark Riedl. His interests lie in machine learning techniques to procedurally generate user-aware interactive experiences and the user experience revolving around it, i.e., the human-machine interface that stimulates mixed-initiative/co-creativity applications.

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2022 Research & Engagement Grant Winner: Media Arts Residency Program

Mar 2, 2023

Abstract: Georgia Tech artists-in-residence Whitney & Micah Stansell, Tristan Al-Haddad, William Barrow, Whispers of Night, Rafiana, Doctor Calico, and Adia Davina will do a panel discussion on arts and technology. These artists-in-residence are working at Georgia Tech this spring as part of three distinct residency programs: Media Arts, Library AIR, and PREMIER. The panel will be led by residency program organizers Yanni Loukissas (Media Arts), Catherine Manci (Library AIR), and Noura Howell (PREMIER). The Media Arts and PREMIER residency programs are funded by GVU/IPaT.

About the Artists: Tristan Al-Haddad is a multi-medium designer and visual artist in addition to previously holding the position of assistant professor in the School of Architecture at Georgia Tech. He leads Atlanta-based Formations Studio. Al-Haddad’s work has been exhibited in venues including the Pompidou Center, The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, The Boston Center for the Arts, The International Contemporary Furniture Fair, and The AIA’s Center for Architecture in New York, as well as being published in print sources including the New York Times, Dwell, Metropolis, Art Papers and The Atlanta Journal Constitution. Al-Haddad was one of seven recipients of the ARTADIA Artist Award in 2009 in addition to being a Fulbright Scholar at the Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria in Valparaiso, Chile. In 2014 Al-Haddad was selected by the US Department of State to represent the United States at the Colombo Art Biennale in Sri Lanka. He has large scale permanent sculptures located throughout the United States.

Micah and Whitney Stansell’s body of work ranges from fibers, sculpture, painting and drawing to single and multi-channel film and video works, to large public art installations. The work often explores ideas of family history, narrative traditions, and binary relationships that pull from contemporary issues influenced and informed by environment and location.  

The Stansells’ work has been reviewed in numerous publications including Art in America, Moviemaker Magazine, FiberARTS Magazine, and the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. Exhibiting in galleries, museums, contemporary art centers, and film festivals, the Stansells’ work has been experienced in cities around the world including Beijing, Vienna, New York, and Atlanta.  

Recent honors include a Forward Arts Prize, Special Jury Prize at the Atlanta Film Festival, Artadia Award, MOCA Working Artist Project Award, Herradura Art Prize, NMWA 2020 Artist to Watch, and a Student Academy Award Nomination for their graduate thesis film. Their work can be found in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia and in Cornell University, and SCAD-Atlanta, Lacoste France, and Hong Kong.

Whispers of Night: Majid Araim, Benjamin Shirley -- Whispers of Night is an ongoing musical collaboration between Majid Araim and Benjamin Shirley, a multi-instrumental duo rooted in the sounds of the South and dedicated to exploration, improvisation, and creative expression. After almost a decade of collaboration and tours across the United States and Europe, the duo honed a sympathetic and dynamic musical bond, persistently seeking to cultivate novel concepts of composition, recording, and presentation in musical practice. Since 2014, Whispers in the Night developed a conception of improvised music nurturing the sound worlds of acoustic instruments such as fiddle, mandolin, cello, banjo, harmonica, drums, and voice, bringing to the fore their resonance and timbres with the elemental feeling of the music traditions of the southern Appalachian region.

Doctor Calico. Here’s what you need to know about Doctor Calico: A child prodigy on piano and drums at four, he played glockenspiel in the orchestra by six. This led to experiments with tape and turntables by age eight, then programming BASIC on a Commodore 64 and analog synthesizers utilizing subtractive synthesis at 10. Calico produced his first catalog by age 15 in a home-built, four-track studio called Soundworks, for which he received the Governor’s Award in Art. He started producing records, then signed a publishing deal for a 300-song catalog by age 18 with MCA.  

Calico has produced many major label artists including Organized Noize, Akon, X-Clan, Toni Braxton, and Elephant Man. In addition to being self-taught in more than 100 instruments, he started the award-winning, state grant-funded Renaissance Kids program for College Park schools. Additionally, Calico founded a 60-week residency in 2015 at the Magnolia House in Historic West End Atlanta with Dr. Al-Yasha Williams of Spelman University.  

Doctor Calico currently works as a DJ and electronic musician at Underground Atlanta’s arts facility and performs at various venues in the city. Recent accomplishments include going viral as an influencer on Instagram by sharing live musical performances and archival content. He has racked up more than a million views on the self-made platform with no advertising or paid partnerships.

William Barrow. Born in western Kentucky, William Barrow works with oftentimes outdated electronics to convey contemporary concepts through sound and video. He produces videos and electronic sounds as a result of experimentation with children’s toys, audio and video tape machines, and synthesizers, creating interconnected systems of pre-existing and homemade instruments.  

Barrow studied at Murray State University, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis in video and performance. There he was a manager of the university galleries and the sculpture studio assistant for four years, as well as being the head of 3D printing operations for the Summer Art Workshop. He has worked in collaboration with dancers, electronic and acoustic musicians, and provided live sound for Butoh dance workshops and outdoor yoga classes. Since moving to Atlanta, Barrow has joined the Atlanta Improvisers Orchestra (AIO) and worked closely with experimental performance and event venue No Tomorrow.

Adia Davina is an experimental, independent and multi-disciplinary artist based in Atlanta. Currently she is pursuing an interdisciplinary degree at Georgia State University, as well as engaging in collaborations with the theatre department as a playwright and wardrobe assistant.  

Davina has performed in Ghana with Rakaba, a west African dance company, sung in numerous choirs, trained at John Robert Powers and performed, recorded and toured the United States with artist Raury. Her unique vocals can be heard echoing through his hit song, and her first feature, “Gods Whisper.” Her last performance with him was at Coachella 2017. Davina currently works as a stylist and make-up artist and directs, writes and produces music.

Rafiana is a multidisciplinary artist of Puerto Rican and American descent from Atlanta producing works in the performing arts, music, film, and painting. They have shared the stage with Grammy-nominated performers, as well as self-professed “non-performers.”  

Rafiana's work focuses on improvisation and the many ways in which that practice collides with elements of form. After graduating from Georgia State, their work became largely based in an abstraction of poetry as it related to the body, the physical world, movement, dance and music.  

The most recent live works include large-scale experimental theater pieces in which an orchestra scores movements and actions loosely choreographed with an emphasis on improvisational “moods” created by various elements in each scene.  

Rafiana designs many of the aesthetic elements of their theater world, which involves creating costumes, props, object curation, painting, sound design, and lighting. The more recent themes of their work have been rooted in exploitation of the self, exploring variations on the concept of clowning and experiments with abstraction of samples to environments and material played on the midi guitar. 

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Patriarchy and Health: Designing Technologies for Men to Improve Women’s Health in Pakistan

Mar 9, 2023

Abstract: This talk will address the design challenges and opportunities in creating health technologies for men to improve the health of women in religiously conservative, patriarchal, and low-income societies. In this talk, I will share findings from the deployment of a speech-based service called Super Abbu (Super Dad) designed to connect expectant fathers to doctors and to each other. Over a period of 71 days, the service reached upwards of 20,000 users who spent almost 400 thousand minutes on the platform. Through a critical examination of cultural and societal factors, such as traditional gender roles, stigma towards sexual health information-seeking, and limited access to resources, I will highlight key considerations for designing effective and culturally sensitive health technologies for this population. The goal of this talk is to provide insights and recommendations for designers, researchers, and practitioners to create health technologies that are inclusive, accessible, and effective for users, regardless of their cultural, social, and economic backgrounds.

Speaker Bio: Mustafa Naseem is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. Mustafa’s research focuses on design challenges around creating, deploying and scaling health technologies in religiously conservative, patriarchal and low-income societies. Mustafa’s scholarship informs technology and policy design in international development, with a focus on centering marginalized individuals’ voices and needs, while focusing on factors such as access and gender. Mustafa has taught and conducted research with underserved communities in Pakistan, Ghana, South Africa, Tanzania, Botswana and the US. Mustafa’s work is published in venues including ACM CHI, CSCW, Web Conference (WWW), Compass, and ICTD, and has received Best Paper Honorable Mention and Diversity and Inclusion Awards at ACM CHI and CSCW. Mustafa received his Masters in ICT and Development (ICTD) from the University of Colorado Boulder on a Fulbright Scholarship. His work is supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, US National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and USAID, among others.

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Research & Engagement Grant Winners: Deep Thinking About Deepfake Videos

Mar 16, 2023

Abstract: “Deepfakes” are videos in which the (usually human) subject of a video has been digitally altered to appear to do or say something that they never actually did or said. Sometimes these manipulations produce innocuous novelties (e.g., testing what it would look like if Will Smith had been cast as “Neo” in the film The Matrix), but far more dangerous use cases have been observed (e.g., producing fake footage of Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in which he instructs Ukrainian military forces to surrender on the battlefield). Generating the knowledge and tools necessary to defend against potential harms these videos could impose is likely to rely on contributions from a broad coalition of disciplines, many of which are represented in the GVU. In this week’s Brown Bag presentation, we will offer some real-time demonstrations of deepfake technology and present findings from our work that has largely focused on investigating the psychological factors influencing deepfake detection.

Speaker Bios:

John Stasko is a Regents Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he has been on the faculty since 1989. He works in the areas of information visualization and visual analytics, approaching each from a human-computer interaction perspective. Stasko received the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC) Visualization Technical Achievement Award in 2012 and was inducted into the ACM CHI Academy in 2016 and IEEE Visualization Academy in 2019. He was named an IEEE Fellow in 2014 and an ACM Fellow in 2023.

Richard Catrambone is a Professor in the School of Psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his B.A. from Grinnell College and his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Michigan. His research interests include problem solving, educational technology, and human-computer interaction. He explores how to create instructional materials that help learners understand how to approach problems in a meaningful way rather than simply memorizing a set of steps that cannot easily be transferred to novel problems. He served on the Cognitive Science Society governing board from 2011-2016 and was chair of the Society in 2015.

Zack Tidler is a doctoral student in the School of Psychology with an emphasis in engineering psychology. His primary research interest is in developing new measures of human cognitive ability that consider tool usage, but he has developed a secondary research program which is focused on the study of deepfake video detection in humans. He is a former president of the Georgia Tech Chapter of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. His work on deepfake detection has been featured in the College of Sciences newsletter and the 2021 issue of the GT Alumni Magazine.

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Data and Social Mobility in South Africa for Women (Education and Equality)

Mar 30, 2023

ABSTRACT: There is a growing global consensus that Africa is the youngest and fastest-growing continent in the world. By 2030, it is estimated that over 300 million young people will seek employment in Africa. This demographic boom will push Africa’s workforce to more than a billion people, the largest in the world. Youth employment is key to building prosperity in South Africa. The changing nature of work means that digital skills are at the heart of the question of how to create sustainable youth livelihoods in South Africa. Building digital skills is a daunting task, as it is near impossible to keep up with the pace of change. Indeed, the digital revolution has overthrown the very way that we learn. How, then, do we think about what digital skills to impart, and how best to impart them to secure positive results for the earning potential of young women?

Unemployment in South Africa currently sits at over 29%, the highest in a decade. According to a report published by McKinsey on ‘The future of work in South Africa: Digitisation, productivity and job creation’ in 2019, digitization could result in a net gain of more than 1m jobs by 2030 and could create 1.6m jobs for women – and boost empowerment. Tech-enabled jobs will require higher skills, resulting in demand for an additional 1.7m graduates. To seize the opportunity, action is needed by government, business and individuals. To navigate these labor-market transitions successfully, women will need different skills and more education, mobility to switch jobs easily, and access to technological capabilities that will not only be in demand but can also open up new ways of working and new sources of economic opportunity. Women face persistent challenges on these three dimensions that will be needed to thrive in the automation era; these long-established structural and societal challenges have already slowed women’s progress toward gender equality in work. Digital and internet technologies offer women a way to break down barriers by making reskilling more accessible and enabling flexible working, for instance. Moreover, private and public sector leaders have a huge opportunity to support women as they navigate impending transitions.

A mismatch exists between skills gained at the universities and the requirements of the job market due to the disconnect between the key stakeholders – employers, government, academia, and the students themselves. Millions are under- or unemployed, yet nearly two-thirds of companies report having positions for which they cannot find qualified applicants. Meanwhile, as technology increasingly reshapes the future of work, more than 50% of today’s jobs require highly specialized technical skills, and 77% will require them in less than a decade. In this context, women are most affected.

Intend to address three priorities:

To increase access to digital skills, knowledge and use of emerging technologies for young women in South Africa;
To create or strengthen effective links between digital skills development and labor market demand;
To establish or enable synergies in the skills and labor ecosystem, including with the private sector; facilitate conditions for on-the-job skills transfer.
Conclusion:

Economic opportunities of women are improved thanks to the use of digital technologies;
Local digital skills, innovation and technology transfer are stimulated to support the development of economic opportunities for women;
Enabling ecosystem for inclusive innovation and knowledge transfer is developed.

Research will include:

Data collection efforts to measure social mobility and equal opportunity, and understand the drivers of these issues;
Discussion of how policies can break down barriers to equal opportunity and promote social mobility;
Analysis of the role of civil society and the private sector in fostering equal opportunity.

SPEAKER BIO
Mbali Hllongwane is a systems engineer, founder and leader, project lead, ecosystem manager, and public speaker. "My personal vision is to drive the economic, innovative, and social development of Africa at large through developing and positioning women to participate in the tech transformation. I believe that you simply can't run a good company or a good country without a woman being involved. Due to the existing gap within the tech sector, I want to ensure that 1 million women in Africa have tech skills to build solutions, start companies, and take up executive roles in tech organizations by 2030 driven by technology, knowledge sharing, integrity, and sustainability."
 

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2022 Foley Scholars Award Winners

Apr 6, 2023

ABSTRACTS
Alyssa Sheehan, Designing for the Future of Meaningful Work
My research is focused on evaluating emerging workplace technologies to shape the Future of Work. In this talk, I will share one example of how tools like augmented reality implemented on the manufacturing shop floor change the nature of work for blue-collar professionals. My work points to the need for computing design to address different value systems across blue- and white-collar domains. Specifically, we need to consider the professional boundaries these tools remake to create technologies that positively impact the future of work – not just developing tools that are useful but creating jobs that are meaningful in the face of automation and the enabling data economies. Designing for meaningful work provides a lens that prioritizes individual worker values and attends to existing organizational norms necessary for the design and use of effective automated systems.

Vedant Das Swain, Information Workers Perspectives on Phenotyping Performance and Wellbeing with Passive Sensing Enabled AI
We live in a time when our conception of a thriving worker is in flux. These changing definitions significantly affect information workers, who are increasingly unsatisfied with the care they get at work. To provide workers insight into successful behaviors, my research has explored the potential of passive sensing to algorithmically estimate performance and wellbeing. I refer to these approaches as Passive Sensing-enabled AI (PSAI). While hybrid work paradigms have simultaneously created new opportunities for PSAI, but have also fostered anxieties of misuse and privacy intrusions within a power asymmetry. At this juncture, it is unclear if those who are sensed can find these systems acceptable. In this talk, I will first introduce the state-of-the-art PSAI for information workers. Then, I will share my findings from scenario-based interviews of 28 information workers to highlight their perspectives as data subjects in PSAI. I unpack their expectations using the Contextual Integrity framework of privacy and information gathering. Participants described the appropriateness of PSAI based on its impact on job consequences, work-life boundaries, and preservation of flexibility. They also perceived that PSAI inferences could be shared with selected stakeholders if they could negotiate the algorithmic inferences. My research takes a step towards worker-centric approaches to implementing PSAI as an empowering tool in the future of work.

Yixuan ("Janice") Zhang, The Rise & Fall of Online Trust
Online trust is becoming a central issue in modern society. Trusting fallacies can harm the wellbeing of individuals and society as a whole, especially during crises like COVID-19. During crises, the inconclusive, conflicting, and time-sensitive information created by varied sources and disseminated on diverse platforms can engender a sense of confusion and uncertainty. This uncertainty makes it difficult for people to determine what and whom they should trust. In this talk, I will share several empirical studies to answer: how people form and develop their online trust over time and how content producers (human & AI) approach “trustworthy” design. I will then discuss ongoing and future efforts in building tools to address issues of online trust, investigating the risks of AI to prevent “manipulating” trust, and developing theoretical frameworks to guide rigorous future research.

 

SPEAKER BIOS
Alyssa Sheehan is currently a PhD candidate in Human Centered Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology and the Director for the Georgia Center of Innovation for Aerospace. Her industry experience working in manufacturing has directly informed her research which is focused on evaluating and designing automation for the future of work in blue collar domains. Together with industry partners, Alyssa investigates the impact of new technologies on workplace practices in settings including manufacturing, logistics, and emergency response to inform technology design and data practices. Situated within the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), her research has been published in top tier computing venues including Association for Computing Machinery Computer Human Interaction, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, and Designing Interactive Systems.

Vedant Das Swain is a PhD Candidate in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, advised by Munmun De Choudhury and Gregory Abowd. His research contributes to the future of work and behavioral wellbeing in general. He identifies, develops, and critiques opportunities to leverage ubiquitous technologies for algorithmic inference of performance and mental wellbeing. He consistently works with organizational psychologists to inform his investigations and also collaborates with Microsoft Research to develop better tools for worker wellbeing. His research has been published at top-tier computing venues like CHI, CSCW, UbiComp/IMWUT, ACII, and IEEE CogMI. His paper at CHI 2022 won a Best Paper Honorable Mention award. He is the winner of the Gaetano Borriello Outstanding Student Award at UbiComp 2022 and the GVU Foley Scholar Award 2022. His research has been supported by IARPA, NSF, CDC, ORNL, and Semiconductor Research Corporation.

Yixuan ("Janice") Zhang is a PhD candidate in Human-Centered Computing at Georgia Tech. Her research broadly lies in human-computer interaction (HCI), data visualization (VIS), equitable computing, and the interdisciplinary fields of crisis informatics and health informatics. She regularly publishes in premier HCI and visualization venues, such as ACM CHI, CSCW, and IEEE VIS. Her research has been well recognized by academia: she was named a Rising Star in EECS 2022, and selected as a Foley Scholar. The impact of her research extends beyond academia; for example, she was invited to present her work to broader audiences, such as the World Health Organization (WHO). More information is available at https://zjanice.github.io

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Computational Models of Human-Like Skill and Concept Formation

Apr 13, 2023


Abstract: The AI community has made significant strides in developing artificial systems with human-level proficiency across various tasks. However, the learning processes in most systems differ vastly from human learning, often being substantially less efficient and flexible. For instance, training large language models demands massive amounts of data and power and updating them with new information remains challenging. In contrast, humans employ highly efficient incremental learning processes to continually update their knowledge, enabling them to acquire new knowledge with minimal examples and without overwriting prior learning. In this talk, I will discuss some of the key learning capabilities humans exhibit and present three research vignettes from my lab that explore the development of computational systems with these capabilities. The first two vignettes explore computational models of skill learning from worked examples, correctness feedback, and verbal instruction. The third vignette investigates computational models of concept formation from natural language corpora. In conclusion, I will discuss future research directions and a broader vision for how cognitive science and cognitive systems research can lead to new AI advancements.

Bio: Chris MacLellan is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, where he leads the Teachable AI Lab (TAIL; https://tail.cc.gatech.edu). His work on cognitive systems aims to advance our understanding of how people teach and learn and to build AI systems that can teach and learn like people do and in ways that are compatible with people. He explores the development of computational models of learning and how these models can support the development of AI technologies, such as intelligent tutoring systems and medical decision support systems, at scale.

He also investigates how data collected about how people learn and make decisions can be leveraged to drive the development of better cognitive models and computational learning systems. Chris has been a principal investigator on multiple sponsored project awards with DARPA, the U.S. Army, ONR, and NSF. He has also received external recognition for his work, such as the 2022 EAAI Now and Future AI Educator award as well as being named on the 2021 Technical.ly RealLIST of technologists building Philadelphia’s future.  

Prior to his position at Georgia Tech, Chris was an Assistant Professor of Information Science and Computer Science (by co-appointment) at Drexel University. Before that, he completed his PhD in Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computing, where he was a fellow in the Program for Interdisciplinary Education Research (PIER).

The products of his work have immediate implications for AI-powered technology development. For example, through his work with the NSF-funded AI ALOE Institute, Chris is developing tools that let teachers build AI-powered tutors by naturally teaching an AI agent rather than programming. His work also has many broader implications, such as enabling doctors to support the development of AI-powered diagnoses tools where few training examples are available (DARPA-funded POCUS project) and for creating personal assistant agents that can engage in collaborative learning to support more effective human-machine teaming (ARL-funded STRONG project).
 

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Convergence Innovation Competition (CIC) Showcase

Apr 20, 2023

ABSTRACT: Finalist teams from previous Convergence Innovation Competition (CIC) will be featured during this GVU Brown Bag and give an update on their projects and where they are now. Student teams are encouraged to attend the session to learn more about projects and network with campus and industry partners.

About the Competition
The CIC encourages students to create innovative, viable products and experiences with the support of campus and industry resources and guidance. Areas of interest are determined by our campus, industry, and community partners. Winning entries will include a working end-to-end prototype which operates on converged services, media, networks, services, and platforms as well as a value proposition model.

As part of the competition, one team is awarded a Golden Ticket to participate in the Create-X Startup Launch program during the summer! Winning team members and runner up team members receive a prize for participating. The prizes vary each semester and typically include electronics and other unique items. The winning CIC teams go on to launch, commercialization, other competitions, as well as internship and job opportunities strengthened by their competition experience. CIC runs in the Fall and Spring semesters and is produced by GT-RNOC in the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT).