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CHCI Seminar Series: Yoonjoo Lee and Sehrish Basir Nizamani

February 10, 2025

Everyone is invited to attend on Fridays 11:00-12:00 in Gilbert Place 3001. This seminar series will showcase various HCI research from all over campus and beyond. And it will be the place to meet and catch up with all your colleagues from CHCI. The series was off to a great start, with 60 attendees for the first seminar!

First Seminar on January 31

Personalized Knowledge Understanding Support: Aligning AI System with How Humans Understand Knowledge

With advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), AI models have become integral to how humans process and build knowledge. However, current AI development heavily focuses on optimizing performance against general benchmarks or artificial contexts, often neglecting the need to align AI systems with how humans understand and engage with knowledge. My research investigates how AI systems can comprehend individuals’ knowledge states and generate personalized outputs to bridge this gap and shift from model-centric to user-centric AI. In this talk, I will discuss approaches to design and evaluate AI systems that provide personalized support by leveraging interactions and knowledge representations tailored to users’ information tasks and contexts.

Yoonjoo Lee
Yoonjoo Lee is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the School of Computing at KAIST, advised by Prof. Juho Kim. Her research lies at the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI) and natural language processing (NLP), focusing on how we can design AI systems to interact with individuals to deliver knowledge tailored to their unique information needs in a reliable and personalized way. Her work has been published in top HCI venues such as CHI, UIST, and FAccT, and she has led machine learning and NLP conferences, including ICML and EMNLP. She has gained industry experience through internships at Adobe Research, the Semantic Scholar team at the Allen Institute for AI, and LG AI Research.

Second Seminar on February 7

Reimagining Cultural Exploration in Human-Computer Interaction

Culture plays a critical role in shaping how individuals interact with and perceive technology. Yet, traditional top-down approaches to cultural exploration in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) often overlook nuanced and subjective aspects of culture. This talk advocates for a bottom-up approach that prioritizes culture-specific studies and subjective insights to design more inclusive and context-sensitive interactive systems.

Dr. Sehrish Basir Nizamani
Dr. Sehrish Basir Nizamani is a Collegiate Assistant Professor of Computer Science and a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Human-Computer Interaction at Virginia Tech. Her research focuses on the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Digital Education, and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Her work enhances our understanding of cultural dynamics in HCI by bridging the gap between cultural diversity and technological innovation. She is also committed to designing innovative tools to improve learning experiences. She has authored and reviewed numerous research papers published in national and international journals. Additionally, she has played significant roles in organizing conferences, including her current position as co-chair of ACM CAPWIC 2025.

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