6th Annual CHCI Workshop: Human-Centered AI for Research, Innovation, and Creativity: Creating Connections across Disciplines

February 28, 2022

In this picture, from the Immersive Space to Think (IST) project, the original scanned document can be seen next to its transcription such that the analyst can see any inflections the original author imprinted in their handwriting. IST is a sensemaking approach for immersive environments to allow analysts to organize, annotate, and synthesize findings in 3D immersive space using augmented or virtual reality.

The Center for Human-Computer Interaction (CHCI) will host its sixth annual workshop on the Future of HCI in March 2022, on the theme “Human-Centered AI for Research, Innovation, and Creativity: Creating Connections Across Disciplines.” Ed Gitre (Assistant Professor, Department of History) and Chreston Miller (Assistant Professor, University Libraries) will lead the workshop.

The workshop will build on Virginia Tech’s success in establishing synergistic transdisciplinary teams that are forging multiple frontiers in AI-empowered, human-centered research, analytics, performance, and design. The aim of the event is to welcome, mentor, and encourage researchers and students who may not be engaged at the moment in transdisciplinary research and collaboration–but may well benefit if they were. Or perhaps you do interdisciplinary research already, and are ready to meet new potential collaborators.

We invite the Virginia Tech community to join us on March 24-25, 2022, as we explore new connections and create new collaborations in this exciting and growing area.

Registration for the workshop is closed.

AI and related technologies (e.g., machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing) can be very powerful for the analysis of large and complex datasets. Simultaneously, what constitutes “data” continues to expand as domain experts, from literature to construction, reimagine their research and creative output. A human-centered design approach can improve the accessibility and usability of AI-powered tools. Empowering teams of domain experts, AI experts, and human-centered design experts to make effective use of these technologies is an area rich in opportunity for collaborative research and design. Through the workshop we will explore ways of improving the user experience of AI-powered data analysis, and facilitate transdisciplinary collaborations involving human-centered design, AI, and domain experts.

During and after the workshop, we envision that human-centered designers with expertise in HCI, UX and interactive visualization will be able to work with experts in any domain with complex data analysis needs (e.g., construction, education, intelligence analysis, agriculture, history) to understand their data and questions of interest. At the same time, AI experts will be able to recommend intelligent technologies and approaches that can address these needs. Together, such teams should be able to propose novel, usable, and accessible tools, powered by AI, to solve data analytics problems in a given domain through human-AI collaboration.

In addition to internal speakers and match-making round tables, there are two keynote speakers for the workshop, Philip Butler and Louis-Philippe Morency.

Philip Butler is an Assistant Professor of Theology and Black Posthuman Artificial Intelligence Systems at ILLIF School of Theology Denver. Dr. Butler’s scholarship combines Black liberation theologies, neuroscience, spirituality and technology, particularly artificial intelligence. He is also the founder of The Seekr Project, which is a distinctly Black conversational artificial intelligence with mental health capacities, combining machine learning and psychotherapeutic systems.

Louis-Philippe Morency is the Leonardo Associate Professor of Computer Science in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University. His research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning, computer vision, computational linguistics and signal processing — building the computational foundations to enable computers with the abilities to analyze, recognize and predict subtle human communicative behaviors during social interactions. Dr. Morency leads the Multimodal Communication and Machine Learning Laboratory which aims to build the algorithms and computational foundation to understand the interdependence between human verbal, visual, and vocal behaviors expressed during social communicative interactions.

The Visualizing History Vauquois project brought together a transdisciplinary team from Virginia Tech to create an exhibit blending the real and virtual worlds for a hands-on look at the human experience in the contested landscape of World War I.

The workshop is co-sponsored by the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence & Data Analytics and the Center for Humanities. Philip Butler's keynote lecture has been made possible by a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. Gitre’s co-leadership is supported by the Diggs Teaching Scholar Association. In addition to the workshop leads, Doug Bowman (Director, CHCI and Professor, Computer Science), Todd Ogle (Associate Director, CHCI and Assistant Professor, University Libraries), Andrea Kavanaugh (Associate Director, CHCI, and Senior Research Scientist), and Sara Evers (Graduate Assistant, CHCI and Ph.D. student, School of Education) comprise the organizing committee.

The workshop is free, but space is limited, so registration is required. Please register for the workshop here. The workshop will be held in hybrid form, both online and at the Virginia Tech Newman Library. For more information, please contact Sara Evers at saralevers@vt.edu.