🦆 Interaction Nerds by UXA
This week from Investigation & Connection: Debugging Imperfect AI with Sherry, and AI, Art, and Design with Deb Lee!
👋 Announcements — Happy Valentine’s Day from Archive & Collection!
Happy Valentine’s day, UXA Community! We hope that everyone is able to take a breather and spend some time with your loved ones this week. 💓
Last week, UXA held the Alumni Panel event where we invited four alumni to share their work experiences and insights. If you want to check out or review what they shared, here are some notes that we compiled from the event. ✏️
Also, starting this week, you can catch us at Millie's every other Friday! We'll be there this Friday 2/17 at 4pm, and our topic this week will be "Our Journeys to HCI" — just in time for HCI application season. See you there! 💫
🐒 Campus Compass — Human-Centered Natural Language Processing
What does it mean to design human-centered natural language processing? In what ways can we analyze and break down the different NLP development stages? How do we design and develop NLP systems that consider the needs of human users, and also the ethical and social implications of these systems?
Topics revolving around these two intersecting fields are explored in Human-Centered Natural Language Processing, and how we can meaningfully evaluate and design such systems.
🔍 05-499 Special Topics: Human-Centered Natural Language Processing
🤔 What is Human-Centered NLP?
Human Centered NLP explores the intersection between HCI and NLP, and ways of approaching both topics in different scenarios and how one may build useful NLP models/systems. The course allows students get access to, and understand, both HCI and NLP research papers and methods.
🧐 What do you do in Human-Centered NLP?
This class will be mainly project-oriented, with a half lecture and half seminar structure. Coursework includes lectures, paper readings, class presentations, and group projects.
😯 Who should take Human-Centered NLP?
Although there are no explicit prerequisites, students are expected to be proficient in Python (for completing assignments), and know basic ML concept — to the extent of understanding concepts like train/dev/test set, model fitting, feature, supervised learning, etc. (Not covered in the course)
🤩 Professor Point — Debugging Imperfect AI with Sherry Tongshuang Wu
AI isn’t perfect. How can we identify where AI is going wrong, and how can we make sure these mistakes don’t create harmful consequences? This week, we spoke with Sherry Wu, an Assistant Professor in the HCII, to learn more about these imperfect systems and how we can still benefit from them.
“…the models created will never be 100% accurate. They will always have some mistakes. So the question is how do we help people identify those mistakes and mitigate whatever problems that might be caused by incorrect models.”
— Sherry Wu
🤩 Field Trip — AI, Art, and Design with Deb Lee
How has AI impacted the field of UX and illustration? Are there ways to ethically use AI in creative fields? And finally, what would that look like? Join our conversation with Deb Lee, BD ‘18, and their opinions on the impact of AI.
“AI generated work will give you work that looks like your work, and if that’s what you need, that’s great. But it’s not going to be revolutionary. /…/ The whole point of being a designer, or being an artist, is to explore and evolve by actually designing or creating.”
— Deb JJ Lee
🤔 Who’s behind the scenes?
Thanks for reading this week’s Interaction Nerds by CMU UXA! The editors behind this work are Sophie McGrady, Caleb Sun, Arin Pantja, and Rebecca Jiang.
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