Updates from Human Centered Design & Engineering faculty, PhD students, and research scientists.
Winter 2025
March 14, 2025
Katya Cherukumilli, Trisha Nene, and Jessamine Li have been awarded a UW Student Technology Fee (STF) grant of $173,425 for their project, “UW CHEMystery Lab,” intended to increase access to analytical chemistry tools on campus.
Zarine Kharazian and Kate Starbird, with co-authors Naomi Miyashita and Laura De Backer, had an article, “How Strategic Information Operations Affect Peacekeeping: Two Case Studies from the Central African Republic,” published in International Peacekeeping.
Julie Kientz, with co-authors Shumenghui Zhai, Tonya Palermo, Susan Shenoi, George Demiris, Waylon Howard, Weichao Yuwen, and Teresa Ward, had an article, “A shared-management web-based intervention for sleep deficiency in school-age children with juvenile idiopathic arthritis and their parents: feasibility and acceptability study,” published the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.
Nichole Sams, with co-authors Brittany Blanchard, Elizabeth Austin, Erin Chase, Julien Rouvere, Vinita Sharma, Morgan Johnson, Florence Williams, Madeline Frost, Sarah Leyde, Judith Tsui, Susan Collins, and John Fortney, had an article, “Primary Care Patient and Clinician Perspectives on Safer Use Strategies for Opioids and/or Stimulants: A Mixed‑Method Study,” published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
Gabrielle Benabdallah will present the “Workshop in Training Large Language Models (LLMs) for Academic and Creative Applications” at the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities on April 14, 2025. This workshop will explore the intersection of AI and creativity, focusing on techniques for customizing large language models (LLMs) for academic and creative applications.
March 7, 2005
Cecilia Aragon gave an invited guest lecture at the University of New Mexico (UNM) on AI, STEM, Entrepreneurship and Diversity.
Brock Craft, with co-authors Alexander Pagano, Saadeddine Shehab, Cristian Eduardo Vargas-Ordóñez, Hadi Ali, Michah Lande, Georges Ayoub, Stefan Dziallas and Taylor Tucker Parks, had an article, “Advancing Human-Centered Engineering (HCE): A Framework for Defining and Building the Emerging Discipline,” accepted to the 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.
Brock Craft, with co-authors Taylor Tucker Parks, Alexander Pagano, and Saadeddine Shehab, had an article, “Using a human-centered engineering design mapping tool to inform ABET accreditation for an existing engineering design program,” accepted to the 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.
Shana Hirsch, with co-authors Mohammad Nasir Tighsazzadeh, Andréanne Doyon and Andrés Cisneros-Montemayor, had an article, “The evolution of equity in offshore renewable energy: A systematic literature review,” published in Ocean & Coastal Management.
Os Keyes with co-author Katherine Cross contributed a book chapter, “Data Violence,” to The Sage Handbook of Data and Society.
Sean Munson, with co-authors Amira Skeggs, Ashish Mehta, Valerie Yap, Seray Ibrahim, Aubrey Rhodes, James Gross, Predrag Klasnja, Amy Orben, and Petr Slovák, had an article, “Micro-narratives: A Scalable Method for Eliciting Stories of People’s Lived Experience” accepted to the 2025 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI).
Will Sutherland had an article, “Big Sky, Big Data, Big Changes: On the Shifting Moral Economy of Astronomy in an Era of Abundance,” published in American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts.
Kate Starbird published an opinion piece in The Seattle Times, “To understand right-wing media's power, study improv and theater of influencers.” This piece was adapted from her University Faculty Lecture on Feb. 24, 2025.
Kate Starbird was quoted in The Washington Post opinion article, “Can Elon Musk find any fraud before Trump’s base notices the con?”
February 28, 2025
Kate Starbird was inducted to the Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) Academy Class of 2025.
Nadya Peek received the Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) Special Recognition Award “for democratizing automation through open-source hardware, building global maker communities, and bridging academic research with grassroots fabrication practices.”
Cecilia Aragon received the Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) Special Recognition Award “for establishing human-centered data science as a new field bridging HCI and data science, demonstrating its impact through applications from astrophysics to energy systems.”
Cecilia Aragon gave a keynote titled, “What is Human-Centered AI and Why Does It Matter?” at the 2025 Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE TS).
Murtaza Ali published “The Dangers of Deceptive Data–Confusing Charts and Misleading Headlines” in towards data science.
Brett Halperin was interviewed by KUOW and featured on the Southside Podcast: “And the winner is... Artificial Intelligence.”
Brett Halperin was interviewed by UW News for its article: “Q&A: How AI is changing the film industry.”
Brett Halperin was interviewed by The Daily for its article: “AI is destroying cinema as we know it — or is it?”
Kate Starbird was featured in The Daily in its article: “Professor Kate Starbird presents the 48th annual University Faculty Lecture: The creation of online rumors, misinformation, and disinformation.”
February 21, 2025
Aayushi Dangol, with co-authors Robert Wolfe, Alexis Hiniker, and Bill Howe, had two articles published in AIES '24: Proceedings of the 2024 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society:
- “Dataset Scale and Societal Consistency Mediate Facial Impression Bias in Vision-Language AI”
- “Representation Bias of Adolescents in AI: A Bilingual, Bicultural Study”
Sourojit Ghosh and Nina Lutz, with co-author Aylin Caliskan, had an article, "”I Don't See Myself Represented Here at All": User Experiences of Stable Diffusion Outputs Containing Representational Harms across Gender Identities and Nationalities,” published in AIES '24: Proceedings of the 2024 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society.
Sourojit Ghosh had an article, “Interpretations, Representations, and Stereotypes of Caste within Text-to-Image Generators,” published in AIES '24: Proceedings of the 2024 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society.
Sourojit Ghosh, with co-authors Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Sanjana Gautam, Shomir Wilson, and Aylin Caliskan, had an article, “Do Generative AI Models Output Harm While Representing Non-Western Cultures: Evidence from a Community-Centered Approach,” published in AIES '24: Proceedings of the 2024 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society.
Ruoxi Shang and Gary Hsieh, with co-author Chirag Shah, had an article, “Trusting Your AI Agent Emotionally and Cognitively: Development and Validation of a Semantic Differential Scale for AI Trust,” published in AIES '24: Proceedings of the 2024 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society.
Danli Luo was featured in the UW News article, “Coffee grounds and Reishi mushroom spores can be 3D printed into a compostable alternative to plastics.” Junchao Yang and Nadya Peek were mentioned. The story was also re-printed by the Tech and Science Post.
Kate Starbird was quoted in the Washington Post article, “Musk accused Reuters of ‘social deception.’ The deception was his.”
February 14, 2025
Katya Cherukumilli was awarded an EDGE Pilot Project by the UW Interdisciplinary Center for Exposures, Diseases, Genomics, and Environment (EDGE) in the amount of $40,000 for “Collectively Addressing Lead Contamination of Drinking Water in Washington State Schools.”
Joseph Schafer, Brett Halperin, Sourojit Ghosh, and Julie Vera had a paper, “To Screenshot or Not to Screenshot? Tensions in Representing Visual Social Media Platform Posts,” published in AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research.
Shana Hirsch, with co-authors Susanna Theroux, Adam Sepulveda, Cathryn Abbott, Zachary Gold, Alison Watts, Margaret Hunter, Katy Klymus, Joseph Craine, Devin Jones, Rachel Brown, Joshua Steele, Miwa Takahashi, Rachel Noble, and John Darling, had a paper, “What is eDNA method standardisation and why do we need it?” published in Metabarcoding and Metagenomics.
Shana Hirsch was quoted in the Seattle Times article, “Future of offshore wind on West Coast is murky under Trump.”
Katya Cherukumilli was featured in the UW News article, “Q&A: How 12 UW researchers fell in love with their research.”
February 7, 2025
Kate Starbird will give the UW’s 2025 University Faculty Lecture on February 24, 2025. Her talk, A Spotlight on Rumors: Illuminating How Influence and Improvisation Shape Online Conversations, will focus on her work understanding online rumors, misinformation and disinformation.
Sean Munson and Tricia Aung, with co-authors Aaron Lyon, Michael Pullmann, Brittany Mosser, John Fortney, Helen Haile, Alex Dopp, Katie Osterhage, Kathryn Bruzios, Brittany Blanchard, Ryan Allred, Macey Fuller, Patrick Raue, Ian Bennett, Jill Locke, Karen Bearss, Denise Walker, Elizabeth Connors, Eric Bruns, Jenna Van Draanen, Doyanne Darnell, and Patricia Areán, had an article, “Harnessing Human-Centered Design for Evidence-Based Psychosocial Interventions and Implementation Strategies in Community Settings: Protocol for Redesign to Improve Usability, Engagement, and Appropriateness,” published in JMIR Research Protocols.
Shengzhi Wang, Melinda Haughey, and Kate Starbird, with co-authors Alexa Schlein, Valerie Remaker, Ziyun Tie, Rachel Davidson, and James Kendra, had an article, “Bursting Pipes and Boiling Snow: Disaster Impacts and Adaptations in the 2021 Texas Power Crisis from the Lens of Short-Form Social Media Videos,” published in the Journal of Disaster Studies.
Brett Halperin and Daniela Rosner had an article, “'AI is Soulless': Hollywood Film Workers Strike and Emerging Perceptions of Generative Cinema,” accepted for publication in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI).
Os Keyes was quoted in the TechCrunch article, “Why IQ is a poor test for AI.”
Kate Starbird was quoted by:
- NPR: “Meta says it will end fact-checking as Silicon Valley prepares for Trump”
- MyNorthwest: “Meta replaces fact-checking with X-style community notes”
- NBC News: “How Elon Musk boosted false USAID conspiracy theories to shut down global aid”
January 31, 2025
Danli Luo, Junchao Yang, and Nadya Peek had an article, “3D-Printed Mycelium Biocomposites: Method for 3D Printing and Growing Fungi-Based Composites,” published in 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing.
Murtaza Ali published “AI Ethics for the Everyday User — Why Should You Care?” in Towards Data Science.
Negin Alimohammadi is quoted in the UW Daily article, “Five years of COVID-19: How the pandemic altered the workforce.”
January 24, 2025
Meena Devii Muralikumar and David W. McDonald had an article, “An Emerging Design Space of How Tools Support Collaborations in AI Design and Development,” published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.
Aayushi Dangol, along with collaborators Robert Wolfe, Alexis Hiniker, and Bill Howe (UW Information School), were featured in the UW News article, “Study finds strong negative associations with teenagers in AI models.”
January 17, 2025
Kate Starbird has been awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from President Biden. The PECASE is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers early in their careers.
Meena Muralikumar and David McDonald had an article, “An Emerging Design Space of How Tools Support Collaborations in AI Design and Development,” published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.
Elin A. Björling and Ryan McLean, with co-authors Kung Jin Lee (Ewha Womans University), Caitlin Martin (ckMartin Consulting), Juan Rubio (Seattle Public Library), and Jin Ha Lee (UW Information School), had an article, “Design cookbook card deck in facilitating effective co-design in library contexts,” published in the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science.
Kate Starbird is quoted in:
- the Nature article, “Does fact-checking work? What the science says”
- the Scientific American article, “Does fact-checking work on social media?”
- the MyNorthwest article, “Meta replaces fact-checking with X-style community notes”
- the Oregon Public Radio article, “Meta says it will end fact checking as Silicon Valley prepares for Trump”
The SECURE Center is referenced in the Nature article, “How to sustain scientific collaboration amid worsening US–China relations.”
January 10, 2025
Gabrielle Benabdallah, with co-authors Audrey Desjardins and Maya A. Kaneko (UW School of Art + Art History + Design) had an article, “Un/Making Data Imaginaries: The Data Epics,” published in the ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction.
Cryston Sahae, Shuyue Gu, Lige Yang, Elin A. Björling, and Nichelle Song had an article, "An Exploration of a Social Robot as a Digital Shield for Law Enforcement Interviews: Designing a Prototype,” published in Interaction Design & Architecture(s) Journal (IxD&A).
Tricia Aung and Sean Munson, with co-authors Aaron R. Lyon and Kathryn E. Bruzios (UW Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences), had an article, “Human-Centered Design to Enhance Implementation and Impact in Health” in the Annual Review of Public Health.
Charlotte Lee with co-authors Melanie Duckert (IT University of Copenhagen) and Pernille Bjørn (University of Copenhagen) had an article, “The Ripple Effect of Information Infrastructures,” published in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).
Will Sutherland, Andrew Neang, and Charlotte Lee had an article, “Making Software Work Sustainable for the Academic Research Group: A Comparative Case Study” published in the Proceedings of the 58th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
Mark Haselkorn is quoted in the NPR article “Y2K seems like a joke now, but in 1999 people were really freaking out.”
Kate Starbird is quoted in the NPR article “Meta says it will end fact checking as Silicon Valley prepares for Trump.”
Kate Starbird is quoted in the Washington Post piece “Opinion: When online rumors and institutional distrust collide, you get drones.”