Please join us for a UW Data Science Seminar featuring UW iSchool Postdoctoral Scholar Hua Shen on Wednesday, April 9th from 4:30 to 5:20 p.m. PT.
The seminar will be held in Electrical and Computer Engineering Building 125 – Campus Map.
“Towards Bidirectional Human-AI Alignment: Empowering Human Interaction in Building Responsible AI across the Lifecycle”
Abstract: As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to transform society, ensuring that AI systems align with human values, ethics, and goals – commonly referred to as AI alignment – has become increasingly critical. How can we systematically integrate human values into AI development and deployment to achieve human-centered, responsible AI? This talk provides an in-depth exploration of bidirectional human- AI alignment, emphasizing the pivotal role of human interaction in fostering responsible AI systems across their lifecycle. I will begin by illustrating a novel human-in-the-loop approach that integrates human computation into data annotation, AI model development, and benchmark creation to build AI systems that effectively address real-world human challenges. Additionally, I will highlight the critical human needs for explaining and collaborating with deployed AI systems in education domains, introducing innovative human-AI interactive systems that empower individuals to collaborate with the AI system in AI-powered scientific writing and coding tasks. The talk will conclude by outlining her broader research agenda and future directions, offering a vision for value-centered, bidirectional human-AI alignment to advance human-centered responsible AI systems that promote societal well-being.
Biography: Hua Shen is a postdoctoral scholar of the University of Washington affiliated with the Information School and Responsibility in AI Systems and Experiences Center (RAISE). Her work anchors in HCI and intersects with multiple AI fields, such as NLP, Machine Learning, Speech Processing, and Computer Vision. Particularly, her research focuses on bidirectional human-AI alignment, aiming to empower humans to interactively explain, evaluate, and collaborate with AI, while incorporating human feedback and values to improve AI systems. Her research has been recognized with multiple awards, including Best Paper and Best Interactive Event at AIED 2024, Best Demo at CSCW 2023, Best Paper Honorable Mention at IUI 2023, and Google Research Science Conference Scholarships. She was selected as the 2023 Rising Stars of Data Science awarded by University of Chicago, UC San Diego, and Stanford University. She earned her Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University from 2019 to 2023 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan.
The 2024-2025 seminars will be held in person, and are free and open to the public.