To Be Announced
1:00pm CDT, Center for Human-Computer Interaction + Design (Frances Searle Building 1-122)
Speaker: Prof. Elena Glassman, Harvard University
(Re)Working AI: Labor, Design, and the Governance of Workplace Technologies
1:00 pm CDT, Center for Human-Computer Interaction + Design (Frances Searle Building 1-122)
Artificial intelligence is frequently introduced into workplaces with the promise that it will make work easier, safer, or more efficient. In practice, many automated systems only function because workers intervene when those systems fall short. This talk examines how organizations deploy workplace technologies in ways that depend on frontline intervention while restricting workers’ influence over how those systems are designed, evaluated, and governed. Drawing on ethnographic and design research in waste management, hospitality, and public transportation, the talk shows how AI systems impose standardized logics on labor that is inherently contingent, embodied, and relational. When those logics break down—or conflict with the demands of safety, service, or bodily limits—workers absorb the consequences: adapting robotic systems, navigating algorithmic schedules, and exercising discretion under tightly constrained operating conditions. This work is essential to keeping organizations functioning, yet it is rarely recognized as expertise or incorporated into decisions about procurement, deployment, or oversight. The talk then traces what changes when worker expertise is taken seriously as a basis for governance. Across cases, I examine labor-aligned design work, collective bargaining, and policy interventions that shift decision-making power—ranging from co-design efforts that surface worker knowledge, to procurement constraints, oversight requirements, and regulatory obligations that make that knowledge institutionally binding. A consistent pattern emerges: worker participation becomes consequential only when it alters who has the authority to set limits, define acceptable risk, and halt or redirect deployment. Taken together, these cases show that AI governance depends on whether working people have meaningful authority in the creation, implementation, and governance of the technologies that organize their labor.
Sarah Fox is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, where she directs the Tech Solidarity Lab. Her research examines how AI, automation, and algorithmic management systems are designed, deployed, and governed in everyday work settings, and how these processes redistribute power between institutions, technologies, and workers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and design research, she foregrounds workers’ situated expertise as a critical site of governance, tracing how everyday practices of adaptation, contestation, and repair expose the limits of technological systems and inform mechanisms of accountability and enforcement.
Redefining the Image Captioning Challenge: From Truthful to Useful
1:00pm CDT, Center for Human-Computer Interaction + Design (Frances Searle Building 1-122)
Visual media increasingly dominates modern (online) communication, but this heavily visual landscape creates substantial barriers for those who cannot access it. To facilitate non-visual accessibility, we need to translate visual information into linguistic descriptions. What appears straightforward on the surface is in fact a fundamental communicative challenge: when moving between modalities, what exact information should be selected and conveyed? While modern vision–language models achieve ostensibly “superhuman” benchmark results on image-to-text tasks, they frequently underperform in real communicative settings. I argue that this gap reflects a deeper problem of information selection: effective image descriptions require not just stating what is literally true about an image, but deciding what should be said given a specific communicative goal and audience. Drawing on cognitive experiments with sighted participants and people who are blind or have low vision, I show that communicative goals strongly shape which visual information people choose to express, and that current AI tasks and evaluation methods fail to capture this nuance. I conclude by discussing recent work in which we start to quantify informativity in image descriptions, and how information selection varies across cultures, highlighting a broader research agenda for understanding and modeling cross-modal communication.
Elisa Kreiss’ work combines tools from natural language processing, psycholinguistics, and human-computer interaction to advance our understanding of how communicative context shapes language use. This research has direct applications to image accessibility – the challenge of (automatically) generating image descriptions for blind and low vision users.
Digital Culture Shock: Who Creates Technology and Why This Matters
1:30pm CDT, Center for Human-Computer Interaction + Design (Frances Searle Building 1-122)
Robots that encroach on your personal space, baffling emojis, a chatbot that gives you an answer that seems terribly rude—does any of this sound familiar? If so, you may know what it feels like to experience a clash of cultures in technology. In this talk, I will present key insights from my book Digital Culture Shock: Who Creates Technology and Why This Matters (Princeton, 2025), showing how culture—shared values, norms, and behaviors—influences both the design of technology and its use. Drawing on a set of common assumptions that do not translate across cultures, the talk will outline what is at stake and how we can resist generalizing our own cultural peccadillos in technology design.
Katharina Reinecke is a Professor and Associate Director for Research and Communication in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle. She has been speaking and writing about intelligent user interfaces that seamlessly adapt to people’s cultural and demographic backgrounds for nearly two decades and has pioneered ways for reliable, large-scale data collection from participants around the world with her virtual lab, the LabintheWild. Katharina received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Zurich and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. Prior to coming to the University of Washington, she was an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan.