Carol Smith
Senior Research Scientist at Canergie Mellon UniversityCarol Smith is a senior research scientist in human-machine interaction in the AI Division of the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Software Engineering Institute. She leads research defining human-centered and responsible AI development practices. Carol also teaches graduate and undergraduate courses for the CMU Human-Computer Interaction Institute.
She has been leading UX research to improve human experiences across industries for over 20 years and improving AI systems since 2015. Carol is the Information Architecture Conference (IAC) 2023 Co-Chair, volunteers for UXPA and IEEE, and is an ACM Distinguished Speaker.
Carol earned her M.S. in HCI from DePaul University, and she lives with her family in Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
In this engaging workshop you will learn how to wield technology ethics to make complex experiences that are human-centered, de-risked, and trustworthy. The facilitator will introduce curiosity inspiring methods, and then participants will practice active speculation about misuse and abuse. These methods will help you to embolden teams to critique their work more closely, and to proactively identify potentially harmful issues that can negatively affect people using your product or service. We will take time to discuss ethical quandaries and common issues between people and systems, and you will leave feeling confident about implementing technology ethics in your organization.
Topics covered
- Introduction to technical ethics and recent related news articles indicating a lack of ethics in technology development.
- Introduction to design considerations to make complex trustworthy experiences.
- Introduction to activities to increase speculation about misuse and abuse such as Abusability Testing, various checklists, and other methods.
- Practice methods through an active session in small groups.
What kind of exercises will be done
- Participants will engage in discussions throughout the workshop about use cases and participants work (if possible).
- Participants will review and discuss Principles and Technology Ethics examples.
- Participants will conduct Abusability Testing for a complex system of their choosing.
What will the audience take away at the end
- Learn skills and methods to design complex experiences that are trustworthy.
- Practice methods that support the creation of trustworthy experiences.
- Learn about technology ethics and how to select and effectively apply them.
Any requirements for attending
Attendees do not have to have any previous experience or knowledge regarding ethics, but should have a few years of work experience in the UX industry and be working on complex systems.
AI-enabled systems that are responsible and human-centered, will be powerful partners to humans in the very near future. UX research (UXR) is necessary to create systems that people are willing to be responsible for. This talk describes the UXR skills and methods that are needed for proper data identification and preparation, bias identification, prevention of harm, human-machine interaction design and prototyping, and the critical oversight activities needed for dynamic AI systems to continue to be effective.
These UXR skills and methods support creation of AI-enabled systems that responsibly augment human abilities. AI-enabled systems that provide appropriate evidence of system capabilities and integrity will support calibrated trust (an individual’s balanced view of the risks and rewards of collaboration), and UXR informs what is appropriate in each context, how the AI system will augment the experience, and how the dynamic nature of the experience will be managed. This session will introduce each of these complex topics and provide references for further exploration of these exciting issues.