Human Centered Design & Engineering

Meet new HCDE Professor Emily Tseng

Assistant Professor Emily Tseng joined the HCDE faculty in Spring 2026, bringing expertise in digital safety and the human impacts of emerging technologies. Learn about the path that brought her to UW, the research questions she's exploring, and what she's looking forward to as she joins the HCDE community.

Mobility Washington 2050 visualizations

HCDE researchers helped create Mobility Washington 2050, a new interactive platform from UW's Mobility Innovation Center that makes complex transportation and infrastructure data easier to understand. Using human-centered design methods, the team transformed decades of planning data into an interactive resource that anyone can use to better understand Washington's transportation future.

Student AI project recognized by UN

HCDE master's student Selah Key presented her independent research project, Ordinary Days, at the United Nations' AI for Good Global Summit, where it received a Best Use Case award. Key developed a context-aware, multimodal AI system that helps people recognize physiological signs of chronic stress and receive personalized, evidence-based support.

Watch: PaperTok for research communication

As generative AI makes it easier than ever to create science content, how do we ensure researchers remain at the center of communicating their own work? Researchers in Professor Gary Hsieh's lab developed PaperTok, an AI-assisted tool that helps researchers transform papers into short-form videos while keeping human expertise in the loop. View a video interview with the research team and a demonstration of PaperTok in action.