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Research Updates

Updates from Human Centered Design & Engineering faculty, doctoral students, and research scientists.

Autumn 2025

November 7, 2025

Jennifer Turns, with collaborators, Sam Bernecker and Patrick Raue received a UW Population Health Initiative Tier 1 pilot grant of $25,000 for Designing Psydkick, an EBPI implementation tool, to deliver problem-solving therapy to depressed and/or anxious rural-dwelling adults.

Cecilia Aragon gave an invited talk, Human-Centered AI, at SUNY Dutchess Community College.

HCDE was well-represented at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '25):

HCDE was also well-represented at the 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2025):

Cecilia Aragon, with co-authors Sun Yoon, Sarah Evans, Bernease Herman, Yang Liyu, and Lacy Molina had an abstract, Transforming Perspectives on Data Ethics through Collaborative Game Design, published in the Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology.

Yihan Yu and David W. McDonald contributed a paper, Considering Cultural and Linguistic Diversity in AI-Assisted Semantic Image Tagging and Search, to the Considering Cultural and Linguistic Diversity in AI Applications: A Hybrid Workshop (CALD-AI @ ASIST).

Aayushi Dangol, with co-author Katie Davis, had an article published in The Conversation, AI could worsen inequalities in schools – teachers are key to whether it will.

Shana Hirsch was featured in the UW Daily article, $2.5 million UW-associated research grant terminated due to the federal government shutdown.

Nisha Devasia, Julie Kientz, and Jin Ha Lee were quoted in the GeekWire article, “From stress relief to self-discovery: UW researchers reveal the deeper impact of video games.” Co-authors Georgia Kenderova and Michele Newman were mentioned.

Katya Cherukumilli was featured in the UW Center for Exposures, Diseases, Genomics & Environment (EDGE) blog post, Removing lead from school drinking water.
 

October 24, 2025

Kyra Arnett received the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) award for her research, Metrics in Motion: Understanding the (De)stabilization and Maintenance of Quantified Measures.

Julie Kientz and Franziska Roesner, with Meghna Gupta, received a Google Academic Research Award (GARA) Program grant of $100,000 for their project, Designing Family-Centered Safety Tools for Teen-AI Companion Interactions.

Kevin Feng, with co-authors Tae Soo Kim, Rock Yuren Pang, Faria Huq, Tal August, and Amy X Zhang, contributed a poster, On the Regulatory Potential of User Interfaces for AI Agent Governance, at The Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025).

Sean Munson with co-authors Beverly Green, Laurel Hansell, Clarissa Hsu, Tae Jones, Casey Luce, James D Ralston, Bryan Davis, Tiana Wright, and Melissa Anderson, had a paper, Evaluation of an Email Blood Pressure Measurement Outreach Program, published in the American Journal of Hypertension.

Sonia Savelli with co-authors Christopher Wirz, Julie Demuth, Robert Prestley, Rebecca Morss, Susan L. Joslyn, and Chao Qin, had a paper, Southeastern U.S. residents’ perceptions and responses to evolving probabilistic tornado forecasts and warnings, published in Weather and Forecasting.

Aayushi Dangol contributed a blog post, When AI Gets It Wrong and What Children Can Learn From It, to The Joan Ganz Cooney Center blog.

Brett Halperin was quoted in the Pitchbook article, A tech skeptic’s AI video startup wants to change Hollywood.

Julie Vera was mentioned in the Business Insider article, TikTok insiders and creators worry its powerful algorithm could lose its magic after a sale.
 

October 10, 2025

Shana Hirsch, with collaborators Ryan Kelly, Aden Ip, Elizabeth Allan, and Kate Bertko, received $250,000 from the Minderoo Foundation ($100,000 to HCDE). This funding supports the work of UW’s eDNA Collaborative which aims to disseminate, accelerate and reinforce science that brings environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis and techniques out of the lab and into routine practice around the world.

Ruiqi Chen with co-authors Xia Su, Jingwei Ma, Chu Li, and Jon Froehlich, had a paper, FlyMeThrough: Human-AI Collaborative 3D Indoor Mapping with Commodity Drones, published in the Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '25).

Ruiqi Chen with co-authors Zhuohao (Jerry) Zhang, Mingyuan Zhong, and Jacob O. Wobbrock, had a paper, SlideAudit: A Dataset and Taxonomy for Automated Evaluation of Presentation Slides, published in the Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '25).

Nisha Devasia, Georgia Kenderova, and Julie A. Kientz, with co-authors Michele Newman and Jin Ha Lee, had a paper, “I Would Not Be This Version of Myself Today”: Elaborating on the Effects of Eudaimonic Gaming Experiences, published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.

Danli Luo had an extended abstract, Building Living Instruments for Scientific Discovery, published in the Adjunct Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST Adjunct '25).

Donghoon Shin, with co-authors Jaewook Lee, Filippo Aleotti, Diego Mazala, Guillermo Garcia-Hernando, Sara Vicente, Oliver James Johnston, Isabel Kraus-Liang, Jakub Powierza, Jon E. Froehlich, Gabriel Brostow, and Jessica Van Brummelen, had a paper, ImaginateAR: AI-Assisted In-Situ Authoring in Augmented Reality, published in the Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '25).

Donghoon Shin, with co-authors Daniel Lee, Nikhil Sharma, DaEun Choi, Harsh Sharma, Jeonghwan Kim, and Heng Ji, had a poster, ThematicPlane: Bridging Tacit User Intent and Latent Spaces for Image Generation, published in the Adjunct Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST Adjunct '25).

Donghoon Shin and Gary Hsieh, with co-authors Daniel Lee and Gromit Yeuk-Yin Chan, had a paper, PosterMate: Audience-driven Collaborative Persona Agents for Poster Design, published in the Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '25).

Donghoon Shin, with co-authors Seojin Hwang, Yumin Kim, Byeongjeong Kim, and Hwanhee Lee, had a paper, Personality Editing for Language Models through Relevant Knowledge Editing, accepted to the EMNLP 2025 Workshop on Exploring Active and Passive LLM Personalization.

Hyewon Suh and Julie Kientz had a paper, Promoting Family Engagement With Early Childhood Developmental Screening via the Baby Steps Text Messaging and Web Portal System: Longitudinal Randomized Controlled Trial, published in JMIR Pediatrics and Parenting.

Julie A. Vera presented "Weathering Trust: Credibility Formation in YouTube's Weather Information Ecosystem" at the Trust and Safety Research Conference on September 25, 2025, hosted by the Stanford Cyber Policy Center.

Nisha Devasia, Julie Kientz, and Jin Ha Lee were interviewed for the UW News article, Q&A: How video games can lead people to more meaningful lives. Co-authors Georgia Kenderova and Michele Newman were mentioned. The interview was also featured in UW Today.

Joseph Schafer, with co-author Morgan Wack, contributed a blog post, The 2020 US election shows how state election policies can fuel conspiracy theories about voting, to the London School of Economics (LSE) United States Politics and Policy (USAPP) blog.

September 26, 2025

Tricia Aung and Sean Munson received a UW Community-Engaged Computing Initiative (CECI) award in the amount of $1,700 for “Digital diary study to assess a low-barrier, culturally and linguistically responsive mental health program co-designed with the Somali community.”

Brett Halperin and Daniela Rosner received a UW Community-Engaged Computing Initiative (CECI) award in the amount of $40,000 for “The People v. Their Own Creation: Designing a Community-Based Docu-Fiction on AI and Labor.”

Georgia Kenderova and Sean Munson received a UW Community-Engaged Computing Initiative (CECI) award in the amount of $5,000 for “Tabletop role-playing games to support youth mental health (w/ Seattle Public Library).”

Amy Xiao and Emily Tseng received a UW Community-Engaged Computing Initiative (CECI) award in the amount of $5,000 for “Mapping Harms and Community Resilience Against Digital-Safety Risks Leveraging Immigration Enforcement Uncertainty.”

Beth Kolko gave a keynote, "Blending Engineering and Human Centered Design for Innovative Products," at Medtronic's Annual Human Centered Design Conference.

Beth Kolko gave a keynote, "Impact: Feature not a Bug," at EDGES, the Responsible Innovation Lab (RIL) annual convening.

David Ribes gave an invited talk, "AI and The “Real World," at the Open Lecture in Media Technology (Medieteknik Live) at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden.

David Ribes, with co-author Francis Lee, had a paper, Computational universalism, or, Attending to relationalities at scale, published in Social Studies of Science.

Emily Tseng with co-authors Ashley Marie Walker, Renee Shelby, Ari Schlesinger, Mark Diaz, Andy Elliot Ricci, and Angela D. R. Smith, had an extended abstract, Designing Support for Systematic Sociotechnical Risk Literacy, published in The Adjunct Proceedings of the Sixth Decennial Aarhus Conference: Computing X Crisis (AAR Adjunct '25).

Cindy Atman and Jennifer Turns, with collaborators Robin Adams, Reid Bailey, Nigel Cross, Dharma Dailey, Shanna Daly, Andy Dong, Liz Gerber, John Gero, Gabriela Goldschmidt, Colin Gray, Mark Guzdial, David Hendry, Susannah Howe, Daria Kotys-Schwartz, Gordon Krauss, Micah Lande, Peter Lloyd, Ade Mabogunje, Janet McDonnell, Laura Murphy, Harold Nelson, Eli Patten, Senay Purzer, Ben Shneiderman, Sheri Sheppard, Kathleen Sienko, David Socha, Erik Stolterman Bergqvist, Vanessa Svihla, Lauren Thomas Quigley, Barbara Tversky, Linda Vanasupa, Michelene Chi, and Alan Schoenfeld, released the “Good Designers do ‘X’” collection.

Kate Starbird was quoted in the Seattle Times piece, Opinion: What can we say about Charlie Kirk? Only what those in power want us to.
 

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