ABSTRACT: AI is changing our lives in many ways. However, AI's benefits and risks are often misunderstood by the general public. Some overestimate AI's power and believe, for instance, political parties use face recognition to identify people's voting preferences. Some underestimate AI's reach and are unaware that, for instance, social media companies use AI to decide which messages users can or cannot read. Meanwhile, AI experts developing algorithms and building applications tend to focus on optimizing speed and accuracy and pay less attention to how their AI applications may be misunderstood by users. There exists a significant gap between the experts and the general public. In this talk, I will discuss our lab's research efforts to study this gap, educate the public and students about the gap, develop tools and systems to help prevent and close the gap.



BIO: Tom Yeh received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for studying vision-based user interfaces. In 2012, he joined the University of Colorado Boulder (CU) as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science. Prior to joining CU, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). Yeh's research interests include 3D printing, assistive technology, computer vision, big data, citizen science, and AI ethics. He has published more than 50 articles across these interest areas. He has received best paper awards and honorable mentions from CHI, UIST, SIGCSE, ASSETS, and MobileHCI. Yeh's research projects are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institute of Health (NIH), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Knight Foundation, and the Piton Foundation.