HCAI'25: The University of Michigan Symposium on Human-Centered AI

Elena L. Glassman - KEYNOTE
Computer science professor leading research on AI-resilient interfaces
Harvard University

Elena L. Glassman is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, specializing in human-computer interaction. Prior to that, she was a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley, and obtained a BS, MEng, and PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. She has been named a Stanley A. Marks & William H. Marks Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow. Her work has been funded by the NSF, private industry, the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, and the Sloan Research Fellowship. This work has received Best Paper and Honorable Mention awards at top-tier human-computer interaction research venues.

Website

Margaret Mitchell - KEYNOTE
Chief Ethics Scientist
Hugging Face

Margaret Mitchell is a researcher focused on the ins and outs of machine learning and ethics-informed AI development in tech. She has published around 100 papers on natural language generation, assistive technology, computer vision, and AI ethics, and holds multiple patents in the areas of conversation generation and sentiment classification. She has recently received recognition as one of Time’s Most Influential People of 2023. She currently works at Hugging Face as Chief Ethics Scientist, driving forward work in the ML development ecosystem, ML data governance, AI evaluation, and AI ethics. She previously worked at Google AI as a Staff Research Scientist, where she founded and co-led Google’s Ethical AI group, focused on foundational AI ethics research and operationalizing AI ethics Google-internally. Before joining Google, she was a researcher at Microsoft Research, focused on computer vision-to-language generation; and was a postdoc at Johns Hopkins, focused on Bayesian modeling and information extraction. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Aberdeen and a Master’s in computational linguistics from the University of Washington. While earning her degrees, she also worked from 2005-2012 on machine learning, neurological disorders, and assistive technology at Oregon Health and Science University. She has spearheaded a number of workshops and initiatives at the intersections of diversity, inclusion, computer science, and ethics. Her work has received awards from Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and the American Foundation for the Blind, and has been implemented by multiple technology companies. She likes gardening, dogs, and cats.

Website

Daniel S. Weld - KEYNOTE
Chief Scientist, Semantic Scholar
Allen Institute for AI (AI2) | University of Washington

Daniel S. Weld is professor emeritus at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and the General Manager & Chief Scientist of Semantic Scholar at the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence. After formative education at Phillips Academy, he received bachelor’s degrees in both Computer Science and Biochemistry at Yale University in 1982. He landed a Ph.D. from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1988, received a Presidential Young Investigator’s award in 1989, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator’s award in 1990, was named AAAI Fellow in 1999, deemed ACM Fellow in 2005, and selected to be an AAAS Fellow in 2020. Dan was a founding editor for the Journal of AI Research, was area editor for the Journal of the ACM, guest editor for Computational Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence, and was Program Chair for AAAI-96. Dan has published two books and scads of technical papers. Dan is an active entrepreneur with several patents and technology licenses. He co-founded Netbot Incorporated, creator of Jango Shopping Search (acquired by Excite), AdRelevance, a monitoring service for internet advertising (acquired by Nielsen NetRatings), and data integration company Nimble Technology (acquired by Actuate). Dan is a Venture Partner at the Madrona Venture Group and on the Scientific Advisory Boards of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Madrona Venture Group. Dan has taught many courses, including graduate classes on Artificial Intelligence, Extracting, Managing & Personalizing Web Information and Intelligent User Interfaces, and undergraduate classes on Artificial Intelligence, Advanced Internet Systems, and Machine Learning. In 2012, Dan co-organized a workshop on Crowdsourcing Personalized Online Education. During sabbaticals Dan was a visiting professor at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia and visited the VIBE group at Microsoft Research.

Website

Diyi Yang - KEYNOTE
Human-Centered AI Professor
Stanford University

Diyi Yang is an assistant professor in computer science at Stanford University. Professor Yang’s research interests are Computational Social Science and Natural Language Processing. Her research goal is to understand the social aspects of language and then build socially aware NLP systems to better support human-human and human-computer interaction. Professor Yang received her PhD from the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, and her bachelor’s degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. Her work has received multiple best paper nominations or awards at ICWSM, EMNLP, SIGCHI, ACL, and CSCW. She is a recipient of Forbes 30 under 30 in Science, IEEE “AI 10 to Watch”, the Intel Rising Star Faculty Award, Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, and NSF CAREER Award.

Website

Huteng Dai
Assistant Professor of Computational Linguistics and Phonology
University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts

Huteng Dai is an assistant professor of computational linguistics and phonology at U-M’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. Dai is a computational linguist and cognitive scientist. His research focuses on understanding how humans learn sound patterns from noisy, real-world data. He builds interpretable learning models that are not only mathematically well-defined but also succeed on real-world corpora.

Website

Lauren E. Gillespie
Assistant Professor, School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS)
University of Michigan

Coming from a background in both computer science and biology, Dr. Gillespie’s interdisciplinary research develops new AI-integrated approaches for monitoring ecosystems at scale. Her work develops foundation models, AI models that can rapidly make sense of large-scale but noisy data with little guidance, and aims to uncover the effects of rapid environmental change on species to improve our ecological forecasting of the natural world. By leveraging diverse and widely available data from sources including remote sensing and citizen + community science, her research aims to create models of biodiversity that are accurate and useful for conservation decision-makers around the world.

Website

Abigail Jacobs
Assistant Professor of Information
University of Michigan School of Information

Abigail Jacobs is an assistant professor of information at U-M's School of Information and an assistant professor of complex systems at U-M’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. Jacobs is an expert in trustworthy AI and algorithmic bias. A 2025 Microsoft Research AI & Society Fellow, Jacobs’ current research focuses on measurement and validity as a lens for governance in responsible AI, structure and inequality in sociotechnical systems and social networks. 

Website

Q. Vera Liao
Associate Professor, Computer Science and Engineering
University of Michigan

Q. Vera Liao is an associate professor in the University of Michigan CSE department. Her current research interests are in human-AI interaction, explainable AI, and responsible AI. Prior to joining U-M, she worked at MSR FATE group, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Tsinghua University. Her research received multiple paper awards at ACM CHI and IUI. She currently serves as the Co-Editor-in-Chief for Springer HCI Book Series, in the Editors team for ACM CSCW conferences, and on the Editorial Board of ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS). She actively organizes events that connect the HCI and AI communities, including several workshops and panels at CHI, IUI, and CSCW conferences.

Website