I am a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Montréal, where I am part of the FATE (Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics of AI) group. I work on human-AI interaction, with current focuses on explainable AI and responsible AI. I am passionate about bridging emerging AI technologies and human-centered design practices, and use both quantitative and qualitative methods to generate recommendations for technology design. Prior to joining MSR, I worked at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Tsinghua University.

I design, build and evaluate systems for comprehending and interacting with population-level structure and trends in large code and data corpora. I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering & Applied Sciences and the Stanley A. Marks & William H. Marks Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, specializing in human-computer interaction. 

My research introduces technological means to help people help each other by sharing knowledge, drawing on shared experiences, and supporting each other. In doing so, I hope to make sustainable progress on long-standing problems in learning and work.

Recent questions in my research include:

How might teachers help each other with teaching techniques adapted to the pandemic?

How might entrepreneurs help each other with feedback and serve overlooked needs?

How might remote workers develop more sustainable careers?

How might knowledge workers make better decisions through improved perspective-taking?

How might voice interfaces inspire collaboration?

I am a traveling scholar. As such I write, lecture, and create materials for teaching.  Sometimes this includes videos, short podcasts, tech reports, sometimes papers for scientific publication, and sometimes books for everyone.  

I'm a practicing scientist.  That means I experiment and I analyze. I do field studies and I try to understand what makes online researchers tick.

Why do they sometimes query Google for [ first ], and then not click on anything?

Why do some Google users only ask one query, while others can go on and on?

What's different about their search experiences?

Why?   This is what drives my work:  What do people search for?  How do they do it?  How do they understand and use what they've found.  

I am an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. My lab focuses on augmenting designer's capabilities through the use of new technology and design methods. My interest in developing new ways to support designers stems from my interest in creating interactive and intelligent products. I blend a background in product design methods, interaction design, human-robot interaction, and mechatronic engineering to build tools and methods that allow designers to understand people better and to create more human-centered products. Before moving to the HCII, I was a Digital Experiences researcher at the Accenture Technology Labs in San Francisco. I graduated with my Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford's Center for Design Research, where I was co-advised by Larry Leifer and Wendy Ju.