magerko, research

Bio

Dr. Brian Magerko is a Regents Professor of  Digital Media, a Human-Centered Computing faculty member in the School of Interactive Computing, & head of the Expressive Machinery Lab at Georgia Tech. He has also served as the Graduate Director of the Digital Media graduate program at Tech from 2018-2026. He received his B.S. in Cognitive Science from Carnegie Mellon (1999) and his MS and Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan (2001, 2006).  

Dr. Magerko’s internationally recognized work in human-centered AI and HCI intertwines cognitive science, computer science, and media arts research, focusing on three concerns: a) better understanding social collaboration and creativity between humans and artificial intelligence; b) designing and developing computational media experiences that inform and/or entertain; c) using personal expression as a means of engaging the public—especially underrepresented populations—in computing. His study of creativity includes developing better formal representations of human creative socio-cognitive processes, and designing and developing technologies that represent and accommodate those processes.  

Highlights of this work include:

• The design and development of an internationally-used STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics) learning environment for learning computer programming through making music with computer code. EarSketch has been widely adopted across all 50 U.S. states, has over 1,800,000 users, and has been empirically shown to increase positive attitudes towards computing, especially in students from underrepresented populations.

• The Long and Magerko AI Literacy framework (2020), published in ACM SIGCHI with a Best Paper nomination, which has quickly become the seminal article in the field for defining–and designing for–AI literacy.  This framework has been used by countless researchers, educators, and government policy makers.

• The design and development of multiple collaborative works with graduate and undergraduate students. These interactive installations focus on co-creative experiences (i.e., collaborative, improvisational meaning-making between humans and/or computers) that have been accepted to festivals and museums such as the ACC Creativity and Innovation Festival at the Smithsonian, the ArtScience Museum of Singapore, and the MoogFest music technology festival.

• Multiple studies of the socio-cognitive processes of creativity during improvisation, which has introduced new theories of human cognition and empirical tools for quantifying creativity at an individual and social level.

• Multiple studies of the socio-cognitive processes of creativity during improvisation, which has introduced new theories of human cognition and empirical tools for quantifying creativity at an individual and social level.

• Foundational work in design of artificial intelligence techniques within AI and narrative creativity.

 Dr. Magerko has been research lead on over $15 million of federally-funded research; has authored over 100 peer reviewed articles related to digital media, creativity, cognition, and learning; has had his work shown at galleries and museums internationally; co-authored an internationally adapted framework--and the top-cited article on--AI literacy education and design; and co-founded a music-based learning environment for computer science - called EarSketch - that has been used by over 1.8 million learners worldwide.  Dr. Magerko and the Expressive Machinery Lab's work has been shown in the New Yorker, Washington Post, the Smithsonian Museum of American History, Eyedrum, The Goat Farm Arts Center, USA Today, CNN, Yahoo! Finance, NPR, and other global and regional outlets.