CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar   (Seminar on People, Computers, and Design)

Fridays 11:30am-12:30pm PT · Gates B3 · Open to the public
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Amy X. Zhang
University of Washington
What can CSCW Teach us About How to Work with Agents?
October 23, 2026

The field of CSCW has long contended with the question of how to design technologies to support collaboration between actors with partial knowledge and distributed roles. In this talk, I discuss how CSCW theories about shared artifacts, mutual awareness, and formalization of social requirements can inform the design of systems that coordinate human-agent activity. I present a series of novel systems that incorporate these lessons: Cocoa, a system for flexibly delegating agency between humans and agents around a shared computational notebook-like artifact; Ream, a workspace where humans and agents can be mutually aware of each others' activity; Compass, a system for continuously aligning social media feed algorithms to a user's changing preferences; and Social-RAG, an approach for continuously aligning an agent into a team's social norms. I conclude by arguing for more research that draws upon ideas from institutional design more broadly, including the design of governments, communities, and organizations, to inform future human-AI institutions. I provide one case study involving our work taking inspiration from case law towards building precedent aligned AI systems.


Amy X. Zhang is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington's Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, where she leads the Social Futures Lab (https://social.cs.washington.edu). Her research is focused on designing and building new social and collaborative systems to empower people and improve society. Amy's research has received awards at top computing venues such as ACM CHI, CSCW, and ICWSM. She is a Sloan Fellow, NSF CAREER awardee, Berkman-Klein Center Fellow, Google PhD Fellow, and ADL Belfer Fellow. She has worked in industry as a visiting researcher, consultant, or research intern at companies such as Google DeepMind, Ai2, and Microsoft Research. Amy holds a PhD in CS from MIT, where her thesis won the MIT George Sprowls Award for Best Thesis in Computer Science, a master's degree in CS from Cambridge where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar, and a bachelor's degree in CS from Rutgers University, where she was also captain and MVP of the varsity tennis team.