CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar (Seminar on People, Computers, and Design)
Fridays 11:30am-12:30pm PT · Gates B3 · Open to the public|
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.
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