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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Tobias Gerstenberg
Going beyond the here and now: Counterfactual simulation in human cognition
April 14, 2023

Human Computer Interaction is increasingly engaged with the social-cultural context that people live in everyday. The city, in all its grit and glory, provides a complex and rich context in which to understand the challenges technologies face when they are adopted by people in the real world. In this presentation, I discuss three on-going research initiatives from my group at Cornell Tech in New York City which grapple with interaction in the urban context: Trashbots in the City, Urban Fingerprinting, and Communal eXtended Reality. These projects highlight different aspects of urban interaction--culture, scale, engagement--which demand new approaches from researchers and practitioners in HCI. In this talk, I will also champion the perspectives that HCI brings to the already crowded urban landscape.

Tobias Gerstenberg is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. He leads the Causality in Cognition Lab. The CiCL studies the role of causality in people's understanding of the world, and of each other. Professor Gerstenberg's research is highly interdisciplinary. It combines ideas from philosophy, linguistics, computer science, and the legal sciences to better understand higher-level cognitive phenomena such as causal inferences and moral judgments. The CiCL's research uses a variety of methods that include computational modeling, online experiments, eye-tracking experiments, as well as developmental studies with children. Professor Gerstenberg's work has appeared in top journals including Psychological Review, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Psychological Science, Cognitive Psychology, Cognition, and Cognitive Science.