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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Sheena Erete
University of Maryland
Breaking chains: Co-designing with Communities to Address Power and Structural Oppression
April 26, 2024

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.

Dr. Sheena Erete is a researcher, educator, designer, and community advocate, whose research focuses on co-designing socio-cultural technologies, practices, and policies with historically marginalized populations to amplify their existing efforts in addressing social issues. The objective of her work is to create more just and equitable outcomes and futures for those who have historically and who currently face structural oppression by designing technologies and methods that center their knowledge, strengthens, and joys. She leverages Black feminist epistemologies and transformative justice practices in her current work which focuses on issues such as equity in AI/ML tools, community safety, education, political efficacy, and economic development in communities that have been historically oppressed and resource-constrained due to unfair policies and State violence.
Her research has won several best paper awards in top venues such as ACM CHI, CSCW, and SIGCSE as well a diversity and inclusion award for her collaborative work dissecting oppression that exists in the field of computing, HCI, and design. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, and several philanthropic foundations including the Polk Bros. Foundation, Pritzker Pucker Family Foundation, and McCormick Foundation.
Dr. Erete is an associate professor in the College of Information at the University of Maryland, College Park and the inaugural associate director of research for the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland (AIIIM). She is also the founder and director of the Community Research, Equity, and Design Collective (CREED). Dr. Erete received Bachelors of Science degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from Spelman College. She received a Masters in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and a Ph.D. in Technology & Social Behavior (joint degree in Computer Science and Communication) from Northwestern University.