Krzysztof Gajos

Join me as a colleague at Harvard School of Engineering. We are looking for a Lecturer in Engineering Design to become part of our Master of Design Engineering program. It is a full time position but limited to 3 years.

https://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15651

MIT front page includes links to a video titled "A world without MIT" and another "Contributions to the nation". I found them a welcome counterpoint to typical research news which focuses on a single advance and its potential for future impact. It is important for research community to also share more holistic syntheses relating a series of research advances to impacts that people can relate to. MIT videos are larger in scope than what I had in mind but still inspiring.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04JCB9GT64c

When supporting decision-making in time constrained settings (like trauma resuscitation!) a promising way to deploy decision-support tools is: 1. to synthesize relevant information as it becomes available to help doctors develop situational awareness; and 2. provide a decision recommendation when enough information has been gathered.

Work led by Angela Mastrianni and Alexandra Sarcevic at Drexel. Good write up here: https://drexel.edu/news/archive/2025/November/AI-assistant-pediatric-trauma

@katharina@hci.social's Digital Culture Shock book has finally hit the shelves! Broadly, the book demonstrates that digital technologies are designed on a set of assumptions about human perception, cognition, behavior and values that are not universal; it then evaluates the cost of such mismatches.

In Ch 3 (the first one I've read) it shows how a mismatch between the design and what is "culturally natural" for a person can incur substantial cognitive tax.

Looking forward to more!

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691255811/digital-culture-shock

TIL that "the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it is connection".

A colleague, Josh Burraway, an anthropologist who studied homelessness and addiction, pointed me to the classic Rat Park experiments that showed that caged rats got addicted to drugs if given an option but not rats that lived in stimulating environments with lots of friends. We now know that it holds for people too: strong connections make addiction much less likely.

https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/what-does-rat-park-teach-us-about-addiction

3 of my federal grants got terminated. While others bring up the impact on science and society, I want to highlight that a vast portion of grant money goes to pay for PhD students so grant terminations can disrupt their lives. My focus, therefore, is on them. With emergency savings and students offering to teach more (which will partly cover their costs), my group has about 1 year buffer. The university also prioritizes students so the current students should be safe until they graduate.

@zbucinca@hci.social's latest #chi2025 paper shows that people who receive AI decision recommendations supported by contrastive explanations (choose A instead of B because..) help people grow their skills. But this only happens if the alternative (the B in the contrastive explanations) is something that people would plausibly consider. This important because earlier work showed that people do not learn when AI provides conventional explanations (reasons for/against a decision).

https://iis.seas.harvard.edu/papers/bucinca2025contrastive.pdf

Congratulations to @zm003@hci.social who has recently defended his PhD dissertation! Over the past 6 years, Zilin focused on understanding and designing technology that benefits vulnerable groups. He analyzed the benefits and perils of LLM chatbots in supporting well-being of LGBTQ+ people; he demonstrated how dating web sites could be redesigned to reduce implicit racial bias when people choose prospective partners; and he developed tools to support front line negotiators.

Congratulations to (soon to be) Dr. Zana Buçinca (@zbucinca@hci.social) for defending her dissertation yesterday!

In her PhD, Zana demonstrated that human cognitive engagement moderates the effectiveness of AI support in human decision making, she introduced cognitive forcing functions, and has launched the new sub-field of worker-centric AI.

Her upcoming #CHI2025 paper on Contrastive Explanations That Anticipate Human Misconceptions exemplifies this latest direction in her work.

https://iis.seas.harvard.edu/papers/bucinca2025contrastive.pdf