Gave a talk at PGH TechFest on The Promise and Perils of AI for Products. I summarize capabilities of AI today, challenges (trust, explainability, human agency), and recommendations.

Fun highlights of my past research. First is our 2018 paper on how people use Alexa. The funniest story from an interviewee was a parent using Alexa as a timeout timer for their kid: "Alexa, set timer for 5 minutes." After the parent left the room, the kid said "Alexa, set timer for 1 minute."

My 5 year old is a little too smart. He's learned that if he barges into my office while I'm on a Zoom call, I'll give him some candy to leave.

We gave away handheld water hoop games for my daughter's birthday. One of the 10-year olds comes up to me and asks how to reset the game. I say "You just hold it upside down." He then asks how to turn off the game. I say "You just put it down on the table" while trying not to laugh too hard.

Ok it's official now, after 20 years of being a faculty at the Human Computer Interaction Institute, I'll become (the youngest?) Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University at the end of 2024.

Since I'm too young to really retire, the bulk of my time will be on a new startup on AI + HCI.

About a year ago, I wrote a book chapter in Mobile Sensing in Psychology: Methods and Applications that summarizes everything I know about legal, philosophical, design, and technical issues about privacy. The book also has excellent chapters on sensing, analysis, and applications.

We've been developing TAIGA (Tool for Auditing Images Generated by AI), it lets you generate images based on a prompt, compare against the images of other prompts, and discuss your findings.

Let us know if you're interested in using TAIGA for your classes or AI literacy!

taiga.weaudit.org

Yesterday, my 10 year old daughter asked: "Dad, what's the difference between a kraken and Cthulhu?" Asking the right questions. 😆🦑

Last year, I wrote an article for Communications of the ACM about what can Responsible AI learn from the successes and failures in privacy. The two fields are surprisingly similar in terms of being ill-defined, strong incentives not to do them, and more.

cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/wha...

This is a blog post I wrote 2 years ago about how the combination of smartphones, webcams, face recognition, drones, and other technologies would make it impossible for superheroes to maintain a secret identity today.

cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/sup...

it's Randy Pausch Memorial Day at @scsatcmu.bsky.social -- if you haven't watched his Last Lecture, or haven't rewatched it recently, it's always a good watch, … advice on achieving your childhood dreams and enabling others to achieve their dreams!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_...

For my first post, a conspiracy theory: Bitcoin was invented by aliens to get us to do hard calculations for them.

In Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky, humans are stuck orbiting a pre-rocket alien civ and must wait for them to ascend the tech tree. The Bitcoin aliens are doing the same with us.