HCI History and the Trajectory to Generative AI   ​
A course at CHI 2024​

Welcome! This is the site for an in-Hawaii two-session course. Monday May 13.

As you know, the field of Human-Computer Interaction today is changing fast and has a long history.

HCI has always changed fast, focused on the future while learning from past successes and challenges.

This course covers HCI evolution—the groups that are involved, how they differ, what each contributes, and how they interact. We consider once-significant topics that are less significant now, and issues that were unnoticed then but are central today, or soon will be.

  First session: A view from 30,000 feet of HCI armies, battling to support users!
                                                              

  Second session: Close-up look at 60 years of conversational agents, leading to Gen AI.

We include an extensive detailed study of a sophisticated predecessory of generative AI that employed machine learning and language processing to interact with millions of people over years. It is illuminating and until now unpublished.

Some say we are in a bubble. Probably not. But several past efforts were. Although much more limited in key respects, they were capable in other respects. Some of the challenges that eventually brought them down remain. We can use that experience to gain leverage in a competitive space. That is what history provides.

Monday May 13  

HCI History    11:00 AM

The Trajectory to Generative AI  2:00 PM

You can find the course notes here.

You can find our 13,000 word paper here.

Your
Guides

  • A leading HCI and CSCW researcher in industry and academia since CHI formed, most recently at Microsoft and University of Washington. ACM Fellow, the most prolific ACM Interactions blogger.​

    From Tool to Partner: The evolution of Human-Computer Interaction. Springer.
    AI and HCI: Two Fields Divided by a Common Focus.​ AI Magazine.

  • Donald Brinkman was the lead for conversational quality and countermeasures for the Zo.AI bot in 2016. He managed a team of researchers and analysts who studied the behaviors of users in near-realtime to understand their motivations and devise counters to bad behavior.
    Learning from a Generative AI Predecessor -- The many motivations for interacting with conversational agent    s. https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02978

The format will be lectures with time for questions and discussion about the past, present and future. Much use of timelines, charts, quotations, images. A few bullet points for those who like them.