John A. Paulson School of Engineering & Applied Sciences
Harvard University
Vision & Values
What we do
AI is powerful, but it can make objective errors, generate contextually inappropriate outputs, and offer disliked options. We defined and build AI-resilient interfaces that help people use AI while being resilient to AI choices that are not right, or not right for them. This is critical during context- and preference-dominated open-ended tasks, like ideating, searching, sensemaking, and reading or writing text and code at scale. AI-resilient interfaces improve AI safety, usability, and utility by working with, not against, human perception, attention, and cognition. To achieve this, we derive design implications from cognitive science, even when they fly in the face of common usability guidelines.
What success looks like
A vibrant, supportive community of undergraduates, masters, PhD students, Postdoctoral Scholars, and collaborators who are creating tools that augment human sensemaking and human-computer collaboration.
How we’re getting there
Frequent feedback from each other
Reflecting on our personal and community practices
Getting enough sleep so we can bring our best selves to our work
MIT AI4Society Seminar Spring 2025
Leveraging theories of human cognition to build reliable tools from unreliable AI
Stanford CS Seminar On People, Computers, and Design Jan 20th 2023
Systems for Supporting Intent Formation and Human-AI Communication[YouTube]
Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Public Lecture Oct 13th 2021
Novel Interfaces to Support Human Intent Formation and Communication to Humans and Computers Alike (for the general public)
HCI + PL
ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP) Keynote August 24th 2021
Building PL-Powered Systems for Humans
ACM SIGPLAN conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH REBASE) Speaker Nov 20th, 2020
PL and HCI: Better Together
Elena L. Glassman is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, specializing in human-computer interaction. Prior to that, she was a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley, and obtained a BS, MEng, and PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. She has been named a Stanley A. Marks & William H. Marks Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow. Her work has been funded by the NSF, private industry, the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, and the Sloan Research Fellowship. This work has received Best Paper and Honorable Mention awards at top-tier human-computer interaction research venues.
Postdoctoral Scholar, now Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Montréal in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO)
Related Courses
(New!) CS 178: Engineering Usable Interactive Systems
