Details
When: May 30, 2025, at 3:00 PM
Where: Lecture Hall 1 (HS1), Währinger Straße 29, 1090 Vienna
Speaker: Daniel M. Russell
Title: The Long View of UX Research: From usability to HAI
Abstract: Starting out as an AI researcher and system builder, I learned early on about the value of understanding how people actually behave, as opposed to the ways you might think they behave, especially when using AI systems and tools. That was decades ago, and ever since then, I’ve constantly tried to learn the ways people think about complex / intelligent systems. The best methods are those that illuminate actual behavior, sometimes quantitative in nature, sometimes qualitative, sometimes purely observational. In this talk I’ll review some successes and failures of earlier research approaches, what we should learn from these decades of practice at the boundary between human experience and the use of intelligent systems, and where AI systems will change knowledge practices in the future.
Bio: Dr. Daniel M. Russell has been working in Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer Interaction for nearly 40 years. He has worked at several of the top technology invention companies in Silicon Valley (Google, Apple, Xerox, IBM) and has been at the forefront of many of their innovations. He currently teaches in the Human-AI group at Stanford’s Computer Science department, and was in the core search engineering team at Google for over 17 years. He has written over 200 technical articles for professional journals as well many articles for the popular press. His most recent book, The Joy of Search: A Google Insider’s Guide to Going Beyond the Basics, is now out in paperback. He has taught over 1,000 classes in-person in venues ranging from 4th grade classes to professional classes for reference librarians at the Library of Congress. He has been on the faculty at Stanford, the University of Maryland, the University of Zürich and serves on multiple boards of information schools. His online classes have been watched by millions of students for an accumulated watch-time of > 450 years. Dan now teaches human-computer interaction and AI at Stanford and the University of Zürich.
