Hello everyone,
We are excited to host our sixth Monthly Memeber Conversation. This month's speaker will be Dr Ignacio Alvarez. Dr. Ignacio Alvarez is professor of human-centered intelligent systems at the Technical University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria, Germany. His research work lays at the intersection of artificial intelligence, systems engineering, and human-computer interaction. He joined academia after fifteen years in industry, most recently as Principal Engineer and Executive Technical Advisor at Intel Labs, where he led autonomous driving research strategy and brought automated driving from research into production with global automakers.
Talk Time: Friday, July 31st, 1:00 PM (ET)
Talk Title: Upskilling UX Designers for AI-native work, A pedagogical framework and empirical evaluation of teaching "vibe coding"
Abstract:
Generative AI now lets people build software by describing intent rather than writing syntax, a practice known as "vibe coding". This talk will walk you through the experience of teaching and measuring Human-AI collaboration principles to UX-design master's students, with no coding background, to co-create working software with AI agents. This AI upskilling process resulted in 21 fully functional prototypes and an end-of-course AI literacy averaging 93%. The more interesting finding was behavioral: given agentic tools, students consistently built systems that augment human judgment and refused to let AI act autonomously, designing constraints rather than steps and defaulting to human verification. That instinct sits squarely on the central question of human-AI-robot teaming; when should an autonomous partner act, and when should it wait? I will share the curriculum framework, the empirical results, and four provocations about delegation, trust, and competence assessment, as an opening for collaboration across our communities.
This is meant to be an informal space to connect and have real conversations with like-minded folks interested in all things HART.
If you're interested, please email me at alsaid@umich.edu.
Hope to see many of you there.
- Areen