Upol Ehsan | hiring PhDs for Fall'27
@upolehsan.bsky.social
🎯 Making AI less evil= human-centered + explainable + responsible AI 💼 Harvard Berkman Klein Fellow | CS Prof. @Northeastern | Data & Society 🏢 Prev-Georgia Tech, {Google, IBM, Microsoft} Research 🔬 AI, HCI, Philosophy ☕ F1, memes 🌐 upolehsan.com
My lab will be busy at COLM 2026! 1. Main conference: - Capability Provenance in Language Models: A Case Study in Social Reasoning arxiv.org/abs/2606.19625 We present a method for answering causal hypotheses about where in a dataset behaviors emerge. We apply our method to social reasoning.
Data & Society just launched Worker Lens on the AI Economy, It's asking a question I've spent almost half a decade on. So I read it closely 👀. Some parts that stood out: Most future of work studies miss the workers. Many count jobs. Far fewer ask what happens to the workers. The hype tells us...
Data & Society@datasociety.bsky.social · last wk.📣 New! Today we’re excited to launch Worker Lens on the AI Economy: a timely and ambitious new research project that will foreground workers’ experiences with and perspectives on AI, and identify opportunities to expand their power. 1/4 datasociety.net/research-lib...
This worker is not alone in feeling like this. Even cancer doctors feel like AI "button pushers". The "soul sucking" is the identity commoditization part. More? Check out this award-winning piece at #CHI2026 to learn more about how AI hollows out workers asymptomatically. bsky.app/profile/upol...
Upol Ehsan | hiring PhDs for Fall'27@upolehsan.bsky.social · 6mo agoI travelled 27 hrs, fought endless visa issues to give this talk for our award-winning paper at #CHI2026. Your turn to show up 📍 P1, Room 112, Apr 15 (Wed), 12 noon. But why? I wish the didn't impact every knowledge worker. Sadly, it does, and we need to talk about it. 1/n
“Only experts should use AI, not learners.” But what if using AI deskills experts? Oncology doctors became less skilled as they used AI in their profession. A 1 year study.
Upol Ehsan | hiring PhDs for Fall'27@upolehsan.bsky.social · 6mo agoI travelled 27 hrs, fought endless visa issues to give this talk for our award-winning paper at #CHI2026. Your turn to show up 📍 P1, Room 112, Apr 15 (Wed), 12 noon. But why? I wish the didn't impact every knowledge worker. Sadly, it does, and we need to talk about it. 1/n
This paper needs to influence HCI in a major way. Included these findings in a teacher AI literacy workshop this summer and it is one of the lasting impressions the teachers took away. They really empathized with seeing other professionals lose skill and identity and I think it shocked them.
Upol Ehsan | hiring PhDs for Fall'27@upolehsan.bsky.social · 6mo agoI travelled 27 hrs, fought endless visa issues to give this talk for our award-winning paper at #CHI2026. Your turn to show up 📍 P1, Room 112, Apr 15 (Wed), 12 noon. But why? I wish the didn't impact every knowledge worker. Sadly, it does, and we need to talk about it. 1/n
Every single paper I've ever published encodes in its words a part of me that only I know and can see: joys, tragedy, struggle, determination, relentlessness, pursuit for excellence, despondency. It's a dissonance to be able to decode something so private in a public artifact.
Went to local fair today. AI slop was everywhere. All the food vendors printed out similar looking designs, making it really hard for anyone to stand out. Food pictures were so AI'ed up that you miss the badly designed MS paint ones. Welcome to enshittification of the small joys of life.
It Really is and I’m Speaking from Experience. I didn’t plan to get sick but went to a hospital there and the visit was very inexpensive….
For those who write tenure letters: you play an important role here. For the last few years I include a statement that the funding environment is bad and while any funding wins should be celebrated, lack of fundraising success should no longer be used as a meaningful metric for tenure.
Upol Ehsan | hiring PhDs for Fall'27@upolehsan.bsky.social · 2mo agoBut will tenure committees actually calibrate expectations? www.nature.com/articles/d41...
But will tenure committees actually calibrate expectations? www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Exclusive: NSF set to issue lowest number of new grants in four decades
The US science-funding agency is withholding $1 billion of its budget so that the money can go to a special White House project.
nature.com
[Pls repost + break the filter bubble] Are there economists who are looking at the cost of long-term deskilling amongst knowledge workers caused by AI-enabled workflows? If yes, and you're interested to work on a frontier project that has tremendous funding potential, get in touch!
Not everyone has the privilege to give back. I'm grateful I can. And I've drastically changed how I do it when it comes to talks. 📍 With 60+ talks in 20+ countries, I started noticing something special during my talks in the Majority World, especially in countries like Bangladesh. 1/n
Congratulations to @upolehsan.bsky.social, who won the Georgia Tech College of Computing Doctoral Dissertation Award. The impact of his work on human-centered explainable AI (XAI) cannot be understated. The last chapter of Upol's dissertation also just won an Honorable Mention at CHI. #ProudAdvisor
As the daughter of a cancer survivor who went through radiation, the partner of a physician, an educator, and a sociotechnical researcher who loves long-term in-situ work, really appreciating @upolehsan.bsky.social presentation and can't wait to read the paper! #chi2026 dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
From Future of Work to Future of Workers: Addressing Asymptomatic AI Harms to Foster Dignified Human-AI Interaction | Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
dl.acm.org
Initial [AI-LLM] operational gains hid ``intuition rust'': the gradual dulling of expert judgment. These asymptomatic effects evolved into chronic harms, such as skill atrophy and identity commoditization.
Upol Ehsan | hiring PhDs for Fall'27@upolehsan.bsky.social · 6mo agoLearn about the "AI-as-Amplifier Paradox" at #CHI2026. Skill amplification? Or skill erosion? Or both? (CHI Honorable Mention Paper)
Upol Ehsan | hiring PhDs for Fall'27@upolehsan.bsky.social · 6mo agoI travelled 27 hrs, fought endless visa issues to give this talk for our award-winning paper at #CHI2026. Your turn to show up 📍 P1, Room 112, Apr 15 (Wed), 12 noon. But why? I wish the didn't impact every knowledge worker. Sadly, it does, and we need to talk about it. 1/n
I travelled 27 hrs, fought endless visa issues to give this talk for our award-winning paper at #CHI2026. Your turn to show up 📍 P1, Room 112, Apr 15 (Wed), 12 noon. But why? I wish the didn't impact every knowledge worker. Sadly, it does, and we need to talk about it. 1/n
Is it even CHI if the wifi works? The "Premier" venue of Human computer interaction research currently facing workshop rooms that don't have tables or extension cords. Each of us paid $1200+ to attend. Many of us traveled 27+ hours in the middle of a war. Fought months of visa wats.
As Khoury College's faculty and student researchers descend on Barcelona this week, they're asking how technology — particularly AI — can fulfill users' needs, enhance their abilities, and amplify their humanity. Read more: https://bit.ly/4miAO6t
Congrats to @upolehsan.bsky.social and team. Their CHI'26 paper won an Honorable Mention award! "From Future of Work to Future of Workers: Addressing Asymptomatic AI Harms for Dignified Human-AI Interaction" (arxiv.org/abs/2601.21920) dives into the AI-as-Amplifier paradox, explained in comic form.
From Future of Work to Future of Workers: Addressing Asymptomatic AI Harms for Dignified Human-AI Interaction
In the future of work discourse, AI is touted as the ultimate productivity amplifier. Yet, beneath the efficiency gains lie subtle erosions of human expertise and agency. This paper shifts focus from ...
arxiv.org
Lol... CS conferences that banned hybrid options are now scrambling to go hybrid given geopolitical events. Would have been nice to keep this accessible in the first place, right?
📢 Deadline (Feb 19) is just around the corner! Get those hot takes, studies, and provocations in and join the most fun workshop at #CHI2026! w/ Amal Alabdulkarim Justin Weisz Andreas Riener Min Kyung Lee @kenholstein.bsky.social #ExplainableAI #HCXAI #XAI #HCI #AI
Upol Ehsan | hiring PhDs for Fall'27@upolehsan.bsky.social · 9mo ago🚨[Pls repost!] Agentic AI is stress-testing Explainable AI. We need to fix it. That's why I'm thrilled to announce the 6th Human-Centered Explainable AI (HCXAI) workshop at CHI 2026 in Barcelona! 🚀 📝 2-5 page single column papers (excluding refs) 🗓️ Deadline: Feb 19, 2026 🔗 hcxai.jimdosite.com 1/n
🚨[Pls repost!] Agentic AI is stress-testing Explainable AI. We need to fix it. That's why I'm thrilled to announce the 6th Human-Centered Explainable AI (HCXAI) workshop at CHI 2026 in Barcelona! 🚀 📝 2-5 page single column papers (excluding refs) 🗓️ Deadline: Feb 19, 2026 🔗 hcxai.jimdosite.com 1/n
The person who knows the most about all of this is @upolehsan.bsky.social who has spent half a decade thinking about the human factors side of explainations. And if you want to know about mechanistic faithfulness of rationales and chain of thought then @sarah-nlp.bsky.social is your go-to.
aclanthology.org
OpenAI’s big idea is to teach the LLM to post-hoc explain how it solved a problem. This is an extension of chain of thought. It looks very similar in nature to “rationale generation”, an explanation technique that has been around since 2018. www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/03/1...
OpenAI has trained its LLM to confess to bad behavior
Large language models often lie and cheat. We can’t stop that—but we can make them own up.
technologyreview.com
Trump is MAGA for Mamdani. I've never seen another politician being as adept as Mamdani when it comes to coming back to the point. How is he this good? My hot take: it's his training as a rapper. Somewhere there's a thesis to be written on nerdy rappers who end up as professionals.
Zohran Kwame Mamdani@zohrankmamdani.bsky.social · 11mo agoWorking people have been left behind in New York. In the wealthiest city in the world, one in five can't afford $2.90 for the train or bus. As I told Trump today— it’s time to put those people right back at the heart of our politics.
