Human Technology Interaction

Computer Interaction but extending well beyond traditional computers. Technology is now embedded across wearables, smartphones, advanced driver assistance systems, and social media, and the course reflects this breadth through a multi-modal approach.

Students learn to use bio-sensors, computer vision, and electro-mechanical sensors to detect and model human physiological and behavioral responses including neural activity, facial expressions, heart rate variability, pupillometry, and galvanic skin response. Core topics include human factors, ergonomics, cognition, affective computing, and human-centered AI. Practical applications span wearables, autonomous vehicles, and robotics, with emphasis on design principles, engineering solutions, usability, safety, and user experience. The course also addresses ethical and technical challenges in developing human-centric technologies.

Industry relevance is central: the course studies strategies to enhance safety, productivity, and creativity across the full spectrum of working environments, from blue-collar to information workers.

This course is divided into three modules. The first module of the course (Week 1-4) narrates the fundamental concepts around HTI such as Human Factors and Ergonomics, HCI, Design Thinking, UX, etc. An understanding of these fundamental concepts is needed to understand the parameters that should be accounted for while designing HTI interfaces. The second module of the course (Week 5-11) revolves around Affective Computing. This module dives into the fundamental theory of emotions and affects, data collection through various kinds of sensors, sentiment analysis, multimodal data fusion, and generation & expressions of human emotions. It is critical to understand from the user’s subjective perspective about how they are “actually feeling” when interacting with technology. This module will include working with text, speech, facial expressions, gestures, and physiological data to interpret human emotions and affects. Finally, the last module (Week 12-15) will weave the first two modules together to first discuss the role social media plays in human lives and shaping our online behavior and collective intelligence. It will then discuss the ethical considerations as we develop Human-AI interactive tools which are also changing the way we work and our workplaces. Thus, we will study safety, productivity, and creativity in industrial settings as well as for information workers using tools studied in the first two modules.

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By the end of this course, each student will have had the opportunity to:

• Engage in hands-on working with human physiological and behavioral data.
• Explore pattern recognition methods on the data for extracting “bio-markers” and applying signal
• processing and machine learning models on them.
• Demonstrate the ability to find real-world problems where they could use the above methods to build
• robust solutions.
• Apply the above statistical techniques to build real-world applications.
• Evaluate the efficacy of the developed solutions to make them more robust and scalable.
• Create a prototype that utilizes the concepts from the course to solve a real-world problem.
• Articulate the characteristics and efficiency of their prototype as to how it works better than existing solutions.

I know my dear students, how much you “like” reading books. Thus, here is a curated list of books that I hope you will “actually” read and find joy in.

• The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman (ISBN: 9780465050659)
• Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler (ISBN: 9781592535873)
• Affective Computing by Rosalind W Picard (ISBN: 978-0262661157)
• How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett (ISBN: 9780544133310)
• Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction by Yvonne Rogers, Helen Sharp, and Jennifer Preece, Sixth Edition (ISBN: 978-1119901099)

Additional resources and readings will be updated timely on the course website.