Human Technology Interaction

This course is dedicated to providing engineering students with a comprehensive understanding of how humans interact with technology. The course borrows its name from “Human Computer Interaction,” but, technology is not just limited to traditional computers anymore. In fact, it is embedded in our lives through wearables, smartphones, advanced driver assistance systems, social media, etc. Thus, the course takes a multi-modal approach involving the use of bio-sensors, computer vision, and electro-mechanical sensors to detect and model changes in human physiological and behavioral responses (such as but not limited to neural activity, facial expressions, heart-rate variability, pupillometry, and galvanic skin response), human ergonomics, and human cognition as humans interact with technology around us.

Students will explore critical topics such as human factors, ergonomics, cognition, affective computing, and human-centered AI. The course will explore practical applications including wearables, autonomous vehicles, and robotics, emphasizing design principles and engineering solutions. Through case studies and real-world examples, students will learn to design technologies that enhance usability, safety, and user experience. Additionally, the course will address the ethical and technical challenges in developing human-centric technologies, providing strategies for innovative solutions. The course will be closely aligned with the requirements of Industry by studying strategies to enhance safety, productivity, and creativity for individuals in their environments (spanning the full spectrum from blue-collar workers 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.

• The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
  ISBN: 978-0465050659
• Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler
  ISBN: 978-1592535873
• Affective Computing by Rosalind W Picard
  ISBN: 978-0262661157
• How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
  ISBN: 978-0544133310
• Interaction Design: Beyond Human Computer Interaction by Yvonne Rogers, Helen Sharp, and Jennifer Preece, Sixth Edition
  ISBN: 978-1119901099
• Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World by Carl T Bergstrom and Jevin D West
  ISBN: 978-0525509189

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