Meet a Data Scientist presents Ching-Hua Chuan 12/8

The Meet a Data Scientist series is a chance to get up close and personal with top-level data science professionals. Join us for a talk with Prof. Ching-Hua Chuan whose research interests include artificial intelligence, machine learning, and music information retrieval with a focus on human-centered computing.

The purpose of the Meet a Data Scientist lecture series is to introduce our audience to the people behind the data, their lives, interests, career choices, their work, and passion for how they can use data to solve grand challenges in their respective fields. Join us as we peer behind the curtain and meet the data scientists behind the data! This lecture series is co-sponsored by the Miami Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and is free and open to the public.

Registration Link forthcoming |  Wednesday, Dec. 8, 2021, 12:00-1:00 PM

TALK TITLE: Human-Machine Collaboration and Communication

One of the key controversies regarding AI centers on how AI systems and automation will replace humans. In this talk, Dr. Chuan will share her various interdisciplinary projects that highlight the collaboration between human and machine. As a computer scientist by training, Dr. Chuan’s work focuses on creating new algorithms and new ways to represent information and knowledge in different media and interactions, with the goal to create computing systems that are able to (1) understand the semantic meanings in complex data and make accurate interpretations, and (2) interact and collaborate with humans to achieve something no humans or machines can perform alone.

Dr. Chuan uses computational approaches to understand and predict how people perceive various media content, including text, speech, music, video, and movement. Specifically, this talk will focus on her projects in three key fields: music, education, and communication. Focusing on music information retrieval, she has created computational tools to inspire creativity in music composition from amateur musicians. She is currently working with a group of faculty across various disciplines at UM to create a smart ecosystem that provides personalized music experience for mood regulation. For education applications, she has worked with scholars in deaf education to create an app that recognizes American Sign Language to assist families with children who are deaf or hard of hearing to learn sign language together. In the field of communication, she used deep learning to create a conversational agent (i.e., chatbot) that delivers personalized, user-friendly information about clinical trials to patients and their families. Most recently, she has developed a mobile app intervention to help users form eco-friendly habits.

As Connolly argued in his recent article–Why Computing Belongs within the Social Sciences–“computing as a discipline is becoming progressively more entangled within the human and social lifeworld.” Through this talk, Dr. Chuan aims to inspire more interdisciplinary collaborations that focus on the nexus of human-centered computing, interactive communication, and design.

About Ching-Hua

Ching-Hua Chuan is an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media at the University of Miami. She received her PhD in computer science from the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, and her BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University.

She has served on the program committees of many organizations including AAAI and the International Society of Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR).

Dr. Chuan was the recipient of the best new investigator paper award at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in 2010. Her interdisciplinary work with communication scholars has applied computational approaches to social science research and has won the top faculty paper award from the Public Relations Society of America (2018) and the American Academy of Advertising research fellowship (2020).

Through her collaborations with scholars across different fields, she aims to augment the power of computing for social change and adopts an interdisciplinary approach to studying the impacts of technological advances, from mixed reality to artificial intelligence, on society.