{"id":2287,"date":"2023-08-26T10:56:19","date_gmt":"2023-08-26T10:56:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/?p=2287"},"modified":"2024-02-26T14:03:21","modified_gmt":"2024-02-26T14:03:21","slug":"meet-ching-hua-chuan-artificial-intelligence-advocate-with-a-human-centered-approach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/meet-ching-hua-chuan-artificial-intelligence-advocate-with-a-human-centered-approach\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet Ching-Hua Chuan: Artificial Intelligence Advocate with a Human-Centered Approach"},"content":{"rendered":"

The analytical side of Ching-Hua Chuan<\/strong>\u2019s brain led her to leave her native Taiwan to study computer science in the U.S. But it was the artistic side of her brain that helped her discover where she would fit into that massive field of study.<\/p>\n

\"Ching-HuaChuan convinced her mother to buy her a guitar when she was 12. By the time she was in college, she was playing in all-female bands like \u201cGood Citizen,\u201d banging her head while playing \u201cZombie\u201d by the Cranberries, and carefully strumming her acoustic guitar on folk songs. Then one day, as a Ph.D. student at the University of Southern California far from her bandmates back home, Chuan had an idea. What if she could train a computer to create her own band? Rather than simply identify or play back songs already in existence, Chuan wondered if she could teach a computer how a specific musician played and then create new music in the same style.<\/p>\n

Chuan, now as assistant professor at the University of Miami, explained: \u201cIn the beginning, I was totally selfish. I built that system for myself.\u201d But that work ended up impressing her advisers so much that it became the focus of her Ph.D. dissertation. The program was capable of learning chord progressions, rhythmic patterns, and specific keys used by different musicians. The ultimate goal was to teach a computer how a particular piece of music feels to a human and recreate that feeling.<\/p>\n

\u201cI analyze music from a human\u2019s perspective,\u201d said Chuan, who dedicated her dissertation to her mother. \u201cEven if you don\u2019t have formal musical training, you can feel, \u2018This song sounds happy.\u2019 Those are the things that we humans process very naturally. Those are the things we want to study.\u201d<\/p>\n

That work launched Chuan on a career studying \u201chuman-centered computing,\u201d where she hopes to serve as a bridge between the technical world of artificial intelligence (AI) and the very human world of its users and those who are impacted by the technology. Chuan has been an assistant professor in the Department of Interactive Media<\/a> of the University of Miami\u2019s School of Communication since 2021, but her goal of finding the humanity in AI helped her land a joint appointment with the Frost Institute for Data Science & Computing<\/a> starting this fall.<\/p>\n

\"KimKim Grinfeder<\/strong>, director of Creative Technologies and the XR Initiative at IDSC, said Chuan\u2019s interdisciplinary culture, her pioneering work in multiple fields, and her superior computational skills, make her an ideal addition to IDSC. \u201cIDSC’s focus on Human-Centered Computing, mirroring Dr. Chuan’s interests in AI, intelligent agents, and human-machine communication, provides an alignment that fosters scholarly growth,\u201d Grinfeder said.<\/p>\n

IDSC Director Nick Tsinoremas said those skills will allow Chuan to serve as a bridge between several IDSC programs from Human Centered Design and Computing to Data Ethics to AI and Machine Learning. \u201cI am extremely excited to welcome Ching-Hua into the faculty at IDSC. Her research in explainable AI and generative AI for social good brings tremendous expertise while addressing real-world problems in the current fast-moving space of AI and its role in our society,\u201d Tsinoremas said.<\/p>\n

Chuan views her role at IDSC as that of an artificial intelligence advocate, using the skills she\u2019s learned to translate the power of AI for non-experts. AI has long been the stuff of science fiction and theoretical research, but over the past year, text and image generators have brought AI into the mainstream. That AI revolution also has led to countless questions about the power of AI and the ethics of deploying it. Chuan is a loud critic of AI technologies that can cause harm, but she doesn\u2019t want the fear of the unknown stifling this critical field of research.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a huge gap between
\npeople who know the technology
\nand the general population who don\u2019t.
\nI want to close that gap.”<\/h5>\n

\u201cThere is a huge gap between people who know the technology and the general population who don\u2019t. I want to close that gap,\u201d she said. \u201cI want to translate from the technical perspective and translate that into something that people understand, to empower the community, to not be afraid of this technology but to take advantage of this technology.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her career provides a glimpse into what that can mean. Chuan has helped design systems that are more useful, and friendly, to their human users. For example, she created AI-powered Extended Reality (XR) training systems that can facilitate various assembly tasks, such as showing new automobile factory workers how to do their jobs. This XR application allowed workers to \u201csee\u201d what they were supposed to do rather than simply reading each step in a manual. Distinct from prior XR training systems that simply shut down when people made a mistake or skipped a step, Chuan added AI to the system so that it corrects errors, reminds users of missed steps, and serves as more of a teacher than a static manual.<\/p>\n

\"Automotive<\/p>\n

Chuan has also studied the interactions between humans and chatbots to see how they can be more useful to people. There, she realized that humans weren\u2019t satisfied even when the chatbot\u2019s responses were accurate and helpful because people also have emotional needs. For instance, sometimes angry customers just wanted someone to vent to. However, when communicating with a chatbot, \u201cYou don\u2019t feel like, \u2018Finally somebody understands my issue,\u2019\u201d she said. Based on her studies on medical chatbots, Chuan found that \u201cempathetic\u201d chatbots were quite helpful. And there\u2019s a level of stereotyping that humans prefer the female persona for \u201ccustomer service\u201d or \u201cempathetic\u201d chatbots. \u00a0\u201cYou think about Siri, Alexa, they are female voices,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\"American<\/p>\n

In all of her research, that human-centered approach is always key. She has continued studying how humans react to music to better train computers to \u201cperceive\u201d the same way. She has worked on programs that help users learn American Sign Language via interactive games. And she has studied how advancements in AI have been portrayed in news articles to gauge how the public is being informed of the fast-moving developments.<\/p>\n

Now with her formal appointment with IDSC, Chuan is eager to see what comes next. The Institute has long pushed an interdisciplinary approach, urging researchers to collaborate with new scientists in different fields to see what develops.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s what I appreciate the most about IDSC and UM,\u201d Chuan said. \u201cThere are a lot of opportunities to work together. I\u2019m excited about that.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Story by Alan R. Gomez<\/a><\/p>\n

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The analytical side of Ching-Hua Chuan\u2019s brain led her to leave her native Taiwan to study computer science in the U.S. But it was the artistic side of her brain that helped her discover where she would fit into that massive field of study.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2090,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[508,731],"tags":[902,901,754,739,191,199],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2287"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2287"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2528,"href":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2287\/revisions\/2528"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}