Augmented Mind Podcast

Yijia Shao, Shannon Shen, Michael Ryan

With AI making major waves in society people often lose focus of the reason to build such technology: uplifting humanity. The Augmented Mind Podcast highlights technical human-centered AI research contributions by interviewing the leading minds driving the human side of the AI revolution. Hosted by Yijia Shao, Shannon Shen, and Michael Ryan

Episodes

  1. 23 JAN

    Bridging Human-AI Grounding Gaps with Omar Shaikh | AM Podcast #1

    Omar Shaikh is a Stanford PhD student, HCI and NLP researcher, and author of the award-winning UIST 2025 paper “Creating General User Models from Computer Use”. Omar’s pioneering work aims to bridge the Human-AI grounding gap. Outline: 0:00 - Teaser 1:21 - Prelude: Introducing Omar Shaikh 2:07 - Monologue: Better Context for AI 4:22 - Bridging the Human-AI Grounding Gap 6:14 - Confidence scores in General User Models (GUMs) 7:32 - Calibration of General User Models 13:20 - Uses of General User Models 15:01 - Mixed Initiative Interactions 22:10 - Motivation for GUM 25:31 - Tabracadabra: tab everywhere! 27:01 - Design decisions in GUM 28:26 - Designing Interactive Experiences 32:11 - DITTO: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.00888 33:06 - Work on Domains without Existing Benchmarks 34:45 - Challenges of the GUM Project 37:26 - Privacy and Data Ownership 38:57 - Finetuning a User Model 44:09 - Mindblowing GUM Inferences 49:02 - Social Problems of GUMs 50:27 - GUM as a Reflection Tool References: Omar Shaikh’s research homepage: https://oshaikh.com/ Creating General User Models from Computer Use: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10831 Tabracadabra: https://x.com/oshaikh13/status/1967626897837494479 Aligning Language Models with Demonstrated Feedback: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.00888 Principles of Mixed-Initiative User Interfaces: https://erichorvitz.com/chi99horvitz.pdf Verification of Forecasts Expressed in Terms of Probability: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/mwre/78/1/1520-0493_1950_078_0001_vofeit_2_0_co_2.xml  Podcast Links: Podcast website: https://augmented-mind.github.io/ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/augmented-mind-podcast/id1868102170 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/40KculkYTe2tOpqJm6TAYr?si=PU_UncsMT4mXjVNCRwoXog RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/10dbf5b7c/podcast/rss About the Hosts: The AM Podcast is hosted by Yijia Shao, Shannon Shen, and Michael Ryan, CS PhD students at Stanford University and MIT.

    52 min

  2. 21 JAN

    Introducing The Augmented Mind: A Podcast for Technical Human-centered AI

    Introducing The Augmented Mind Podcast (The AM Podcast). We explore techniques for building AI models that collaborate with people and augment human intelligence. In Episode 0, we share who we are, why we started this podcast, and what we're looking forward to. Outline: 0:00 - Prelude: the problems we care about 1:48 - Host introduction 2:03 - Why we started the AM Podcast 2:31 - Hot takes on human-centered AI 2:45 - Hot take #1: learning on outcome rewards over long horizons will directly solve human-agent collaboration 3:00 - The Bitter Lesson 3:53 - How to define rewards is a human problem 4:50 - Empathetic AI 5:48 - Hot take #2: even with an automation-vs-augmentation view, as AI gets stronger, there will be less for us to work on 6:09 - Creative Destruction 7:21 - Task vs. goal 10:45 - Format of our podcast 11:28 - Unique technical challenges in human-centered AI 11:43 - Example #1: human variation 13:58 - Example #2: revolution of annotation and data collection 15:10 - Example #3: making sense of noisy data 16:45 - Let the journey begin! External Clips Referenced: Eric Horvitz; 1:02:38 - 1:03:07 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddjNTxtyEnw Fei-Fei Li ; 12:40 - 12:58 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=be0gLzeBX5w Podcast Links: Podcast website: https://augmented-mind.github.io/ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/augmented-mind-podcast/id1868102170 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/40KculkYTe2tOpqJm6TAYr?si=PU_UncsMT4mXjVNCRwoXog RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/10dbf5b7c/podcast/rss About the Hosts: The AM Podcast is hosted by Yijia Shao, Shannon Shen, and Michael Ryan, CS PhD students at Stanford University and MIT.

    17 min
  • 2 Episodes

About

With AI making major waves in society people often lose focus of the reason to build such technology: uplifting humanity. The Augmented Mind Podcast highlights technical human-centered AI research contributions by interviewing the leading minds driving the human side of the AI revolution. Hosted by Yijia Shao, Shannon Shen, and Michael Ryan

Information

  • Creator
    Yijia Shao, Shannon Shen, Michael Ryan
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    2
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Yijia Shao, Shannon Shen, Michael Ryan
  • Show Website
    Augmented Mind Podcast