Vibing with your AI
This talk examines how people understand and relate to conversational AI, tracing a shift from metaphor-based mental models to deliberately designed AI personalities. Drawing on years of research published across ACM CHI, CSCW, TOCHI, and CUI, it shows how users’ perceptions of voice and conversational interfaces have evolved from tools or simplistic agents to social actors with distinct “vibes.” I demonstrate how early metaphors, such as AI as a child, butler, or friend, laid the conceptual groundwork for today’s personality-driven design enabled by large language models, where traits such as agreeableness or openness can be systematically tuned. The talk concludes by surfacing both the design opportunities and ethical risks of this shift, including trust calibration, emotional manipulation, and transparency, and argues for more responsible, human-centered approaches to AI personality design.

About our speaker
Smit Desai is an Assistant Professor in the College of Arts, Media and Design (CAMD) at Northeastern University, with joint appointments in Art + Design and Communication Studies and an affiliated appointment in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. He directs the Conversational Human–AI Interactions (CHAI) Lab, which investigates how people understand, trust, and collaborate with conversational AI—and how these systems can be designed to augment human capabilities and support meaningful interactions.

Smit’s research bridges theory and design practice: he examines users’ mental models through methods such as metaphor analysis and persona design, and applies these insights to build next-generation conversational agents. His current projects span healthcare (AI assistants for serious illness conversations in emergency departments), aging and well-being (voice-first reminiscence systems like Memory Box), and everyday collaboration (LLM-powered chatbots that adapt to user personality). Across these efforts, his work emphasizes human-centered AI principles, transparency, and the social consequences of giving machines personalities and roles.

His work has appeared in premier HCI venues including CHI, CSCW, and TOCHI. He serves on the organizing committee for the ACM SIGCHI Conversational User Interfaces Conference (2024-2026), ACM CHI (2026), and leads workshops on ethical conversational persona design at major HCI conferences. Smit received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

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Bringing Digital Empathy to Conversational AI Agents
Empathy is central to everyday interactions and enables stronger collaboration, leadership, and communication. Extending this human capacity to conversational AI can raise engagement and satisfaction, but it also brings risks such as dependency and overreliance. This talk shares recent efforts at Microsoft Research to map the many forms of digital empathy and highlights the opportunities and challenges of building it into conversational agents.

About our speaker
Javier Hernandez is a Principal Researcher in the Interactive Multimodal Futures group at Microsoft Research and an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing journal. Javier’s research focuses on how future AI agents can collaborate effectively by understanding users more deeply and adapting to their context. Before Microsoft, he was a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab, where he earned his Ph.D. in the Affective Computing group. His work, spanning mental health support, emotion-aware technology, and user-centered AI, has received multiple best paper awards and has been featured in National Geographic and The Economists.

Naviagation: Enter the building through this gate and take left.

Nearest T station is Ruggles on Orange line and Northeastern University on Green line