"Lawless Progress on Wicked Problems”: Shifting the Roles of Humans in Human-AI Systems

Inside the event

Title: "Lawless Progress on Wicked Problems”: Shifting the Roles of Humans in Human-AI Systems Speaker: Abe Davis, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Cornell University Abstract: AI is rapidly changing the roles that humans play as developers and users of new technology. In this talk, I will discuss three of those shifting roles and how my group addresses them through technical innovation and interdisciplinary design. Across these projects, understanding human roles is central to determining what systems should optimize, what data they need, and how they can be trusted. Humans as objective functions: Many real-world applications involve optimizing user-specific objectives, but users’ descriptions can be vague, inconsistent, or self-contradictory. I will discuss Interactive Explainable Ranking (Best Paper, CHI 2026), which combines optimization, AI, and interaction design to help users identify and resolve contradictions in how they evaluate items—from open-ended course projects to purchasing options or contestants in a competition to find the best cat. Humans as a source of data: AI is only effective if we have the right data, and many important applications depend on specific or individualized data captured in uncontrolled settings. Projects in my group design systems that help people capture such data with mobile devices. This work connects capture guidance, sampling theory, computational imaging, and interaction design to support downstream learning, with applications spanning remote healthcare, infrastructure, and agriculture. Humans as adversaries: Some advances in AI carry significant potential for harm, calling for new approaches to protect against adversarial use. Video forensics is particularly challenging. I will discuss coded illumination systems that add near-imperceptible watermarks to lighting in high-stakes environments, making manipulation in recorded videos easier to detect without access to or control over recording cameras. Speaker Bio: Abe Davis is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University, where his group works at the intersection of human-AI systems and visual computing. He earned his Ph.D. in EECS at MIT. His dissertation received the Sprowls Award for Best PhD Thesis in Computer Science at MIT and an ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Honorable Mention. He has received the NSF CAREER Award and a Sloan Research Fellowship, published award-winning papers across visual computing and HCI, and been recognized in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 and Business Insider’s 50 Scientists Who Are Changing the World.