Elisa gave her PhD seminar talk titled “Human-AI Interaction and Alignment in Engineering Design: An Exploration of Behavioral, Cognitive, and Neurocognitive Perspectives” (abstract below)!
ABSTRACT: Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly enable opportunities for providing real-time support to human designers during early-stage design. Novel interactions afforded by these systems (e.g., retrieval of visually similar designs based on sketched inputs) raise fundamental questions regarding their influence on designers’ behaviors, cognitive processes, and design outcomes. For these interactions to be effective, human and AI perspectives should align such that designers’ intentions and expectations are accurately interpreted by AI. My doctoral work explored the interaction and alignment between human and AI systems during design across a series of empirical studies. Through behavioral investigations, I first examined the use of a custom multi-modal AI interface to support concept generation and design space exploration using computational prediction of design behaviors resulting from AI interventions. In a cognitive study on human similarity perceptions, I then compared how humans and AI define similarities between designs, identifying criteria for aligning AI to human representations in design tools. Applying a novel neuroimaging approach, I lastly showed how brain signals during word generation positively align with word representations by large language models (LLMs), indicating the potential for LLMs to directly interface with human thought during design. Across these studies, my work has contributed to understanding and informing effective human interaction with AI in engineering design.