What is HXRL?
The Human-Experience Research Lab (HXRL) works on Computing for Social Good. Specifically, we focus on designing, building, and evaluating computational technologies as they relate to the human condition and reflecting on how these technologies affect society. Addressing national social matters within the HXR Lab enables us to work with various departments, such as political science, psychology, business, engineering, sociology, history, and athletics. We also collaborate beyond the university’s borders, working with state and federal government offices and many other organizations.
Our research covers a variety of areas, including voting/elections technologies, fairness/bias in AI, advanced learning technologies, culturally relevant computing or ethnocomputing, privacy/security, usability and accessibility. The goal is to build innovative solutions to real-world problems by integrating people, information, culture, policy, and technology to address societal issues.
What is Human-Centered Computing?
Human-Centered Computing is focused on understanding how to make computational technologies more useable and how computational technologies affect society. Human-Centered Computing is research that focuses on humans first and then technology. Technology is integrated into human life as a tool. "Human-Centered Computing addresses problems that the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) does not generally address. In HCC the focus is not only on interaction, but also on the design of algorithms and systems with a human focus from start to finish." (HCM 2006) "Research in human-centered computing has multiple goals. Some researchers focus on understanding humans, both as individuals and in social groups, by focusing on the ways that human beings adopt, adapt, and organize their lives around computational technologies. Others focus on developing new design strategies for computational artifacts.
Human-centered design of computational tools attempts to address problems that traditional human computer interaction heuristics, which often include measurements of productivity and efficiency, do not generally address. For example, designing computational tools for spirituality, for fun, and for pleasure are some non-traditional design problems that are of interest to HCC researchers." (Wikipedia) "Human-centered computing (HCC) studies the design, development, and deployment of mixed-initiative human-computer systems. It embodies a "systems view" that includes computational tools, cognitive and social systems, and physical facilities and environment. HCC inherits the complexity of software engineering and systems integration, plus modeling of human-machine, human-information (NG), and human-human interaction. Advances in theory and modeling require systematic data on such interactions in realistically complex environments." (Intelligent Systems Project of NASA). In summary, HCC designs systems, products, etc. using behavior, culture, personality and other human traits.
