REU Site: The DUB REU Program for Human-Centered Computing Research

Technology should be designed to serve people and society. When we fail to make people the focus of our technologies, we run the risk of designing software and hardware that ignores our ethics, our privacy, or even our rights. This REU Site addresses a lack of human-centered scientists, analysts, developers, accessibility experts, and designers in the US computing workforce. Specifically, this REU Site provides undergraduate students with valuable training and research experiences to help them become independent and mindful contributors to society. This REU Site is part of a grassroots alliance of human-centered researchers and practitioners at the University of Washington called Design Use Build (DUB). Participating REU students will gain a broader understanding of human-centered computing research, gain real-world experience applying human-centered and design methodology to challenging research problems, and develop their technical communication, project management, critical thinking, and independent research skills. The research projects under this REU Site span a wide range of areas of computer science, including AI, machine learning, data science, accessibility, security and privacy, software engineering, databases, robotics, and fabrication. The throughline that ties these projects together is the emphasis on designing hardware and software to enhance human capabilities and agency rather than replace human intelligence. Example projects include: interviewing developers on how they build high quality software and developing corresponding frameworks for measuring code quality; reviewing the literature on how the general public reasons about algorithms so algorithm designers can make them more intuitive; building guardrails around large language models so they can be used for fact-checked content generation; measuring changes in perceived text quality given the disclosure of AI involvement in its generation; and designing programmable media for youth to address structural forms of exclusion such as accessibility, language fluency, and neurodiversity. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.