Talk by Dan Russell on People, AI and online research

Title

 People, AI and online research

Abstract

Given all of the press that LLMs have garnered, it’s worthwhile asking if they’re changing the ways people find information.  Are LLMs pulling traffic away from the search engines?  Just as importantly, how do regular people think about the quality of information they get from their favorite AI systems?  One key lesson of my research into the UX of AI systems over the past 30 years is that people don’t really understand what AI is, how it works, or what it means for them. I’ll review some successes and failures of earlier research approaches, what we should learn from these decades of practice at the boundary between human experience and the use of intelligent systems, and where AI systems will change knowledge practices in the future

Bio 

Dr. Daniel M. Russell has been working in Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer Interaction for nearly 40 years. He has worked at several of the top technology invention companies in Silicon Valley (Google, Apple, Xerox, IBM) and has been at the forefront of many of their innovations.  He currently teaches in the Human-AI group at Stanford’s Computer Science department and at the University of Zürich.  Dan was in the core search engineering team at Google for over 17 years.  He has written over 200 technical articles for professional journals as well many articles for the popular press.  His most recent book, The Joy of Search: A Google Insider’s Guide to Going Beyond the Basics, is now out in paperback.  He has taught over 1,000 classes in-person in venues ranging from 4th grade classes to professional classes for reference librarians at the Library of Congress.  He has been on the faculty at Stanford, the University of Maryland, the University of Santa Clara and serves on multiple boards of information schools. His online classes have been watched by millions of students for an accumulated watch-time of > 450 years.