Augmented Mind Podcast

"Maybe human is becoming one of the bottleneck for how much human can benefit from AI" For our second guest we welcome @tongshuangwu, professor at Carnegie Mellon University, whose research sits at the intersection of human-computer interaction and natural language processing. From making AI work for imperfect humans to making humans work better with AI — Sherry's work challenges us to rethink both sides of the equation. 0:00 - Teaser 1:13 - Prelude: Introducing Sherry Wu 2:30 - How the AI Field Has Changed in the Last Four Years 4:22 - Making AI Systems Work for Imperfect Humans 6:54 - Models vs. Scaffolding 10:36 - Understanding Human Imperfection in Teaching Contexts arxiv.org/abs/2509.21890 19:28 - AI Literacy Skills 22:04 - How AI Is Changing CS Education 25:38 - Suppose We Have AGI, What Does It Mean to Be Human? 29:14 - Training Models to be More Human-centered 31:46 - Checklists Are Better Than Reward Models arxiv.org/abs/2507.18624 36:56 - Challenge in Aligning Models 43:22 - Advice for Interdisciplinary Research 45:37 - Reflection on Her Own Research

Since I started working on AI research, I've deeply cared about how AI can augment and empower people. It was often the case that final, real-world model usage was an afterthought after development, rather than something deeply integrated in the model training and evaluation. But as models have grown increasingly powerful, we're seeing lots of technical advances and fascinating research throughout the model dev stack--they are easier to use, and start to become collaborative. It’s an extraordinary time to work on human AI collaboration: it’s never been simpler to build practically useful AI applications and deliver to a large pool of users; but it’s also a time of doubt and questions: what is the role of research/academia in this direction, and what to work on next? It turned out these thoughts are shared among us – when I started to talk to @EchoShao8899 last year, we immediately connected. We wanted to reflect this field holistically to understand what are the critical challenges and how to advance in this direction. Together with @michaelryan207 , we decided to start this journey and try out something that we'd never done before — starting a podcast — which, retrospectively, was such a cool decision that we made that afternoon walking on the Stanford campus. We’ve had a lot of interesting discussions and thoughts in the past few months, and I am genuinely impressed by how much our three-person crew can put together in such a short time. We can’t wait to share what we have with y’all! As we wrote in the opening script, this is a journey to find the answers. The destination matters, but so does the journey. Please join us and let's explore together :)