Human-centered Artificial Intelligence; Social Computing; User experience; User-centered design

My research currently focuses on human-centered artificial intelligence. I am now an associate researcher at the CENIA Basal Center (National Center of Artificial Intelligence) and a principal investigator in the Millenium Nucleus Futures of Artificial Intelligence and its socio-cultural implications in Chile and Latin America. In both, I study the intersection between people and artificial intelligence. On the one hand, I study how citizens conceptualize, understand, and interact with AI. On the other hand, I explore ways AI developers can incorporate ethical aspects into the development process.

Previously, my work centered on the design and empirical evaluation of social technologies and their implications for citizens. During my doctoral work, I undertook a mixed-method investigation of e-democracy.org, one of the oldest, still active web platforms, to encourage and support citizen discussion about local politics in the USA. I conducted digital trace analysis, manual and automatic content classification, social network analysis, surveys, and interviews to assess the influence of online and offline factors on the sustainability of e-democracy online groups over time. Since then, I have combined quantitative and qualitative research methods to address research questions related to system design and people's involvement in technological platforms.

My scientific production includes 8 WOS articles. Scopus has indexed 51 of my papers. During my eight years at UTFSM, five graduate and 23 undergraduate students have graduated under my supervision. I have been a committee member in 12 graduate theses and 14 undergraduate exams. I regularly serve as a reviewer for Fondef, Becas Chile, six international conferences, and two international journals. I am currently serving as General Co-chair of ACM CSCW 2024. I am also active in the network of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) researchers in Latin America. I serve on the Steering Committee of Women in Computing Event in Chile. I also participate in several public outreach activities discussing AI's implications for people, including AI ethics and biases.

More info at: https://claudialopezmoncada.com

Product 1: R&D AI project for and with female entrepreneurs associations
Title A human-centered approach to build equitable recommendations
Doi https://www.inf.utfsm.cl/noticias/414-investigacion-fondos-covid19-anid
This project focuses on building Aliadas, a virtual platform to increase associativity among female micro-entrepreneurs during and after the pandemic. The platform uses serendipity in recommendation mechanisms to promote the entrepreneurs’ visibility equitably and articulate job networks in local communities. Feminization of poverty, care work, and vulnerability have increased due to the pandemic. Even though Facebook and Instagram allow entrepreneurship advertisement, their algorithms tend to make the rich richer. A few popular initiatives become extremely popular, while the rest falls into practical online invisibility. That does not offer a collective sustainable solution for our fragile local economies. Along with a multidisciplinary team and two associations of female micro-entrepreneurs, we are working to connect entrepreneurs’ needs to the design of Aliadas’ user experience and recommender systems to offer an alternative that promotes equity and collective support among women.

This project pioneers the use of AI to fight one kind of structural inequality: the feminization of poverty. To do so, the project proposes and develops a human-centered approach to building an AI-based system. Its recommender system uses diversity as an objective variable (besides relevance) to lead to more equitable distributions of visibility and connections among female entrepreneurs. The methodology involves the main users (female entrepreneurs) as the system’s co-designers and evaluators. Our co-design practices and impact evaluation methods will be informative to advance the efforts on human-centered AI. This project was selected for funding (along with 62 other proposals, with more than a thousand applications) in the Contest for Rapid Assignment of Resources for Research Projects about Coronavirus of the Chilean National Agency of Research and Development (ANID).

Product 2:
Title ACM SIGCHI in Latin America
ACM SIGCHI en América Latina
Doi http://interactions.acm.org/blog/view/cscw-research-latin-america
In 2018, I was selected to participate in a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Across Borders event that congregated 16 young and senior HCI researchers from Latin America. The ACM Special Interest Group on HCI organized this event. The goal was to articulate a network of researchers who can strengthen the HCI discipline in the region. Since then, I have organized and participated in the region's HCI events (research methods, proposal writing, and research dissemination). These efforts seek to educate more students and researchers on HCI in Latin America, strengthen the discipline’s position within Computer Science (CS) departments, and increase the impact of Latin American research on the international community. In 2021, I served as general co-chair of the Latin American Conference on HCI (CLIHC). I am currently the General Co-Chair of ACM CSCW, which will take place in Latin America for the first time.

HCI is fundamental to building sustainable technology; however, it is a young discipline in CS, especially in Latin America. Since 2018, I have been key in building and maintaining a regional network of HCI researchers. We play a similar role in our research ecosystems. We advocate for human-centered technology development, where people’s capabilities, goals, and contexts are systematically studied to build better solutions. Our human-centered AI research line has its roots in HCI. Our Latin American HCI research network will be instrumental in extending the Institute’s influence beyond Chile and reaching impact on the region. It will allow us to conduct large-scale projects to replicate studies in different Latin American locations, thus strengthening the scientific evidence we can produce.

Product 3: Collaboration
Títle 5-year academic partnership for digital transformation: Scotiabank - UTFSM
This collaboration aims to strengthen our Informatics Engineering students’ education to build safe and human-centered information systems. The main pillars of this collaboration are artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and human-centered software development. I am co-leading the latter. We have built a user experience (UX) laboratory in Valparaíso and will soon start building another one in Santiago through this partnership. These labs are physical spaces dedicated to designing, exploring, and assessing the impact of information technology design on users. We count on technology to record and analyze users’ interactions with technology and train our students in human-centered techniques. Other efforts of this project aim to address gender diversity in STEM and effective communication and ethics in computing.

This project is essential as it is a large-scale, ambitious project to explore a closer collaboration between academia and an actor of the national industry. My role will be to generate infrastructure and capabilities to support human-centered design and evaluations of information technologies. The UX facilities we are building in our university will be available for the Institute’s projects. Additionally, I think this partnership and our involvement with the financial industry can become a fruitful context to conduct studies related to the implications of AI-based systems proposed by the Institute.