Courses
These classes will be taught again starting in the 2027-2028 academic year. Interested students can submit petitions through my.harvard and find more instructions on the respective Canvas pages once they are live. Harvard undergraduates and graduate students interested in doing a CS 91R or CS 2990R, respectively, with Elena should email her directly.
CS 1780 / CS 2780: Usable Interactive Systems
Students learn critical techniques, concepts, and technologies for building usable novel interactive systems, alone and in teams. Assignments provide hands-on experiences with different modern frameworks, platforms, and libraries while conceptual commonalities and distinctions are annotated and explained at multiple levels, from the programming environments to the interfaces users interact with. Discussions grounded in readings will also cover human cognitive capabilities, iterative prototyping, and human-AI interaction. The final research project requires iteratively designing and building a novel interactive system informed by pilot user studies and a final evaluation with target users. Designed for advanced undergraduates. Designed for PhD students interested in HCI or using interactive systems as tools for discovery in other fields.
CS 2790R: Research Topics in Human-Computer Interaction
Students will read, write about, prepare presentations about, and discuss human-computer interaction (HCI) and HCI-relevant work with a focus on papers about interfaces and automation that work especially well with (or clash against) human cognitive capabilities. Papers will primarily be on the building and evaluation of novel systems, as well as theories of and studies characterizing human cognition relevant to human-AI interaction scenarios. As a semester-long final project, students will pursue a research project of their own design in self-organized groups and present their findings in writing and orally in a conference-style format, as means to understand more deeply the processes behind HCI research.