Ken Holstein

I am an Assistant Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where I direct the CMU CoALA Lab. In addition to my position at CMU, I am an inaugural member of the Partnership on AI’s Global Task Force for Inclusive AI. I am also part of Northwestern’s Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence (CASMI), the Microsoft Research AI & Society Fellows, and the Jacobs Foundation’s CERES network.

My research focuses broadly on participatory and expertise-driven approaches to AI design, development, and evaluation, with a particular interest in AI's impacts on human workers. I draw on approaches from human–computer interaction (HCI), AI, design, cognitive science, learning sciences, statistics, and machine learning, among other areas.

I am deeply interested in: (1) understanding the gaps between human and artificial intelligence across a range of contexts, and (2) using this knowledge to design systems that respect human work, elevating human expertise and on-the-ground knowledge rather than diminishing it. To support these goals, my research develops new methods and tools to incorporate diverse human expertise across the AI development lifecycle.

My work has been generously supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), CMU’s Block Center for Technology and Society, Northwestern’s CASMI & UL Research Institutes, PwC, Public Interest Technology University Network, Notre-Dame IBM Technology Ethics Lab, Microsoft Research, Google Research, Amazon Research, Cisco Research, Jacobs Foundation, Institute for Education Sciences (IES), CMU’s Metro21 Smart Cities Institute, and Prolific.

You can find my recent publications on my Google Scholar page and my CV.