UW's Amy X. Zhang brings CSCW theory to human-agent collaboration in Stanford talk
amyxzh · x · 2026-10-21
At Stanford's HCI seminar (Oct 23, open to the public), UW professor Amy X. Zhang argues that decades of CSCW research on human team coordination — shared artifacts, mutual awareness, formalization of social requirements — can guide the design of human-agent systems.
She presents a series of systems: Cocoa (flexible delegation of agency between humans and agents around a shared notebook-like artifact), Ream (a workspace with mutual awareness of human and agent activity), Compass (continuously aligning feed algorithms to changing preferences), and Social-RAG (aligning an agent into a team's social norms). She closes by calling for "sociotechnical institutional design" research, with a case study drawing on case law for precedent-aligned AI systems.
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