Saleema Amershi

I'm a PhD candidate in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington advised by James Fogarty. During my time in grad school, I've also had the opportunity to work with some amazing people at Google Research, Microsoft Research (VIBE, ASI and TEM) and IBM Research. I'm also a member and former student coordinator of the DUB group, an interdisciplinary human-computer interaction group at the University of Washington that includes faculty, graduate students and researchers from departments across campus as well as local industrial research labs.

I have a M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia where I worked at The Laboratory for Computational Intelligence with Cristina Conati on a machine learning-based framework for user modeling. I also have a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of British Columbia.

My research interests are in human-computer interaction. In particular, I am interested in important problems at the intersection of human-computer interaction and machine learning. My dissertation focuses on how to design effective end-user interaction with machine learning. In this research, I target real-world problems that can benefit from end-user driven machine learning. Concrete examples include image classification, access control in online social networks, and alarm triage in large-scale computer networks. Throughout my work, I identify challenges and opportunities for improving the interactive machine learning process and design new and balanced solutions. I also distill guiding principles applicable in a broader context, providing a foundation for future end-user interactive machine learning systems.