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, Microsoft Research Redmond (VIBE), Microsoft Research Redmond (ASI), Microsoft Research India and IBM Research Almaden. 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 industry researchers from Computer Science, the Information School, Human Centered Design and Engineering, DXARTS and other on campus departments 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.

I am broadly interested in human-computer interaction and the intersection of human-computer interaction and machine learning, including improving human interaction with machine learning algorithms, machine learning-based applications, intelligent interfaces and user modeling.

The focus of my dissertation is on advancing our understanding of how to design effective end-user interaction with machine learning. I have explored this question by designing, developing and evaluating new interaction techniques for everyday people to train machine learning applications in a variety of domains. Concrete examples from my work include designing techniques for people to train machine learning applications to automatically recognize user-defined classes of images, construct in-context access control groups in online social networks and categorize computer network alarms to defend against network failures and attacks.