Antti Oulasvirta

The OA version will be available next week via OUP. I'll add that link on the book's homepage as soon as it's out:
introductiontohci.org

And perhaps what makes me proudest: the book is free.

While open access has gained momentum in HCI, it has largely focused on articles, not educational resources. We hope this open access book promotes equity, especially in low-resource settings, and accelerates the uptake of HCI’s findings.

What excites me most is its focus on the *enduring principles* of HCI; its core methods, concepts, theories, and models. While many books approach HCI primarily as a craft, we set out to go deeper. Our goal was to welcome students into the rich intellectual world of HCI research.

It's amazing to have the book in my hand now, after several years of working on it with Kasper and Per Ola.

In a nutshell, it's a new textbook for introductory-level HCI courses:
✅ 10 parts, covering the whole HCI process
✅ 864 pages and 1.9 kgs
✅ Open access (!)

Smiling young man standing next to a poster titled "Evaluating Attention Management Systems for Dynamic Monitoring Tasks" at a conference.

🏆Anton Gasse, Alexander Lingler(@ituaustria.bsky.social), Martin Lorenz, @oulasvirta.bsky.social(@aalto.fi‬), @philwintersberg.bsky.social(@ituaustria.bsky.social) & @patebel.bsky.social won the People’s Choice Award for Best Poster @chiwork.bsky.social 2025 in Amsterdam!
🔗https://shorturl.at/D5JDO

We had a lovely summer school last week in Paris. Thirty amazing students and postdocs, a week full of keynotes and hands-on lectures on computational methods. State-of-the-art as call as classical topics, ranging from LLM agents to Bayesian inference cixschool2025.isir.upmc.fr

In Pittsburgh, I’m a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the top computer science school in the world. I’ve also worked in various large technology companies, who have offices in Pittsburgh to connect with and employ Carnegie Mellon faculty and students.

I work in the best university in the world, less than 3 hours from my rural hometown, yet superstar students travel here from all over the world… if we keep treating them badly, will centers of excellence move elsewhere?

"If my kids excel, will they move away?"

jeffreybigham.com/blog/2025/wh...

John Williamson lecturing about simulator-bases inference at the Comp Int summer school cixschool2025.isir.upmc.fr

Sounds like an amazing project. Big congratulations Albrecht!

Philipp Wintersberger giving a talk on multitasking and human-AI interaction at Aalto

Visualizing Knowledge 2025 starting at Aalto

FailureNotes help designers discover how AI model failure affects interaction downstream:

Vera gives a compelling argument why this is a very hard problem. It's often impossible to imagine the critical situations where AI fails

Vera Liao giving a talk on the AI sociotecnical gap at FCAI / Aalto

Paul Strohmeier giving a talk at Aalto

Better charts and keyboards by simulating how people behave with digital interfaces: research from @oulasvirta.bsky.social & co. is where a new kind of AI meets HCI.
www.aalto.fi/en/news/ai-t...

➡️ First author @danqingshi.bsky.social explains more in the thread: bsky.app/profile/danq...

Thanks for an exciting talk!

I was honored to give the closing keynote at the Everyday AR through AI-in-the-Loop workshop at #chi2025 yesterday on simulated users.

In a nutshell: training user models directly in simulators enables tackling more realistic problems and opens up new applications.

Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems | ACM Conferences CHI: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems #chi2025 are now online! dl.acm.org/doi/proceedi...

Cognitive abilities predict performance in everyday computer tasks Fluency with computer applications has assumed a crucial role in work-related and other day-to-day activities. While prior experience is known to pred…

Really interesting work from @oulasvirta.bsky.social and colleagues, demonstrating that the effect size of cognitive abilities is comparable to that of previous experience when using every day user interfaces.
How did this paper slip by me for 4 months: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🇫🇮💡 Wondering what the new @ellisinstitute.fi is all about and its #AI game plan?

Check out the recent Acatiimi interview with Director @samikaski.bsky.social for insights on their mission, professorship investments, and Finland's AI impact. #Finland #ELLISInstitute

Annual Helsinki PreCHI event opening by @oulasvirta.bsky.social. First up, Rungjun Ma presents “Privacy Perceptions of Custom GPTs by Users and Creators.” #chi2025

LLM Social Simulations Are a Promising Research Method Accurate and verifiable large language model (LLM) simulations of human research subjects promise an accessible data source for understanding human behavior and training new AI systems. However, resul...

Should we use LLMs 🤖 to simulate human research subjects 🧑? In our new preprint, we argue sims can augment human studies to scale up social science as AI technology accelerates. We identify 5 tractable challenges and argue this is a promising and underused research method 🧪🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2504.02234

I am happy to share that with the joint effort of the Nordic HCI community, there is a website that accommodates Nordic reception at CHI, yearly CHI accepted works, a list of contributing institutions, and pre-chi events. www.chi-nordics.eu

Want to learn how to build cognitive models using reinforcement learning? Join our course at #CHI2025: "C13: Introduction to Computational Cognitive Modeling"

Flowchart comparing manual, direct, free-form, and structured approaches to problem framing with designers and LLMs, highlighting the structured method’s nine-step process by Dorst.

#ProblemReframing: looks at whether working with #AI, namely #LLMs, benefits designers in devising high-quality problem frames. Shows how generative AI can fail at supporting realistic design tasks. 💁🏻💡🤖 #CHI2025

users.aalto.fi/~luceroa1/re...

@joongishin.bsky.social @oulasvirta.bsky.social

This title if the comic is ‘Googling Stuff…’ The comic shows two columns: on the left is “Then” showing search results with one thing listed as “the thing you want” On the right column is ‘Now’ - also showing search results but in this case it’s a whole bunch of stuff you don’t need: AI TAKING A WILD STAB AT IT WITH SOME BLATANT MISINFORMATION SPONSORED RESULT SPONSORED RESULT SPONSORED RESULT SPONSORED RESULT PEOPLE ALSO ASK VIEW PRODUCTS And then right at the bottom just off screen is ‘the thing you want’

Googling Stuff: Then v Now.

Figure 1. A schematic depiction of a model-mechanism mapping between a human learning system (left side) and a cognitive model (right side). Candidate model mechanism mappings are pictured as mapping between representations but also can be in terms of input data, architecture, or learning objective.

Figure 2. Data efficiency in human learning. (left) Order of magnitude of LLM vs. human training data, plotted by human age. Ranges are approximated from Frank (2023a). (right) A schematic depiction of evaluation scaling curves for human learners vs. models plotted by training data quantity.

Paper abstract

AI models are fascinating, impressive, and sometimes problematic. But what can they tell us about the human mind?

In a new review paper, @noahdgoodman.bsky.social and I discuss how modern AI can be used for cognitive modeling: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Computational models of human perception have been stuck with visual saliency, which has little ecological validity. Who looks at a display with no task in mind? One reason for this fixation has been that there simply are no high quality datasets for other tasks. Well now there is for visual search:

The paper presents findings on visual search in a large dataset (N=84) including over 900 real-world GUIs. And the dataset is released too