Show Notes
Sherry Wu is a professor at CMU whose research sits at the intersection of human-computer interaction and natural language processing. From making AI work for imperfect humans to making humans work better with AI — Sherry's work challenges us to rethink both sides of the equation.
Outline: 0:00 - Teaser 1:13 - Prelude: Introducing Sherry Wu 2:30 - How the AI Field Has Changed in the Last Four Years 4:22 - Making AI Systems Work for Imperfect Humans 6:54 - Models vs. Scaffolding 10:36 - Understanding Human Imperfection in Teaching Contexts 19:28 - AI Literacy Skills 22:04 - How AI Is Changing CS Education 25:38 - Suppose We Have AGI, What Does It Mean to Be Human? 29:14 - Training Models to be More Human-centered 31:46 - Checklists Are Better Than Reward Models https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18624 36:56 - Challenge in Aligning Models 43:22 - Advice for Interdisciplinary Research 45:37 - Reflection on Her Own Research
References: Sherry Wu’s Research Homepage: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sherryw/
Sherry Wu’s course page (PMDS, Spring 2025): https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sherryw/courses/2025s-pmds.html
AI Fluency Index: https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-fluency-index
Checklists Are Better Than Reward Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18624
Not Everyone Wins with LLMs: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21890
Podcast Links: Podcast website: https://augmented-mind.github.io/
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/augmented-mind-podcast/id1868102170
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/40KculkYTe2tOpqJm6TAYr?si=PU_UncsMT4mXjVNCRwoXog
RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/10dbf5b7c/podcast/rss
About the Hosts: The AM Podcast is hosted by Yijia Shao, Shannon Shen, and Michael Ryan, CS PhD students at Stanford University and MIT.
More from Augmented Mind Podcast
Geoffrey Litt is a design engineer at Notion. Previously, he was a senior researcher at the independent research lab Ink & Switch, and he got his PhD in HCI at MIT. Geoffrey’s work focuses on malleable software and designing environments for thinking.
Zora Wang is a CS PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University. Zora’s work lies at the intersection of coding agents and human-ai collaboration. In this episode we explore how agents work, how humans work, and how we can get more done together.
Jeremy Avigad is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Jeremy is a pioneer in using AI for Mathematics and the co-creator of the Lean Theorem Prover. Currently, he is the director of the Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics at CMU, Dean's Chair in Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics, and the director of the newly-established Institute for Computer-Aided Reasoning in Mathematics under NSF.
Ken Liu is a Stanford CS PhD student and founder of The Open Anonymity Project. Ken’s pioneering work explores the intersection between language models and data & user privacy.
Woosuk Kwon is CTO of Inferact and creator of the vLLM inference library. Woosuk shares what it takes to build the most popular open-source LLM inference engine from a human-centered perspective.