Monday, March 11 at 4pm in PTAB 109

Abstract:
Complex games have demonstrated real-world benefits that illustrate their value as innovative and engaging tools for learning, either by leveraging entertainment games in educational contexts or by developing novel gaming environments for the purpose of teaching. However, complex games are also notoriously difficult, which limits their applicability to high-impact domains and may render them unusable in learning and training contexts as students may be unable to master the necessary gameplay. In this research talk, I discuss my work at the intersection of games, learning, and user experience of artificial intelligence where I explore how we can support learning in complex games through computational support. By leveraging the theory of Self-Regulated Learning and user-centric methods, I identify opportunities to better leverage games as innovative learning environments and formalize and evaluate design requirements for computational support tools for learning. I additionally discuss future work exploring ethics, social learning, and opportunities to transfer the resulting insights to high-impact domains such as health and education, where computational support for learning can be implemented to enhance training and performance.
Bio:
Erica Kleinman is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Ghost Lab at Northeastern University. Prior to joining Northeastern, she earned her PhD in Computational Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), where she was advised by Dr. Magy Seif El-Nasr. Before pursuing a PhD, Erica earned two Masters degrees, one in Computer Science from Northeastern University and one in Digital Media from Drexel University. She earned her Bachelors degree in Film Studies from Skidmore College. Erica’s research sits at the intersection of UX of AI, Learning, and Games, where she focuses on identifying ways to improve the UX of AI for learning and performance in complex gaming environments while also understanding and addressing the ethical limitations of these systems in a user-centric manner. She has collaborated with several companies and has authored over 25 peer-reviewed publications. She was awarded the 2022 – 2023 – UCSC Jack Baskin and Peggy Downes Fellowship and the 2016 Drexel Graduate College Research Excellence Award for the Arts and Humanities. She has served as an assistant to the subcommittee chairs for the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems, track chair for IEEE CoG and FDG, and as a reviewer for various other conferences and journals.