On the 15th of November 2024, CHI Nederland (CHI NL) organized the second edition of Experience & Beyond 2024. Like the last time in 2022, the event sold out, and was overall perceived to be an excellent event too! 🎉
We welcomed around 100 attendees to the Emakina offices in Amsterdam, a truly mixed audience of industry professionals and academics.
This year’s edition revolved around the theme of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how the various AI applications are being infused into our everyday lives. As such, the day consisted of a diverse series of talks, addressing a range of applications and methodologies. To that end, the event not only embraced breadth over depth, but also diversity over uniformity — we were happy to bring together people from *both* academia and industry, which we believe is a rare but very welcome opportunity on the Dutch UX / HCI scene.
Gerrit van der Veer, CHI NL’s founder, kicked off the event with a personal history of HCI in the Netherlands, before Experience and Beyond was born. Professor Kaisa Väänänen (Tampere University) followed with a keynote about the urban inclusion projects she’s leading in Finland, including on AI agents in block housing. She raised critical questions of how AI can best support urban inclusion, and touched upon design methods to help facilitate such processes.
The day followed with yet more interesting talks. David Graus (Randstad Group) spoke about the use of AI to combat filter bubbles in news consumption and discrimination in hiring processes. David highlighted that a key aspect of this is also the work required to address human bias.
Ernestasia Siahaan-Bauszat (Google) provided a range of examples of how AI is being used for malicious purposes. She brought in some cautionary tales of how GenAI tech can be misused, despite the benefits brought in for cybersecurity purposes.
Alexandra Diening (Human-AI Symbiosis Alliance®) spoke about Human-AI symbiosis, and her independent nonprofit research organization initiative, which ultimately aims at creating a seamless collaboration between humans and artificial intelligence. The key take away is that AI is here to stay, and that we perhaps should best adapt to this new AI driven world.
Albert Ali Salah (Utrecht University) provided a deep dive into the promises and perils of affective computing, and specifically in how it can be used for mental health assessment. He provided an in-depth take on how bias in certain machine learning tasks can manifest. He offered some ways to mitigate such harms, despite there being no real panacea, especially in privacy sensitive domains such as (mental) health.
Judith Redi (Miro) gave a detailed case study on the uptake of a new AI feature which did not perform as well as expected and why this might be, including the critical role of users’ very first impression of its quality.
After a brief cake break (provided by Cake Researcher), Anne Wil Burghoorn (Philips) spoke about the role of AI in redesigning care pathways, and the importance of this moving forward in this day and age. Finally, a passionate closing talk was given by Felienne Hermans (Vrije Universiteit) who questioned the current claims about AI’s impact on society. Specifically, this recent obsession over AI and using Large Language Models in education, where human learning is here to stay. She concluded the talk by also cautioning about AI’s negative impact on the environment, and how we as practitioners, researchers, and educators, need to be mindful of this ongoing AI craze and its (sometimes negative) societal implications.
All in all, it was a stimulating day with wide-ranging perspectives on the current and future state of AI, and how AI tools and applications are influencing our day to day lives, evermore so with each passing day given the sheer amount of research happening. We’d like to thank all our speakers and attendees for helping create such a thought-provoking day.
Finally, a big thank you to our sponsors: EPAM Systems (venue sponsor) and Cake Researcher (cake sponsor).
We hope to see you all at our next events, stay tuned for 2025! 🧡💚
