The Human-Centered AI Lab (HCAI Lab) is an interdisciplinary research organization founded in 2023 by Katherine Elkins and Jon Chun. The Lab conducts AI research at the intersection of safety, governance, and the humanities and social sciences. It provides an institutional umbrella for distributed teams of experts to secure funding and collaborate on human-centered AI research in the public interest.

Elkins and Chun co-created the world's first human-centered AI curriculum in 2016, integrating computational methods with ethics, governance, and humanistic inquiry. Their 2023 paper in the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing (53 citations) established the intellectual framework for this integration — and the evidence base for why it matters for AI safety and public benefit. Student research from the curriculum they co-created has been downloaded over 95,000 times by more than 4,000 institutions across 198 countries.

The Lab's principal investigators serve in the NIST US AI Safety Institute Consortium (CAISI), representing the Modern Language Association — the largest scholarly organization in language and literature — where their work focuses on how large language models process negation, prohibition, and persuasion. They are also Principal Investigators for the Schmidt Sciences Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI), leading the Archival Intelligence project — a $330K initiative to rescue endangered cultural heritage archives in New Orleans using AI with community-governed data sovereignty.

Additional affiliations include UNESCO (MONDIACULT expert consultation on AI and cultural heritage), the Notre Dame–IBM Technology Ethics Lab (multi-agent behavioral simulation of judicial decision-making), the Meta Open Innovation AI Research Community, Bloomberg (AI Strategy course), and OpenAI (Education Guild, Higher Education Forum).