News from the Human-Centered AI Lab
Announcements and updates from the Human-Centered AI Lab and the people connected to it — projects, fellows and alumni, board and directors, publications, grants, and our participation in AI governance and cultural-policy initiatives. For external media coverage, see Press & Media.
Katherine Elkins, Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Human-Centered AI Lab, will serve as a keynote speaker at the University of Michigan’s 2026 Annual Data Science & AI Summit, December 2–3, 2026, alongside speakers from leading technical institutions. The summit convenes the university’s data science and AI research community with external collaborators to develop new research directions and partnerships across technical and societal applications.
In the Summer 2026 MLA Newsletter, Katherine Elkins describes the Modern Language Association team’s work contributing humanities and language expertise to federal AI standards through NIST’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation. Elkins and Jon Chun lead the MLA’s consortium team, with contributions from Anna Mills, Seth Perlow, and Rita Raley.
The article presents three connected contributions. The team’s work on agent security shows how agents interpret natural-language instructions rather than simply executing them. Its concept of interpretive tractability asks whether human overseers can meaningfully evaluate an agent’s actions and reported reasoning at the pace agents operate. Its work on benchmarks argues that evaluation must account for the languages, cultural assumptions, and prompt formulations through which capabilities are measured. Elkins also describes syntactic fragility: small structural changes in otherwise equivalent prompts can reverse a model’s recommendation.
Read the current MLA Newsletter (available to MLA members).
Board Member Raul Romero will interview Venezuelan democracy leader Leopoldo López during Kenyon College’s Homecoming Weekend on September 26, 2026. Romero’s research and civic work on Venezuelan democracy long predates his service to the Lab.
The Human-Centered AI Lab contributed to the AI, IP & Culture Repository co-design process, an international civil-society initiative developed in support of UNESCO’s work on AI ethics, intellectual property, cultural rights, and digital cultural sovereignty.
The report, Democratic Infrastructure for Creative Futures: Building the AI, IP & Culture Repository, draws on 23 selected proposals and a multi-stakeholder co-design workshop convening 42 participants from across the arts, cultural policy, civil society, technology, and research sectors. The proposed Repository is envisioned not as a static archive but as a “living governance infrastructure” for knowledge-sharing, cultural-rights protection, and community-driven AI governance.
The Lab’s contribution, “Provenance Infrastructure as a Safeguard for Cultural Commons in the Age of Generative AI,” by Katherine Elkins and Jon Chun, was included among the report’s operational proposals for rights-aware AI training, data provenance, and cultural-data governance.
Raul Romero, Board Member of the Human-Centered AI Lab, is co-founder of Kite ML, a robotics IDE and development platform for applied robotics teams working in physical AI. Kite ML has recently been publicized through startup and robotics-development announcements, including NVIDIA Inception and Founders, Inc. Canopy updates.
Katherine Elkins, Co-Founder of the Human-Centered AI Lab, spoke on the “Artificial Intelligence” panel at the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society’s 2nd Annual Ohio Civics Centers Symposium at The Ohio State University. The panel — which also featured Michael Inzlicht (University of Toronto) and Sean Westwood (Dartmouth College) — examined the challenges AI poses to teaching, research, and civic life.
A recording of the session is available on the Chase Center’s YouTube channel.
A professional-education course created for Bloomberg on integrating AI into organizational workflows.