BBL Speaker Series: Vedant Das Swain: Beyond Productivity: Collaborating with AI for Worker Wellbeing

Talk Title: Beyond Productivity: Collaborating with AI for Worker Wellbeing

Speaker: Vedant Das Swain, Assistant Professor, New York University.

Location: IRB 4105 and Zoom

Abstract: Work is central to our mental wellbeing and technology is central to how we engage with work. Today, generative AI based applications are emerging as a dominant means to mediate who we identify, understand, and perform work. But does that make AI a good coworker? A good coworker understands your holistic needs as a person and has a keen sense of what you want from a role and what a role entails. This talk will present findings from two recent studies: (1) demonstrates how AI can support identity work to help select careers, and (2) demonstrates how AI can support emotion work, specifically in client-facing roles. In addition, I will discuss future and ongoing research focused on social-wellbeing outcomes of Human-AI collaboration. Collectively, these studies inform the design, delivery, and evaluation of human-AI systems to envision a different future of work.

Bio:  Vedant Das Swain is an Assistant Professor at NYU. His research focuses on transforming digital applications, behavioral models, and infrastructures to enhance workers’ behavioral health. Dr. Das Swain aims to build digital work technologies to support wellbeing and promote healthier performance by mitigating invisible labor, emotional fatigue, and burnout. His human-centered research approach prioritizes applications that workers want to adopt and continually use. He integrates organizational science theories to conceive new data-driven understandings of worker behavior and explores innovative digital interventions to promote healthy integrations between human organizations and cutting-edge technology (e.g., sensors, social media, and AI applications). Before joining NYU, he was a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at Northeastern University. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and a MS in Human-Computer Interaction from Georgia Institute of Technology. He has published extensively in top-tier Human-Centered Computing venues such as CHI, CSCW, and UbiComp/IMWUT. His papers have received prestigious awards, including top honors at CHI 2022 and CHI 2024. He has been recognized with the Gaetano Borriello Outstanding Student Award and the GVU Foley Scholar Award. His research is supported by IARPA, NSF, CDC, ORNL, and Semiconductor Research Corporation, and has been lead PI on grants from NIDA/NIH and Microsoft.