Sherry Wu is a professor at CMU whose research sits at the intersection of human-computer interaction and natural language processing. From making AI work for imperfect humans to making humans work better with AI — Sherry's work challenges us to rethink both sides of the equation.

Outline:

0:00 - Teaser
1:13 - Prelude: Introducing Sherry Wu
2:30 - How the AI Field Has Changed in the Last Four Years
4:22 - Making AI Systems Work for Imperfect Humans
6:54 - Models vs. Scaffolding
10:36 - Understanding Human Imperfection in Teaching Contexts
19:28 - AI Literacy Skills
22:04 - How AI Is Changing CS Education
25:38 - Suppose We Have AGI, What Does It Mean to Be Human?
29:14 - Training Models to be More Human-centered
31:46 - Checklists Are Better Than Reward Models https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18624
36:56 - Challenge in Aligning Models
43:22 - Advice for Interdisciplinary Research
45:37 - Reflection on Her Own Research

References:

Sherry Wu’s Research Homepage: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sherryw/
Sherry Wu’s course page (PMDS, Spring 2025): https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sherryw/courses/2025s-pmds.html
AI Fluency Index: https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-fluency-index
Checklists Are Better Than Reward Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18624
Not Everyone Wins with LLMs: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21890

Podcast Links:

Podcast website: https://augmented-mind.github.io/
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/augmented-mind-podcast/id1868102170
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/40KculkYTe2tOpqJm6TAYr?si=PU_UncsMT4mXjVNCRwoXog
RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/10dbf5b7c/podcast/rss

About the Hosts:

The AM Podcast is hosted by Yijia Shao, Shannon Shen, and Michael Ryan, CS PhD students at Stanford University and MIT.

Building AI Systems for Imperfect Humans with Sherry Wu | AM Podcast #2

Augmented Mind Podcast

Building AI Systems for Imperfect Humans with Sherry Wu | AM Podcast #2