Misha Montoya Sra
Assistant Professor, UCSB Computer Science Affiliated Faculty with the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Center for Responsible Machine Learning, Mind & Machine Inteligence, the Media, Art & Tech program and the Cognitive Science Program at UCSB. Director of the Perceptual Engineering Lab Email: sra@ucsb.eduHuman augmentation is not a new idea and neither is the idea of intelligent machines. Our quest for immortality, an extreme form of human augmentation, goes as far back as the Epic of Gilgamesh. On the other hand, devices with varying degrees of artifical intelligence for augmenting our abilities have been part of narrative fiction for at least the last 3000 years. As AI decouples intelligence from consciousness, as XR technologies transform perception, and as matter becomes machine manipulable, three key questions about the future arise: 1) what will newer experiential interfaces look like where digital bits occupy space and algorithms have faces, 2) what impact will interactions between humans and AI have on the user experience, and 3) how will the shift from the current data-centric approach to a more human-centered approach support and enrich our lives? To answer these questions, we design, engineer and study realtime interactive human-machine systems that can enhance our abilities.
We call our unique approach to human augmentation Human-AI Synthesis.
We prioritize building real-world applications and tools (XR and non-XR) in areas of skill acquisition, task assistance and creative collaboration.
