Join us for our online seminar series event hosted by MIT Media Lab's Advancing Humans with AI (AHA) research program. This upcoming event features Petr Slovak, Associate Professor (‘Reader’) in Human-Computer Interaction at King’s College London.
Work for a Member organization and need a Member Portal account? Register here with your official email address.
Join us for our online seminar series event hosted by MIT Media Lab's Advancing Humans with AI (AHA) research program. This upcoming event features Petr Slovak, Associate Professor (‘Reader’) in Human-Computer Interaction at King’s College London.
How might we design AI systems that support rather than replace human cognition, particularly in sensitive domains like mental health? This talk will explore our human-centered design approach to develop interventions that help users develop key mental health skills in everyday contexts. I will present insights from two recent award-winning papers (CHI'24, CHI'25) on gen-AI driven mental health intervention design, alongside 7+ years of research on Purrble—an interactive ‘situated’ emotion regulation intervention that has evolved from research prototype to commercially available socially assistive robot with multiple RCTs, over 100,000 units sold, and recognition as one of TIME Magazine's "Best Inventions of 2021."
Together, these projects show how new technical capabilities can let us rethink where, when, and how interventions are delivered: innovating on intervention 'form' while preserving (and sometimes extending) their psychological 'function'. I’ll close by inviting discussion on both the opportunities and the risks that gen-AI introduces for human-AI collaboration in mental-health contexts, and how explicit alignment with psychological theory can guide responsible AI design in these contexts.
Petr Slovak, PhD, is an Associate Professor (‘Reader’) in Human-Computer Interaction at King’s College London, with visiting appointments at the University of Oxford. His research blends user-centered design with clinical science to create digital mental-health interventions that fit seamlessly into users' daily life. Petr has secured more than $9.5M in funding as PI/Co-I, including a prestigious 7-year $2.5M UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship. His research appears regularly in top-tier computer science and HCI venues and has earned 11 Best Paper/Honourable Mention awards in CHI/CSCW since 2017. Across projects, he focuses on designing Generative AI and embodied technologies that build users’ emotion-regulation and other mental health competencies—advancing human agency rather than replacing it.