Angela Liu

Caleb Ziems, Dora Zhao, Rose E. Wang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly shaping the private and professional lives of users, with numerous applications in business, education, finance, healthcare, law, and science. With this rise in global influence comes greater urgency to build, evaluate, and deploy these systems in a manner that prioritizes not only technical capabilities but also human priorities. This work presents a framework for developing Human-Centered Large Language Models (HCLLMs), which integrates perspectives from Natural Language Processing (NLP), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and responsible AI. Considering the ethics, economics, and technical objectives of language modeling, we argue that model developers need to address human concerns, preferences, values, and goals, not only during a cursory post-training stage, but rather with rigor and care at every stage of the pipeline. This paper offers human-centered insights and recommendations for developers at each stage, from system design to data sourcing, model training, evaluation, and responsible deployment. Then we conclude with a case study, applying these insights to understand the future of work with HCLLMs.

Taylor West Henderson, Yuheng Zhi, Angela Liu et al.

Even though artificial muscles have gained popularity due to their compliant, flexible, and compact properties, there currently does not exist an easy way of making informed decisions on the appropriate actuation strategy when designing a muscle-powered robot; thus limiting the transition of such technologies into broader applications. What's more, when a new muscle actuation technology is developed, it is difficult to compare it against existing robot muscles. To accelerate the development of artificial muscle applications, we propose a data driven approach for robot muscle actuator selection using Support Vector Machines (SVM). This first-of-its-kind method gives users gives users insight into which actuators fit their specific needs and actuation performance criteria, making it possible for researchers and engineer with little to no prior knowledge of artificial muscles to focus on application design. It also provides a platform to benchmark existing, new, or yet-to-be-discovered artificial muscle technologies. We test our method on unseen existing robot muscle designs to prove its usability on real-world applications. We provide an open-access, web-searchable interface for easy access to our models that will additionally allow for continuous contribution of new actuator data from groups around the world to enhance and expand these models.