Derek Lomas

Willem van der Maden, Derek Lomas, Malak Sadek et al.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a double-edged sword: on one hand, AI promises to provide great advances that could benefit humanity, but on the other hand, AI poses substantial (even existential) risks. With advancements happening daily, many people are increasingly worried about AI's impact on their lives. To ensure AI progresses beneficially, some researchers have proposed "wellbeing" as a key objective to govern AI. This article addresses key challenges in designing AI for wellbeing. We group these challenges into issues of modeling wellbeing in context, assessing wellbeing in context, designing interventions to improve wellbeing, and maintaining AI alignment with wellbeing over time. The identification of these challenges provides a scope for efforts to help ensure that AI developments are aligned with human wellbeing.

Willem van der Maden, Vera van der Burg, Brett A. Halperin et al.

This essay examines how Generative AI (GenAI) is rapidly transforming design practices and how discourse often falls into over-simplified narratives that impede meaningful research and practical progress. We identify and deconstruct five prevalent "semantic stopsigns" -- reductive framings about GenAI in design that halt deeper inquiry and limit productive engagement. Reflecting upon two expert workshops at ACM conferences and semi-structured interviews with design practitioners, we analyze how these stopsigns manifest in research and practice. Our analysis develops mid-level knowledge that bridges theoretical discourse and practical implementation, helping designers and researchers interrogate common assumptions about GenAI in their own contexts. By recasting these stopsigns into more nuanced frameworks, we provide the design research community with practical approaches for thinking about and working with these emerging technologies.

Willem van der Maden, Derek Lomas, Paul Hekkert

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues advancing, ensuring positive societal impacts becomes critical, especially as AI systems become increasingly ubiquitous in various aspects of life. However, developing "AI for good" poses substantial challenges around aligning systems with complex human values. Presently, we lack mature methods for addressing these challenges. This article presents and evaluates the Positive AI design method aimed at addressing this gap. The method provides a human-centered process to translate wellbeing aspirations into concrete practices. First, we explain the method's four key steps: contextualizing, operationalizing, optimizing, and implementing wellbeing supported by continuous measurement for feedback cycles. We then present a multiple case study where novice designers applied the method, revealing strengths and weaknesses related to efficacy and usability. Next, an expert evaluation study assessed the quality of the resulting concepts, rating them moderately high for feasibility, desirability, and plausibility of achieving intended wellbeing benefits. Together, these studies provide preliminary validation of the method's ability to improve AI design, while surfacing areas needing refinement like developing support for complex steps. Proposed adaptations such as examples and evaluation heuristics could address weaknesses. Further research should examine sustained application over multiple projects. This human-centered approach shows promise for realizing the vision of 'AI for Wellbeing' that does not just avoid harm, but actively benefits humanity.

Dinuo Liao, James Derek Lomas, Cehao Yu

This study explores how Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning, guided by human aesthetic evaluations, can enhance the outputs of generative AI models in tangible product design, using lamp design as a case study. By integrating human feedback into the AI model, we aim to improve both the desirability and aesthetic appeal of the generated designs. Comprehensive experiments were conducted, starting with prompt optimization techniques and focusing on LoRA fine-tuning of the Stable Diffusion model. Additionally, methods to convert AI-generated designs into tangible products through 3D realization using 3D printing technologies were investigated. The results indicate that LoRA fine-tuning effectively aligns AI-generated designs with human aesthetic preferences, leading to significant improvements in desirability and aesthetic appeal scores. These findings highlight the potential of human-AI collaboration in tangible product design and provide valuable insights into integrating human feedback into AI design processes.

Prashant Lawhatre, Bharatesh R Shiraguppi, Esha Sharma et al.

This research study aims to use machine learning methods to characterize the EEG response to music. Specifically, we investigate how resonance in the EEG response correlates with individual aesthetic enjoyment. Inspired by the notion of musical processing as resonance, we hypothesize that the intensity of an aesthetic experience is based on the degree to which a participants EEG entrains to the perceptual input. To test this and other hypotheses, we have built an EEG dataset from 20 subjects listening to 12 two minute-long songs in random order. After preprocessing and feature construction, we used this dataset to train and test multiple machine learning models.

Dhananjay Sonawane, Krishna Prasad Miyapuram, Bharatesh RS et al.

The music signal comprises of different features like rhythm, timbre, melody, harmony. Its impact on the human brain has been an exciting research topic for the past several decades. Electroencephalography (EEG) signal enables non-invasive measurement of brain activity. Leveraging the recent advancements in deep learning, we proposed a novel approach for song identification using a Convolution Neural network given the electroencephalography (EEG) responses. We recorded the EEG signals from a group of 20 participants while listening to a set of 12 song clips, each of approximately 2 minutes, that were presented in random order. The repeating nature of Music is captured by a data slicing approach considering brain signals of 1 second duration as representative of each song clip. More specifically, we predict the song corresponding to one second of EEG data when given as input rather than a complete two-minute response. We have also discussed pre-processing steps to handle large dimensions of a dataset and various CNN architectures. For all the experiments, we have considered each participant's EEG response for each song in both train and test data. We have obtained 84.96\% accuracy for the same. The performance observed gives appropriate implication towards the notion that listening to a song creates specific patterns in the brain, and these patterns vary from person to person.