This Research Experience for Undergraduates program (REU), provides hands-on learning experiences to undergraduates focused on human-AI interaction and evaluation in web and information systems at Old Dominion University (ODU) within the Department of Computer Science, in partnership with the Virginia Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation Center (VMASC) and the Department of Communication Disorders & Special Education. Users are increasingly engaging with and relying on adaptive, generative, and often opaque AI agents, such as chatbots. For example, in healthcare, clinicians must be able to trust AI diagnostics, yet many models remain “black boxes” or hallucinate. On the Web, AI chatbots perform well in controlled settings, but usability challenges emerge in real-world contexts, such as managing ambiguity, privacy, and user expectations. Unfortunately, research in human-AI interaction is still in its incipient stages, as the rapid permeation of AI has outpaced our understanding of its long-term effects on user behavior, skills, and societal norms.

The need to train future computer scientists in the emerging critical field of human-AI interaction and the rich experience of our research team provide great opportunities to incorporate undergraduate students into ongoing research projects and related community efforts.

Our overarching goal is to train students to be independent, contributing, and functioning researchers. To achieve this goal, we will involve and challenge undergraduate students from a wide spectrum of backgrounds as colleagues in ongoing research projects and encourage them to pursue graduate study in STEM disciplines.

1. The concept of human-AI interaction, its methods, interfaces, and active research topics.
2. Mainstream computational methods to study human-AI interaction, including how to access, clean, preprocess, and visualize data and how to build analytical and predictive models using open source programming tools
3. Important metrics to evaluate research results, compare baseline models, and produce preliminary results for publication quality research products.
4. Essential research skills including brainstorming discussion, programming experiments, evaluation, trial-and-error, technical writing, and research presentation.

• Be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident.
• Be currently enrolled at a U.S.-based institution of higher education.
• Be a rising sophomore, junior, or senior.
• Have a GPA of 3.00 or higher (preferred).
• Students from all majors and disciplines will be considered, but preference will be given to those in Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) or related fields.
• Submit a resume or CV, a cover letter (personal statement), transcripts, and a writing sample with the application. Up to two letters of recommendation may be submitted but are optional.

• Research full time for 9 weeks
• Attend weekly lectures/workshops and field trips