Zhu-Tian Chen wins NSF CAREER Award

Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CS&E) Assistant Professor Zhu-Tian Chen has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support his project, “Situated Visual Augmentation for Human-AI Complementarity in Physical Spaces.” This prestigious award provides support to early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education, and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

“Receiving the CAREER Award is both a tremendous honor and an encouragement to pursue my long-term vision of moving human-AI collaboration beyond the desktop,” Chen said. “It gives my group an opportunity to investigate how augmented reality can help people benefit from AI while continuing to think critically and exercise their own judgment.

Chen’s research draws on augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence (AI), data visualization, and human-computer interaction. He and his team study how AI can support human perception, reasoning, and action without replacing human judgment.

His CAREER project specifically addresses a limitation of current AI systems, which is that most human-AI interaction remains confined to desktop computers and mobile devices. Chen will investigate how augmented reality can present AI-generated information directly within a person’s physical surroundings. To help people determine if an AI-generated or AI-assisted decision is better than one they would have made themselves, Chen is developing a “Situated Visual Augmentation" system.

The system is made up of context-sensitive visual information that encourages users to carefully examine the cues in front of them and consider whether to accept or reject the AI suggestions.

“An important goal is to design AI systems that do more than give people an answer,” Chen said. “We want these systems to help people combine the strengths of machine intelligence with their own knowledge and situational awareness. The best human-AI team should be able to perform better than either the human or the AI working alone.”

Education is deeply integrated into the project. Chen will incorporate the research into a course in which students use the University of Minnesota’s augmented reality infrastructure to design and evaluate situated AI systems. The project will also produce open-source design resources, tutorials, and workshops for learners and industry practitioners.

“Students will not simply learn about the research after it has been completed—they will participate in the process of creating and evaluating these new interfaces,” Chen said. “I hope this experience will prepare them to think critically about both the technical capabilities of AI and the human consequences of how it is designed.”

Chen joined the University of Minnesota Department of Computer Science & Engineering in 2024 as an assistant professor. He earned his bachelor’s degree in software engineering from South China University of Technology in 2015 and his Ph.D. in computer science from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2020. Chen completed postdoctoral research at the University of California San Diego’s Design Lab and Harvard University’s Visual Computing Group. His publications have received four Best Paper Honorable Mentions and one Best Paper Award.

“I am deeply grateful to my students, mentors, collaborators, and colleagues at Minnesota who helped shape this work,” Chen said. “This CAREER Award will allow us to establish a foundation for human-AI collaboration in the physical world and work toward a future in which intelligent systems meaningfully augment, rather than replace, human capabilities.”

Learn more about Chen’s research at his personal website.