Derek Lomas

Derek Lomas
Delft University of Technology | TU · Human Centered Design

PhD

About

86
Publications
49,976
Reads
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730
Citations
Introduction
I am a tenure-track professor focusing on the design of AI for Wellbeing in the field of education and health care. I use human centered design and large-scale product experiments to improve outcomes like student and teacher wellbeing. I also use learning engineering techniques to improve student learning and motivation. I also conduct research in the field of empirical aesthetics.
Additional affiliations
August 2017 - present
Delft University of Technology
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)
Description
  • Positive AI. In my design practice, I help large organizations use data for continuous improvement. But what should we be improving? To investigate theories of human value, I run experiments about learning, motivation, aesthetics and well-being.
January 2015 - January 2017
University of San Diego
Position
  • PostDoc Position
Description
  • Postdoc under Don Norman, the author of "The Design of Everyday Things"​. Used large-scale experiments in online learning products to test scientific theories of learning.
August 2009 - December 2014
Carnegie Mellon University
Position
  • PhD Student
Education
June 2009 - December 2014
Carnegie Mellon University
Field of study
  • Human Computer Interaction
September 2005 - May 2009
UC San Diego
Field of study
  • Visual Art
September 1999 - May 2003
Yale University
Field of study
  • Cognitive Science

Publications

Publications (86)
Article
Full-text available
In an era where artificial intelligence (AI) permeates every facet of our lives, the imperative to steer AI development toward enhancing human wellbeing has never been more critical. However, the development of such positive AI poses substantial challenges due to the current lack of mature methods for addressing the complexities that designing AI f...
Preprint
Full-text available
Generative AI systems are increasingly capable of expressing emotions via text and imagery. Effective emotional expression will likely play a major role in the efficacy of AI systems -- particularly those designed to support human mental health and wellbeing. This motivates our present research to better understand the alignment of AI expressed emo...
Conference Paper
The brain is an incredibly complex organ capable of perceiving and interpreting a wide range of stimuli. Depending on individual brain chemistry and wiring, different people decipher the same stimuli differently, conditioned by their life experiences and environment. This study’s objective is to decode how the CNN models capture and learn these dif...
Preprint
Full-text available
Generative AI systems are increasingly capable of expressing emotions via text and imagery. Emotional expression and emotional expertise may be essential for conversational AI systems and robots that can support human mental health and wellbeing. However, the alignment of AI emotions with the human perception of emotions is not well understood. Thi...
Preprint
Full-text available
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the world as we know it, implying that it is up to the current generation to use the technology for ''good.'' We argue that making good use of AI constitutes aligning it with the wellbeing of conscious creatures. However, designing wellbeing-aligned AI systems is difficult. In this article, we investigat...
Article
Full-text available
[ Background ] Readability metrics provide us with an objective and efficient way to assess the quality of educational texts. We can use the readability measures for finding assessment items that are difficult to read for a given grade level. Hard‐to‐read math word problems can put some students at a disadvantage if they are behind in their litera...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction Designing artificial intelligence (AI) to support health and wellbeing is an important and broad challenge for technologists, designers, and policymakers. Drawing upon theories of AI and cybernetics, this article offers a design framework for designing intelligent systems to optimize human wellbeing. We focus on the production of wellb...
Preprint
Full-text available
p>Electroencephalography (EEG) enables online monitoring brain activity, which can be used for neurofeedback. One of the growing applications of EEG neurofeedback is to facilitate meditation practice. Specifically, EEG neurofeedback can be used to alert participants whenever they get distracted during meditation practice based on changes in their b...
Preprint
Full-text available
p>Electroencephalography (EEG) enables online monitoring brain activity, which can be used for neurofeedback. One of the growing applications of EEG neurofeedback is to facilitate meditation practice. Specifically, EEG neurofeedback can be used to alert participants whenever they get distracted during meditation practice based on changes in their b...
Article
Full-text available
The article provides an open-source Music Listening- Genre (MUSIN-G) EEG dataset which contains 20 participants’ continuous Electroencephalography responses to 12 songs of different genres (from Indian folk music to Goth Rock to western electronic), along with their familiarity and enjoyment ratings. The participants include 16 males and 4 females,...
Preprint
Full-text available
p>Studying brain waves elicited while listening to naturalistic music is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary research area encompassing experts from cognitive science, signal processing, and machine learning. Previous works have documented several perspectives, including correlating brain responses to stimulus features, inter-subject and time-varyi...
Preprint
Full-text available
p>Studying brain waves elicited while listening to naturalistic music is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary research area encompassing experts from cognitive science, signal processing, and machine learning. Previous works have documented several perspectives, including correlating brain responses to stimulus features, inter-subject and time-varyi...
Chapter
Full-text available
Arising from the 2020 Darwin College Lectures, this book presents eight essays from prominent public intellectuals on the theme of Enigmas. Each author examines this theme through the lens of their own particular area of expertise, together constituting an illuminating and diverse interdisciplinary volume. Enigmas features contributions by professo...
Poster
Full-text available
World music is categorized into several genres based on complex features like harmony, rhythm, timbre, etc., present in a song. Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and neural entrainment studies have observed that neural responses to music encode features of the stimulus. The relationship between these music features and brain responses can be identi...
Chapter
In the modern world, it is easy to get lost in thought, partly because of the vast knowledge available at our fingertips via smartphones that divide our cognitive resources and partly because of our intrinsic thoughts. In this work, we aim to find the differences in the neural signatures of mind-wandering and meditation that are common across diffe...
Poster
Full-text available
Preference of consonant chords over dissonant chords, revealed through subjective ratings and pupil dilation responses. For more details : https://indico.aesthetics.mpg.de/event/2/attachments/26/30/Lange-Fink-MusicET2022-Full-Program-DIGITAL.pdf
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The COVID-19 pandemic has put wellbeing on the global agenda like never before.Many businesses, organizations, and even governments have recognized wellbeing asa formal policy goal. This paper addresses the question of how to design complexsystems to improve the wellbeing of their stakeholders. We present a case of helpinga university adopt a syste...
Chapter
Full-text available
Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) can only respond adaptively to the digital learning activities of the students. If students are learning offline without any digital devices, they have little or no means to receive personalized learning materials with the help of intelligent systems. This paper proposes a Paper-Digital Integration System that can...
Article
Full-text available
Background: As smartphone technology has become nearly ubiquitous, there is growing literature to suggest ecological momentary cognitive testing (EMCT) offers advantages to traditional pen-and-paper psychological assessment. We introduce a newly developed platform for self-administration of cognitive tests in ecologically valid ways. Objective: To...
Article
Full-text available
Resonance, a powerful and pervasive phenomenon, appears to play a major role in human interactions. This article investigates the relationship between the physical mechanism of resonance and the human experience of resonance, and considers possibilities for enhancing the experience of resonance within human–robot interactions. We first introduce re...
Article
Full-text available
Classical theories of harmony have been used to explain phenomena like beauty, happiness, health, virtue, pleasure, peace, and even ecological sustainability. With the intent of making these theories more accessible to designers, this article reviews the conception of harmony from about 500 BCE to the present. It begins with a brief overview of har...
Presentation
Full-text available
Technology aided learning is becoming increasingly popular. In some of the countries, online learning has taken over for traditional classroom-based learning. With this, educational data is being generated in vast amounts. Knowing the potential of this data, many education stakeholders have turned to evidence-based decision making to improve the le...
Poster
Full-text available
Introduction: Resonance can be distinguished as a metaphor and physical mechanism. Neural resonance is a physical phenomenon that refers to the synchronization and amplification of brain oscillations to features of internal/external oscillators. Entrainment is a type of resonance, which can be further defined as external and internal. External entr...
Article
Full-text available
The potential space of game designs is astronomically large. This paper shows how game design theories can be translated into a simple, tangible card deck that can assist in the exploration of new game designs within a broader "design space." By translating elements of game design theory into a physical card deck, we enable users to randomly sample...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
My Wellness Check" is a wellbeing assessment system designed to help universities systematically support student and staff wellbeing. In this paper, we present a narrative describing the human-centered design process used to develop a context-sensitive wellbeing feedback system within a large technical university during the COVID19 pandemic. We sha...
Article
Full-text available
Process Analysis is an emerging approach to discover meaningful knowledge from temporal educational data. The study presented in this paper shows how we used Process Analysis methods on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test data for modeling and predicting student test-taking behavior. Our process-oriented data exploration gav...
Poster
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 d...
Preprint
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 deg...
Chapter
Full-text available
A detailed illustration of how large scale digital learning systems can incrementally reduce the poverty-achievement gap
Preprint
Full-text available
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 few years. EEG signal primarily characterizes brain activity and carries vital information of visual, sensational and auditory perception of a human being. Leveraging the recent advanc...
Poster
Full-text available
We propose that the classical aesthetic theories of consonance and dissonance apply to vibrotactile feedback and the somatosensory system. In our pilot study, (n=24) subjects ranked six (6) different low frequency (<40hz) vibration combinations while lying in a custom-built vibrating chair. The frequency combinations included consonant intervals-th...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Showing progress towards a goal is a well-established motivational design tactic. This paper describes how university students designed a new "progress meter" for an online learning game and then evaluated the effects of the design using a controlled online experiment, or A/B test. Using the UpGrade A/B testing platform, we randomly assigned 3,200...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
UpGrade is an open-source tool for A/B testing in educational software. We this study, we used UpGrade to run large scale online experiments in an educational game. Our experiments were aimed at increasing the student engagement. We experimented with various features of the game such as question difficulty, game narrative, feedback style, etc. to f...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper describes a new, open source tool for A/B testing in educational software called UpGrade. We motivate UpGrade's approach, describe development goals and UpGrade's software architecture, and provide a brief overview of working within UpGrade to define and monitor experiments. We conclude with some avenues for future research and developme...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Human-centred design (HCD) is a powerful methodology that might play an important role in the development of real-world intelligent systems. However, present conceptualisations of artificial intelligence (AI) tend to emphasise autonomous, algorithmic systems. If humans are not involved in AI system design, what role can HCD play? This paper conside...
Article
Full-text available
Objective Current measurements of cognitive functioning are time-consuming and costly, often done as point-in-time assessments. We examined the feasibility and acceptability of six newly developed smartphone-based mobile cognitive tests (MCTs), completed in the real-world, among persons with bipolar disorder (BD) and healthy controls (HC). Methods...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Escape the Smart City is a critical pervasive game that uses an escape room format to help players develop an understanding of the implications of urban surveillance technologies. Set in downtown Amsterdam, players work together as a team of hackers to stop the mass deployment of an all-seeing AI-enhanced surveillance system. In order to defeat the...
Poster
Full-text available
We propose to build a Curriculum Pacing workflow component in the LearnSphere environment. Curriculum Pacing is a way to visualize student learning trajectories through curriculum data. It is a visual learning analytic method that allows its users to observe how students interacted with curriculum topics over time, which modules of the curriculum w...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The primary goal of this workshop is to produce open source data visualizations that help communicate results of learning analytics (LA) research to educators. Instructors are increasing their use of data to drive instruction, and various results of LA research are useful towards this end. However, the actionable insights discovered by the LA commu...
Chapter
Full-text available
Selective sustained attention, or the ability to allocate perceptual and mental resources to a single object or event, is an important cognitive ability widely assumed to be required for learning. Assessing young children's selective sustained attention is challenging due to the limited number of sensitive and developmentally appropriate performanc...
Conference Paper
Improving people's well-being through relevant products and services is a designer task. They achieve this by combining innovative ideas with appropriate technologies. While the Internet of Things (IoT) brings vast opportunities in this regard, it significantly raises the rapid-prototyping complexity. In this paper, we look at the challenge of desi...
Chapter
Full-text available
This paper examines the use of “pacing plots” to represent variations in student learning sequences within a digital curriculum. Pacing plots are an intuitive and flexible data visualizations that have a potential for revealing the diversity of blended classroom instructional models. By using curriculum pacing plots, we identified several common im...
Article
Full-text available
Neuropsychological assessments are used to measure and characterize cognitive function. However, in-lab assessments are expensive and inconvenient to administer. This paper describes a series of game-based mobile cognitive assessments designed to measure cognitive functions such as inhibition, processing speed, working memory and reasoning skills....
Poster
Full-text available
In this paper, we describe data mining techniques used to extract frequent learning pathways from a large educational dataset. These pathways were extracted as a directed graph that encoded student learning processes. Our dataset contains more than 800 million interactions of over 3 million anonymized students in an online learning platform. Perfor...
Presentation
Full-text available
Instructional designers often turn to theories of motivational design when producing educational games. The popular theory of ”Flow” predicts that game motivation will be greatest when games are ”not too hard and not too easy.” We tested this idea by randomly assigning >20,000 learners to variations of a popular educational math game. Results: In a...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Many game designers aim to optimize difficulty to make games that are "not too hard, not too easy." However, recent experiments have shown that even moderate difficulty can reduce player engagement. The present work investigates other design factors that may account for the purported benefits of difficulty, such as choice, novelty and suspense. The...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
"Multi-armed bandits" offer a new paradigm for the AI-assisted design of user interfaces. To help designers understand the potential, we present the results of two experimental comparisons between bandit algorithms and random assignment. Our studies are intended to show designers how bandits algorithms are able to rapidly explore an experimental de...
Article
Full-text available
MP Ranjan was an influential senior faculty at India’s National Institute of Design and was on the editorial board of this journal. This article shares an interview with MP Ranjan that was recorded just two days before his untimely death. In this lively interview, he shared his rich vision for the future of design in India. He shared fascinating an...
Research
Full-text available
This case study presents the design of “an intelligence-building app for kids” as a worked example, with the goal of sharing our accumulated design knowledge. Our design goals are motivated by the fact that researchers in artificial intelligence assume that "intelligence" is a property that can be improved while researchers in human intelligence do...
Article
Full-text available
Selective sustained attention, or the ability to allocate perceptual and mental resources to a single object or event, is an important cognitive ability widely assumed to be required for learning. Assessing young children's selective sustained attention is challenging due to the limited number of sensitive and developmentally appropriate performanc...
Research
Full-text available
Large-scale online controlled experiments provide a rapid and ecologically-valid mechanism for measuring the effects of design on users. These experiments can be useful for both applied software optimization as well as for the development of basic scientific theory. The commercial software industry has built an enormous infrastructure for conductin...
Research
Full-text available
“Multi-armed bandits” offer a new paradigm for designing user interfaces in collaboration with AI and user data. To help designers understand the potential, we present the results of two experimental comparisons between bandit algorithms and random assignment. Our studies are intended to show designers how bandits algorithms are able to rapidly exp...
Research
Full-text available
One popular design theory for games is that player motivation will be greatest when the game isn’t too hard and isn’t too easy. However, recent design experiments have found that lowering game difficulty consistently increases motivation. Might difficulty be overrated as a motivational factor? After all, increased game difficulty is often correlate...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Online controlled experiments can serve as a powerful tool to facilitate theory building. The commercial software industry regularly uses online experimentation (e.g., A/B tests) to understand which of several interaction designs produce more optimal results. However, online controlled experiments can also be used to test generalizable theories abo...
Article
Selective sustained attention, or the ability to allocate perceptual and mental resources to a single object or event, is an important cognitive ability widely assumed to be required for learning. Assessing young children’s selective sustained attention is challenging due to the limited number of sensitive and developmentally appropriate performanc...