Nick Merrill

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Managing Director at University of California, Berkeley

We presented software engineers in the San Francisco Bay Area with a working brain-computer interface (BCI) to surface the narratives and anxieties around these devices among technical practitioners. Despite this group's heterogeneous beliefs about the exact nature of the mind, we find a shared belief that the contents of the mind will someday be "...

While brain-computer interfaces (BCI) based on electroencephalography (EEG) have improved dramatically over the past five years, their inconvenient, head-worn form factor has challenged their wider adoption. In this paper, we investigate how EEG signals collected from the ear could be used for "gestural" control of a brain-computer interface (BCI)....

We investigate interpretations of a biosignal (heartrate) in uncertain social interactions. We describe the quantitative and qualitative results of a randomized vignette experiment in which subjects were asked to make assessments about an acquaintance based on an imagined scenario that included shared heartrate information. We compare the results o...

Numerous toolkits have been developed to support ethical AI development. However, toolkits, like all tools, encode assumptions in their design about what work should be done and how. In this paper, we conduct a qualitative analysis of 27 AI ethics toolkits to critically examine how the work of ethics is imagined and how it is supported by these too...

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are widely deployed in smartphone photography; and prompt-based image synthesis models have rapidly become commonplace. In this paper, we describe a Research-through-Design (RtD) project which explores this shift in the means and modes of image production via the creation and use of the Entoptic Field Camer...

Numerous toolkits have been developed to support ethical AI development. However, toolkits, like all tools, encode assumptions in their design about what work should be done and how. In this paper, we conduct a qualitative analysis of 27 AI ethics toolkits to critically examine how the work of ethics is imagined and how it is supported by these too...

Design research is important for understanding and interrogating how emerging technologies shape human experience. However, design research with Machine Learning (ML) is relatively underdeveloped. Crucially, designers have not found a grasp on ML uncertainty as a design opportunity rather than an obstacle. The technical literature points to data an...

This paper introduces “infrastructural speculations,” an orientation toward speculative design that considers the complex and long-lived relationships of technologies with broader systems, beyond moments of immediate invention and design. As modes of speculation are increasingly used to interrogate questions of broad societal concern, it is pertine...

This one-day workshop aims to explore ubiquitous privacy research and design in the context of mobile and IoT by facilitating discourse among scholars from the networked privacy and design communities. The complexity in modern socio-technical systems points to the potential of utilizing various design techniques (e.g., speculative design, design fi...

Biosensors-devices that sense the human body-are increasingly ubiquitous. However, it is unclear how people evaluate the risks associated with their use, in part because it is not well-understood what people believe these sensors can reveal. In this study, participants ranked biosensors by how likely they are to reveal what a person is thinking and...

In-ear EEG offers a promising path toward usable, discreet brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) for both healthy individuals and persons with disabilities. To test the promise of this modality, we produced a brain-based authentication system using custom-fit EEG earpieces. In a sample of N = 7 participants, we demonstrated that our system has high accu...

Drawing on philosophies of embodied, distributed & extend cognition, this paper argues that the mind is readable from sensors worn on the body and embedded in the environment. It contends that past work in HCI has already begun such work, introducing the term models of minds to describe it. To those who wish to develop the capacity to build models...

We investigate cybersecurity toolkits, collections of public facing materials intended to help users achieve security online. Through a qualitative analysis of 41 online toolkits, we present a set of key design dimensions: agentive scale (who is responsible for security), achievability (can security be achieved), and interventional stage (when are...

In this paper, we empirically demonstrate the vulnerability of a passthought authentication system to fake signals generated by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), and use these same signals to make authenticators more robust. We first train a classifier that is able to authenticate a subject based on their EEG signals. The classifier performs...

In this paper, we use design fiction to explore the social implications for adoption of brain-computer interfaces (BCI). We argue that existing speculations about BCIs are incomplete: they discuss fears about radical changes in types of control, at the expense of discussing more traditional types of power that emerge in everyday experience, particu...

Privacy policies are critical to understanding one's rights on online platforms, yet few users read them. In this pictorial, we approach this as a systemic issue that is part a failure of interaction design. We provided a variety of people with printed packets of privacy policies, aiming to tease out this form's capabilities and limitations as a de...

The emerging ecology of commercial social VR currently includes a diverse set of applications and competing models of what it means to be social in VR. This study maps a slice of this ecology, comparing and contrasting ways different applications frame, support, shape, or constrain social interaction. We deploy a method of design-oriented autobiogr...

Passthoughts, in which a user thinks a secret thought to log in to services or devices, provides two factors of authentication (knowledge and inherence) in a single step. Since its proposal in 2005, passthoughts enjoyed a number of successful empirical studies. In this paper, we renew the promise of passthoughts authentication, outlining the main c...

Multifactor authentication presents a robust security method, but typically requires multiple steps on the part of the user resulting in a high cost to usability and limiting adoption. Furthermore, a truly usable system must be unobtrusive and inconspicuous. Here, we present a system that provides all three factors of authentication (knowledge, pos...

In February of 2017, Google announced the first SHA1 col- lision. Using over nine quintillion computations (over 6,500 years of compute time), a group of academic and industry researchers produced two different PDF files with identical SHA1 checksums. But why? After all, SHA1 had already been deprecated by numerous standards and advisory bodies. Th...

This workshop seeks to expand our understanding and imaginations regarding the possible roles biosensors (sensors measuring humans) can-and should-play in everyday life. By applying a critical lens to issues of interpretation, representation, and experience around biosensing and biosensors, we aim to shape research agendas within DIS, and generate...

This study examines heartrate sharing in the context of a trust-building game. Through quantitative and qualitative analyses, we find that "elevated" (versus “normal”) heartrate of an exchange partner is associated with negative mood attributions and reduced cooperation in a social dilemma game. To investigate how specific our findings are to heart...

Personal and wearable computing are moving toward smaller and more seamless devices. We explore how this trend could be mirrored in an authentication scheme based on electroencephalography (EEG) signals collected from the ear. We evaluate this model using a low cost, single-channel, consumer grade device for data collection. Using data from 12 stud...

This paper exhibits two methods for decreasing the time associated with training a machine learning classifier on biometric signals. Using electroencephalography (EEG) data obtained from a consumer-grade headset with a single electrode, we show that these methods produce significant gains in the computational performance and calibration time of a s...

Recent scholarship suggests that immersive virtual worlds may be especially well suited for friendship formation on the Internet. Through 65 semi-structured interviews with residents in highly-populated portions of the virtual world Second Life, we explore the nature of friendship within the immersive virtual world, examining friendship claims and...