Building AI Systems for Imperfect Humans with Sherry Wu | AM Podcast #2

Sherry Wu is a professor at CMU whose research sits at the intersection of human-computer interaction and natural language processing. From making AI work for imperfect humans to making humans work better with AI — Sherry's work challenges us to rethink both sides of the equation.

Outline:

• 0:00 - Teaser
• 1:13 - Prelude: Introducing Sherry Wu
• 2:30 - How the AI Field Has Changed in the Last Four Years
• 4:22 - Making AI Systems Work for Imperfect Humans
• 6:54 - Models vs. Scaffolding
• 10:36 - Understanding Human Imperfection in Teaching Contexts
• 19:28 - AI Literacy Skills
• 22:04 - How AI Is Changing CS Education
• 25:38 - Suppose We Have AGI, What Does It Mean to Be Human?
• 29:14 - Training Models to be More Human-centered
• 31:46 - Checklists Are Better Than Reward Models https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18624
• 36:56 - Challenge in Aligning Models
• 43:22 - Advice for Interdisciplinary Research
• 45:37 - Reflection on Her Own Research

References:

• Sherry Wu’s Research Homepage: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sherryw/

• Sherry Wu’s course page (PMDS, Spring 2025): https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sherryw/courses/2025s-pmds.html

• AI Fluency Index: https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-fluency-index

• Checklists Are Better Than Reward Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18624

• Not Everyone Wins with LLMs: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21890

Podcast Links:

• Podcast website: https://augmented-mind.github.io/

• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/augmented-mind-podcast/id1868102170

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/40KculkYTe2tOpqJm6TAYr?si=PU_UncsMT4mXjVNCRwoXog

• RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/10dbf5b7c/podcast/rss

About the Hosts:

The AM Podcast is hosted by Yijia Shao, Shannon Shen, and Michael Ryan, CS PhD students at Stanford University and MIT.