Bridging Human-AI Grounding Gaps with Omar Shaikh | AM Podcast #1

Omar Shaikh is a Stanford PhD student, HCI and NLP researcher, and author of the award-winning UIST 2025 paper “Creating General User Models from Computer Use”. Omar’s pioneering work aims to bridge the Human-AI grounding gap.

Outline:

0:00 - Teaser

1:21 - Prelude: Introducing Omar Shaikh

2:07 - Monologue: Better Context for AI

4:22 - Bridging the Human-AI Grounding Gap

6:14 - Confidence scores in General User Models (GUMs)

7:32 - Calibration of General User Models

13:20 - Uses of General User Models

15:01 - Mixed Initiative Interactions

22:10 - Motivation for GUM

25:31 - Tabracadabra: tab everywhere!

27:01 - Design decisions in GUM

28:26 - Designing Interactive Experiences

32:11 - DITTO: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.00888

33:06 - Work on Domains without Existing Benchmarks

34:45 - Challenges of the GUM Project

37:26 - Privacy and Data Ownership

38:57 - Finetuning a User Model

44:09 - Mindblowing GUM Inferences

49:02 - Social Problems of GUMs

50:27 - GUM as a Reflection Tool

References:

• Omar Shaikh’s research homepage: https://oshaikh.com/

• Creating General User Models from Computer Use: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10831

• Tabracadabra: https://x.com/oshaikh13/status/1967626897837494479

• Aligning Language Models with Demonstrated Feedback: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.00888

• Principles of Mixed-Initiative User Interfaces: https://erichorvitz.com/chi99horvitz.pdf

• Verification of Forecasts Expressed in Terms of Probability: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/mwre/78/1/1520-0493_1950_078_0001_vofeit_2_0_co_2.xml 

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.