The Computational Design Lab is a research group in the Computer Science Department of Columbia University. Its goal is to build AI tools that enhance people's productivity. The three main approaches are to:

  • discover principles of successful solutions
  • design better solutions through brainstorming, synthesis, and iteration
  • communicate complex ideas more easily with visual symbols and well-grounded prose

People



Lydia Chilton

Lydia B. Chilton
Professor, PI
Vivian Liu

Vivian Liu
PhD Student
Sitong Wang

Sitong Wang
PhD Student
Tao Long

Tao Long
PhD Student


Yulun Du

Yulun Du
PhD Student
Jenny Ma

Xuanming "Billy" Zhang
PhD Student (co-advised by Zhou Yu)
Jenny Ma

Jenny Ma
PhD Student
Karthik Sreedhar

Karthik Sreedhar
PhD Student


Riya Sahni

Riya Sahni
PhD Student

Alumni



Robert Soden

Robert Soden
Faculty at University of Toronto
Katy Gero

Katy Gero (2023)
Faculty at University of Sydney

Dissertation: AI and the Writer: How Language Models Support Creative Writers

Savvas Petridis

Savvas Petridis (2023)
Google DeepMind, People and AI Research (PAIR)

Dissertation: Designing Exploratory Search Systems that Stimulate Memory and Reduce Cognitive Load

Daniel Li

Daniel Li (2022)
US Army

Dissertation: Enabling Structured Navigation of Longform Spoken Dialog with Automatic Summarization

Publications

Schemex: Interactive Structural Abstraction from Examples with Contrastive Refinement
Sitong Wang, Samia Menon, Dingzeyu Li, Xiaojuan Ma, Richard Zemel, Lydia B. Chilton
Under submission

PDF Video


AgentDynEx: Nudging the Mechanics and Dynamics of Multi-Agent Simulations
Jenny Ma*, Riya Sahni*, Karthik Sreedhar, Lydia B. Chilton
* equal contribution
Under submission

PDF Video


Simulating Cooperative Prosocial Behavior with Multi-Agent LLMs: Evidence and Mechanisms for AI Agents to Inform Policy Decisions
Karthik Sreedhar, Alice Cai, Jenny Ma, Jeffrey V. Nickerson, Lydia B. Chilton
IUI 2025

PDF


Beyond AI Training: How Social and Experiential Learning Shape AI Adoption in theWorkplace
Riya Sahni, Lydia B. Chilton
Under submission

PDF


Audience Impressions of Narrative Structures and Personal Language Style in Science Communication on Social Media
Grace Li, Yuanyang Teng, Juna Kawai-Yue, Unaisah Ahmed, Anatta S. Tantiwongse, Jessica Y. Liang, Dorothy Zhang, Kynnedy Simone Smith, Tao Long, Mina Lee, Lydia B Chilton
Under submission

PDF


The Role of Human Creativity in the Presence of AI Creativity Tools at Work: A Case Study on AI-Driven Content Transformation in Journalism
Sitong Wang, Jocelyn McKinnon-Crowley, Tao Long, Kian Loong Lua, Keren Henderson, Kevin Crowston, Jeffrey V. Nickerson, Mark Hansen, Lydia B. Chilton
Under submission

PDF


AI Humor Generation: Cognitive, Social and Creative Skills for Effective Humor
Sean Kim, Lydia B. Chilton
Under submission

PDF


JumpStarter: Getting Started on Personal Goals with Adaptive Personal Context Curation
Sitong Wang, Xuanming Zhang, Jenny Ma, Alyssa Hwang, Zhou Yu, Lydia B. Chilton
Under submission

PDF Video


Copying Style, Extracting Value: Illustrators' Perception of AI Style Transfer and its Impact on Creative Labor
Julien Porquet, Sitong Wang, Lydia B. Chilton
CHI 2025

PDF


DynEx: Dynamic Code Synthesis with Structured Design Exploration for Accelerated Exploratory Programming
Jenny Ma, Karthik Sreedhar, Vivian Liu, Pedro Alejandro Perez, Sitong Wang, Riya Sahni, Lydia B. Chilton
CHI 2025

PDF Video


LogoMotion: Visually Grounded Code Generation for Content-Aware Animation
Vivian Liu, Rubaiat Habib Kazi, Li-Yi Wei, Matthew Fisher, Timothy Langlois, Seth Walker, Lydia Chilton
CHI 2025

PDF Video Project Website


Seeing Science: Inquiry-Based Learning at Home Through Mobile Messaging System
Tamar Fuhrmann, Marina A Lemee, Jonathan Pang, Je Seung You, Lydia B Chilton, Carl Vondrick, Paulo Blikstein
IDC WIP 2024

PDF ACM DL


MoodSmith: Enabling Mood-Consistent Multimedia for AI-Generated Advocacy Campaigns
Samia Menon, Sitong Wang, Lydia Chilton
ICCC 2024

PDF


Eliciting Topic Hierarchies from Large Language Models
Grace Li, Tao Long, Lydia Chilton
Under submission

PDF


Not Just Novelty: A Longitudinal Study on Utility and Customization of AI Workflows
Tao Long, Katy Ilonka Gero, Lydia B. Chilton
DIS 2024

PDF Arxiv ACM


PodReels: Human-AI Co-Creation of Video Podcast Teasers
Sitong Wang, Zheng Ning, Anh Truong, Mira Dontcheva, Dingzeyu Li, Lydia B. Chilton
DIS 2024

PDF Arxiv PDF ACM


Digital "Double Hatters":
Vivian Liu, Tao Long, Nathan Raw, Lydia Chilton
HICSS 2025

PDF Video Tweetorial Code Demo BibTex


Scrolly2Reel: Retargeting Graphics for Social Media Using Narrative Beats
Duy K. Nguyen, Jenny Ma, Pedro Alejandro Perez, Lydia B. Chilton
HICSS 2025

PDF


Simulating Human Strategic Behavior: Comparing Single and Multi-agent LLMs
Karthik Sreedhar, Lydia Chilton
Best Paper Nomination
HICSS 2025

PDF


Storysumm: Evaluating faithfulness in story summarization
Melanie Subbiah, F Ladhak, A Mishra, G Adams, Lydia B Chilton, Kathleen McKeown
EMNLP 2024


Reading Subtext: Evaluating Large Language Models on Short Story Summarization with Writers
Melanie Subbiah, Sean Zhang, Lydia B. Chilton, Kathleen McKeown
TACL 2024


ReelFramer: Human-AI Co-Creation for News-to-Video Translation
Sitong Wang, Samia Menon, Tao Long, Keren Henderson, Dingzeyu Li, Kevin Crowston, Mark Hansen, Jeffrey V Nickerson, Lydia B Chilton
CHI 2024

PDF Video Tweet BibTeX


Writing out the Storm: Designing and Evaluating Tools for Weather Risk Messaging
Sophia S Jit, Jennifer Spinney, Priyank Chandra, Lydia B Chilton, Robert Soden
CHI 2024


Designing with AI
Lydia B. Chilton
XRDS Magazine, Summer 2023


Tweetorial Hooks: Generative AI Tools to Motivate Science on Social Media
Tao Long, Dorothy Zhang, Grace Li, Batool Taraif, Samia Menon, Kynnedy Simone Smith, Sitong Wang, Katy Ilonka Gero, Lydia B. Chilton
ICCC 2023

PDF Video Project Website Code Demo BibTeX


Metaphorian: Leveraging Large Language Models to Support Extended Metaphor Creation for Science Writing
Jeongyeon Kim, Sangho Suh, Lydia B Chilton, Haijun Xia
DIS 2023

PDF


StoryWars: A Dataset and Instruction Tuning Baselines for Collaborative Story Understanding and Generation
Yulun Du and Lydia Chilton
ACL 2023

PDF


How Much is Performance Worth to Users? A Quantitative Approach
Adam Hastings, Lydia B. Chilton, Simha Sethumadhavan.
Computing Frontiers 2023

PDF


Challenges and Opportunities for the Design of Smart Speakers Language Models
Tao Long, Lydia B. Chilton
AAAI AI4Home 2023


PDF Video BibTeX


PopBlends: Strategies for Conceptual Blending with Large Language Models
Sitong Wang, Savvas Petridis, Taeahn Kwon, Xiaojuan Ma, Lydia B. Chilton
CHI 2023


PDF Video


AngleKindling: Supporting Journalistic Angle Ideation with Large Language Models
Savvas Petridis, Nicholas Diakopoulos, Kevin Crowston, Mark Hansen, Keren Henderson, Stan Jastrzebski, Jeffrey V. Nickerson, Lydia B. Chilton
CHI 2023

PDF


Social Dynamics of AI Support in Creative Writing
Katy Ilonka Gero, Tao Long, Lydia B. Chilton
CHI 2023

PDF Video Tweet BibTeX


Improving Automatic Summarization for Browsing Longform Spoken Dialog
Daniel Li, Thomas Chen, Alec Zadikian, Albert Tung, Lydia B. Chilton
CHI 2023

PDF


Opal: Multimodal Image Generation for News Illustration
Vivian Liu, Han Qiao, Lydia B. Chilton
UIST 2022

PDF


Eliciting Gestures for Novel Note-taking Interactions
Katy Gero, Lydia B. Chilton, Chris Melancon and Mike Cleron.
DIS 2022

PDF



Sparks: Inspiration for Science Writing using Language Models
Katy Gero, Vivian Liu, and Lydia B. Chilton.
DIS 2022

PDF bibtex


Initial Images: Using Image Prompts to Improve Subject Representation in Multimodal AI Generated Art
Han Qiao, Vivian Liu, Lydia B. Chilton
Creativity and Cognition 2022


Design Guidelines for Prompt Engineering Text-to-Image Generative Models
Vivian Liu, Lydia B. Chilton
CHI 2022


Insights and Opportunities for HCI Research into Hurricane Risk Communication
Robert Soden, Lydia B. Chilton, Scott Miles, Rebecca Bicksler, Kaira Ray Villanueva, Melissa Bica
CHI 2022


(Workshop) HAI-GEN 2022: 3rd Workshop on Human-AI Co-Creation with Generative Models
Justin D. Weisz, Mary Lou Maher, Hendrik Strobelt, Lydia B. Chilton, David Bau, Werner Geyer,
IUI 2022
https://hai-gen.github.io/2022/


SymbolFinder: Brainstorming diverse symbols using local semantic networks
Savvas Petridis, Hijung Valentina Shin, Lydia B. Chilton
UIST 2021
https://columbia-comp-design.github.io/symbol_finder_web/


Hierarchical Summarization for Longform Spoken Dialog
Daniel Li, Thomas Chen, Albert Tung, Lydia B. Chilton
UIST 2021


What Makes Tweetorials Tick: How Experts Communicate Complex Topics on Twitter
Katy Gero, Vivian Liu, Sarah Huang, Jennifer Lee, and Lydia Chilton.
CSCW 2021
http://language-play.com/tech-tweets/
bibtex


VisiFit: AI Tools to Iteratively Improve Visual Blends
Lydia B. Chilton, Ecenaz Jen Ozmen, Sam H. Ross, Vivian Liu
CHI 2021


HAI-GEN 2021: 2nd Workshop on Human-AI Co-Creation with Generative Models
Werner Geyer, Lydia B. Chilton, Justin D. Weisz, Mary Lou Maher
IUI 2021
https://hai-gen2021.github.io/


AmbiTeam: Providing Team Awareness Through Ambient Displays
Sarah Morrison-Smith, Lydia B. Chilton, Jaime Ruiz.
GI 2021


AmbiTeam feature in XRDSVolume 29 Issue 4 pp 20–25


Facilitating Team Awareness through Ambient Displays.
Sarah Morrison-Smith, Lydia B. Chilton, Jaime Ruiz.
Microsoft’s Symposium on the New Future in Work. (2020).

How Novelists Use Generative Language Models
Alex Calderwood, Vivian Qiu, Katy Ilonka Gero, Lydia B. Chilton
HAI-GEN Workshop Paper at IUI 2020


HAI-GEN 2020: Workshop on Human-AI Co-Creation with Generative Models
Werner Geyer, Lydia B. Chilton, Ranjitha Kumar, Adam Tauman Kalai
IUI 2020
https://hai-gen2020.github.io/


WordBlender: Principles and Tools for Generating Word Blends
Sam H. Ross, Ecenaz Jen Ozmen, Maria Kogan, Lydia B. Chilton
IUI 2020.

(Workshop) Addressing the Accessibility of Social Media
Cole Gleason, Patrick Harrington, Benjamin M. Gorman, Andres Monroy-Hernandez, Garreth Tigwell, Lydia B. Chilton, Hernisa Kacorri, Meredith Ringel Morris, Shaomei Wu
CSCW 2019
https://socialandaccessible.wordpress.com/

Low Level Linguistic Controls for Style Transfer and Content Preservation
Katy Gero, Chris Kedzie, Jonathan Reeve and Lydia B. Chilton
INLG 2019

Making Memes Accessible.
Cole Gleason, Amy Pavel, Xingyu Liu, Patrick Carrington, Lydia B. Chilton, Jeffrey P. Bigham.
ASSETS 2019

Human Errors in Interpretation of Visual Metaphors
Savvas D. Petridis, Lydia B. Chilton.
Creativity & Cognition 2019

VisiBlends: An Interactive Pipeline for Creating Visual Blends (Short Version)
Lydia B. Chilton, Savvas D. Petridis, Maneesh Agrawala.
Collective Intelligence 2019.

VisiBlends: An Interactive Pipeline for Creating Visual Blends
Lydia B. Chilton, Savvas D. Petridis, Maneesh Agrawala.
CHI 2019

Cicero: Multi-Turn, Contextual Argumentation for Accurate Crowdsourcing
Jim Chen, Jonathan Bragg, Lydia B. Chilton, Daniel S. Weld.
CHI 2019

Metaphoria: An Algorithmic Companion for Metaphor Creation.
Katy Gero, Lydia B. Chilton
CHI 2019


MicroTalk: Using Argumentation to Improve Crowdsourcing Accuracy
Ryan Drapeau, Lydia B. Chilton, Jonathan Bragg, Daniel S. Weld
HCOMP 2016

HumorTools: A Microtask Workflow for Generating News Satire
Lydia B. Chilton, Daniel S. Weld, James A. Landay.
In submission.

Frenzy: Collaborative Data Organization for Creating Conference Sessions
Lydia B. Chilton, Juho Kim, Paul Andre, Felicia Cordeiro, James A. Landay , Daniel S. Weld, Steven P. Dow, Robert C. Miller, Haoqi Zhang.
CHI 2014. Honorable Mention for Best Paper

Cascade: Crowdsourcing Taxonomy Creation
Lydia B. Chilton, Greg Little, Darren Edge, Daniel S. Weld, James A. Landay.
CHI 2013.

Community clustering: Leveraging an academic crowd to form coherent conference sessions.
Paul Andre, Haoqi Zhang, Juho Kim, Lydia B. Chilton, Steven P. Dow, and Robert C. Miller.
HCOMP 2013. Honorable Mention for Best Paper

Cobi: A community-informed conference scheduling tool.
Juho Kim, Haoqi Zhang, Paul André, Lydia B. Chilton, Wendy Mackay, Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, Robert C. Miller, and Steven P. Dow.
UIST 2013.

Addressing Users' Queries directly in the Web Search Results
Lydia B. Chilton, Jaime Teevan
WWW 2011.

Task Search in a Human Computation Market
Lydia B. Chilton, John J. Horton, Robert C. Miller, Shiri Azenkot.
KDD-HCOMP 2010.

Exploring Iterative and Parallel Human Computation Processes
Greg Little, Lydia B. Chilton, Max Goldman, Robert C. Miller.
KDD-HCOMP 2010.

TurKit: Human Computation Algorithms on Mechanical Turk
Greg Little, Lydia B. Chilton, Max Goldman, Robert C. Miller.
UIST 2010.

The Labor Economics of Paid Crowdsourcing
John J. Horton, Lydia B. Chilton
ACM E-Commerce 2010.

Seaweed: A web application for designing economic games.
Lydia B. Chilton, Clayton T. Sims, Max Goldman, Greg Little, and Robert C. Miller.
SIGKDD HCOMP 2009.

Tabulator: Exploring and analyzing linked data on the semantic web.
Tim Berners-Lee, Yuhsin Chen, Lydia B. Chilton, Dan Connolly, Ruth Dhanaraj, James Hollenbach, Adam Lerer, and David Sheets.
Semantic Web User Interaction Workshop, 2006.

Why We Customize the Web
Lydia B. Chilton, Robert C. Miller, Greg Little, and Chen-Hsiang Yu.
Chapter In A. Cypher, M. Dontcheva, T. Lau, and J. Nichols, eds., No Code Required: Giving Users Tools to Transform the Web, Elsevier, 2010.

Rewriting the Web with Chickenfoot
Robert C. Miller, Michael Bolin, Lydia B. Chilton, Greg Little, Matthew Webber, and Chen-Hsiang Yu.
Chapter In A. Cypher, M. Dontcheva, T. Lau, and J. Nichols, eds. No Code Required: Giving Users Tools to Transform the Web, Elsevier, 2010.