Faculty Projects
Human-AI Community Programs for Undergraduates in Design, Technology, and Research (DTR)

Photo of group of DTR students

Faculty

Haoqi Zhang, CS

Amount Requested

$16,000

Summary

Design, Technology, and Research (DTR) is a Computer Science and Segal Design initiative that empowers undergraduates to drive cutting-edge research that shapes new experiences with people and technology. As a program and model for undergraduate research, DTR prepares students for careers in engineering, design, innovation, and research by providing authentic practice. The effort embodies McCormick's mission to engage students in the creation, exploration, and application of engineering and scientific principles to solve challenging problems, produce new knowledge, and advance society. DTR also aligns with Northwestern's strategic focus on Design and the advancement of inventive and rigorous models of education.

Through 12 years of our highly successful program:

  • We mentored 187 students (50% women) to self-direct complex work.
  • DTR students place at top tech and design companies; at last survey, an astonishing 40% of DTR undergrads placed at Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. Two DTR alums are at OpenAI.
  • 4 out of 5 KPCB Fellows from Northwestern (all time) are DTR alums.
  • Students iteratively designed, built, and tested 70+ new socio-technical systems; they have applied for and received $80,000+ in outside funding, including 78 undergraduate research grants.
  • 30+ student papers are published at premier conferences; students won 8 research competitions nationally and internationally.
  • We publicly released the DTR documentary short film, Forward.
  • I write the widely read DTR annual letter, which fosters ongoing dialogue on undergraduate mentoring, learning, and research practice.

With this new Murphy Society grant, we aim to pilot and establish community programs for learning human-AI practices that connect our undergraduate students, our outstanding alumni, and the larger human-AI research community. This work will significantly enrich and advance our learning space and community for our undergraduates and prepare our students to become thoughtful, self-directed innovators in the age of AI. By connecting students to practitioners, alumni, and the broader human-AI research community, we will create a learning environment where students collaboratively develop the judgment, practices, and learning community needed to thrive as designers, engineers, and researchers in the age of AI.

Planned Activities/Investments

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming how people learn, design, engineer, and conduct research. Yet the most important challenge for higher education is not simply teaching students to use AI tools. Rather, it is helping students develop the judgment, learning practices, and communities they need to work thoughtfully, creatively, and responsibly with AI throughout their careers.

Much of the frontier knowledge about effective human-AI practices—how people think, create, design, and conduct research with AI—is not yet codified in textbooks or university courses. Instead, it is emerging through the everyday practices of researchers, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and creators working across industry and academia. As a result, universities must create new ways for students to learn not only from faculty, but also from practitioners and researchers who are actively shaping these new forms of work.

We believe human-AI practices are fundamentally learned through community. Students develop sophisticated practices around AI by experimenting together, sharing workflows, critiquing one another's ideas, reflecting on failures, and building norms for responsible and effective use. DTR has always emphasized learning through community, mentorship, and authentic practice. Our goal is to extend this educational model into the age of AI by creating spaces where students can safely explore, tinker, and take intellectual risks while remaining grounded in a supportive learning community.

Importantly, the rise of AI makes DTR's longstanding educational philosophy even more valuable. As AI accelerates technical work, skills such as self-directed learning, self-regulation, metacognition, critical reflection, and developing one's own sense of purpose become increasingly important. Rather than focusing solely on teaching today's AI tools, we aim to continue helping students become lifelong learners who can thoughtfully adapt as AI technologies continue to evolve.

This educational philosophy motivates three complementary investments during the 2026-2027 academic year:

  • Human-AI community programs: We will run weekly AI hackathons and community events that enable DTR students to collaboratively explore emerging human-AI practices through experimentation, discussion, and project-based learning. These events will also create opportunities to discuss the societal impacts of AI and our own responsibilities as designers, engineers, and researchers. We ran an initial pilot of the program in Spring 2026 with great success, and will work to expand it this year.
  • Connecting students with alumni and external researchers: We now have 100+ DTR alumni working at top tech companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook), leading startups, and teaching aspiring designers and technologists. In addition, DTR has become well known within the human-computer interaction and human-AI research communities. These relationships create exceptional opportunities for our students to learn directly from people leading and advancing the field. With this extended community, we will build sustained programming that connects current DTR students with alumni working at leading technology companies and startups, as well as faculty and researchers from other institutions. Proposed programming includes alumni workshops, social events, mentoring dinners, and networking opportunities, as well as bringing DTR students to ACM CHI 2027 in Pittsburgh and organizing an undergraduate-faculty networking event there. These interactions will expose students to emerging human-AI practices while strengthening their professional and intellectual communities.
  • Supporting experimentation through AI infrastructure: We will invest in shared AI infrastructure—including software subscriptions, API credits, and computing resources—that enables students to rapidly prototype, evaluate, and critically investigate cutting-edge human-AI systems.

Impact

DTR is structured to realize McCormick undergraduates' potential for developing novel technologies and creative solutions through design, engineering, and research. By giving students the independence to drive their own projects while providing the program structure, mentoring, and community to promote productivity, learning, and collaboration, DTR develops students' innovation self-efficacy, provides students with practical experiences in design, research, engineering, and communication, and connects students to a larger community of peers, alumni, and faculty.

Specific to this proposal, we will evaluate the impact of our programming with undergraduate students, alumni, and outside faculty by conducting surveys and semi-structured interviews to understand the impact of these programs on undergraduates' learning and growth, career planning, and well-being. We will craft survey and interview questions using existing literature, such as those created to evaluate the effectiveness of mentoring relationships (e.g., Berk et al., 2005).

We will also continue to evaluate the impact of DTR overall through semi-structured interviews, self-assessment questionnaires, and pre- and post-surveys to assess student learning and development outcomes. We will also use quantitative measures of participation, retention, products, publications, student diversity, and student internship/job placement to evaluate DTR as an effective and scalable model for promoting undergraduate contributions to design, innovation, and research.

Deliverables

The major deliverables for academic year 2026-2027 include:

  • Human-AI community events and weekly human-AI hackathons throughout the academic year
  • Alumni-undergraduate programs, including workshops, mentoring network, social events, and dinners, largely themed around human-AI practices and AI and society
  • Bringing DTR students to, and organizing a faculty-undergraduate networking event at, ACM CHI 2027
  • DTR students designing, developing, evaluating, and critically assessing 10+ cutting-edge human-AI systems and applications, with 15+ students participating in demos, presentations, poster sessions, and student research competitions locally and at national/international conferences and workshops

Sustainability

My goal is to establish DTR as a long-term, sustainable program for supporting undergraduate design, research, and technical innovation. The core approach is to use Murphy funding as "incubator" funds to start new initiatives, fund small capital investments, and produce early results that are then used to apply for larger external funds. So far, this model has shown tremendous success; I have earned 5 NSF grants as PI through the incubator projects in DTR, including my latest award of almost $1M from the NSF in 2025 on "Learning to Innovate."

Additionally, with matching funds and commitment from the Computer Science department and the Segal Design Institute to support DTR's regular operations, we intend to use the Murphy funding to test out and refine new ideas, and to then integrate them into DTR's regular operations over time.

Additionally, we will work to gather outside funding through:

  • NSF REU sites proposals
  • Gift funds from tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Meta
  • Gift funds from donors
  • Northwestern Office of Undergraduate Research

Previous ProjectS

With our 2024-2025 Murphy funding (with some carryover to 2025-2026 during the funding gap), we successfully connected our undergraduates to our outstanding alumni and faculty at other universities. Some highlights from 2025-2026:

  • In Winter 2026, we hosted an AI prototyping studio led by three DTR alums who are leading engineering teams in industry: Corey Grief (Senior Software Engineer at Dropbox), Alex Hollenbeck (Engineering Manager at Plentiful), and Kevin Chen (Senior Staff Software Engineer at Ripple Prime).
  • In Winter 2026, DTR alum Leesha Maliakal (faculty at NEIU) guest-led a studio to teach design prototyping and planning.
  • In Winter 2026, I hosted two DTR alumni dinners in the Bay Area with alumni working across the tech industry, and at Stanford.
  • In Spring 2026, we piloted a weekly community AI hackathon on Friday mornings at the Garage.
  • In Spring 2026, we hosted Elena Glassman, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, who connected with multiple student teams.
  • In Spring 2026, DTR alum Kalina Silverman, who just published her book (Penguin Random House) on "Big Talk: How to Skip the Small Talk, Make Meaningful Connections, and Enrich Your Lives," organized a Big Talk workshop for DTR students and participated in DTR social events.
  • Also in Spring 2026, DTR alum Alex Feng (engineer at Nextdoor) visited DTR and talked to current students about his career.
  • We hosted the DTR end-of-year DTR to connect our current students with local alumni.
  • Beyond hosting these in-person events, I also wrote the fourth DTR annual letter, which shares DTR's learning culture with other faculty, designers, researchers, and educators. We are leading in CS and design research education, and sharing what we are doing with the world.

Current DTR students found these events to be extremely helpful for their thinking about their careers and lives beyond Northwestern, and to become more familiar with AI as a prototyping tool within their design, tech, and research practice. Moreover, students and alumni reported that these events helped to strengthen the DTR community, and also their connection to Northwestern CS and Design. We know that the deepening of these communities and connections can be extremely powerful. Already, multiple alums have offered to provide career advice and mentoring for our current students (including recent calls between current students and alums at Google and Apple).

Budget Overview

Alumni and Faculty Programs: $10,500

  • DTR-hosted alumni dinners, workshops, and socials: $5,000 — Workshops and social events ($3,000), including 2 events/quarter for 3 quarters at $500 per event for supplies, food, and refreshments; and travel supplements for 4 alumni visitors ($2,000).
  • DTR hackathons and social events: $1,500 — Community-building hackathons and Human-AI events (weekly event, 10 weeks/quarter for 3 quarters, estimated at $50 per event for basic snacks).
  • Undergraduate Participation and Themed Event at CHI 2027: $4,000 — Hosting a DTR faculty-undergraduate networking event at ACM CHI 2027 ($1,000), and supplemental funds for students to attend CHI 2027 ($3,000), covering conference registration costs for up to 6 students at $500 per student.
AI Infrastructure: $5,500
  • ChatGPT Pro (Codex)/Claude Pro accounts: $3,000 — $200/year for 15 undergraduate students.
  • Claude and OpenAI Credits: $2,000 — For student-developed AI-enabled prototypes and applications.
  • Supplemental hosting costs for running AI apps: $500 — $125/year for 4 apps.

Total Budget Amount: $16,000

Matching Funds

The following matching funds are expected (and have been received in previous years):

  • NU Computer Science ($3,000 for DTR's operational budget)
  • NU Segal Design ($3,000 for DTR's operational budget)
  • Northwestern Undergraduate Research Grants Office ($5,000 for student research projects)
  • NSF RITEL "Learning to Innovate" Grant ($4,000 devoted for user studies, stipends, and travel)