Research
Current work: measuring AI's effects on human cognition and expertise, through brain sensing and field research, from education to legal practice.
Dr. Erin Solovey is an Associate Professor and the Graduate Coordinator of Computer Science at WPI and was a 2024-25 Harvard-Radcliffe Institute Fellow. She studies HCI and human-AI interaction, exploring how people and intelligent systems can work together in both high-stakes and everyday environments in ways that are natural, empowering, and aligned with human goals and values. Her career spans academia and industry, from research labs to enterprise software to early-stage startups.
In her lab, Dr. Solovey and her students develop advanced interactive systems that help people think, learn, and work more effectively. To achieve this, they create new ways for people to engage with technology through emerging input technologies, including brain-computer interfaces, physiological and textile sensing, and radar-based input, and combine these with machine learning to create intelligent, adaptive systems. These systems address real-world challenges in education, accessibility, teamwork, decision-making, and safety-critical environments. She currently collaborates with industry and research labs such as Draper to bring brain and physiological computing into real-world settings for more effective human-AI teaming. Dr. Solovey is also deeply committed to improving STEM education and increasing participation in computing and AI.
Dr. Solovey received her AB from Harvard College and her MS and PhD from Tufts. She was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT. She was deputy editor of IJHCS (2019–2024) and is an associate editor for ACM TOCHI and on program committees including ACM CHI. She was appointed to the National Academies Panel on Assessment of Humans in Complex Systems. Her research is funded by the NSF, and she has received a Computing Innovation Fellowship, a Best Paper Award and five Honorable Mention Awards. Her work has been covered on WBZ CBS News, MIT Technology Review, The Times, and others. Her industry experience includes software engineering at Oracle and Sun Microsystems, research internships at Microsoft Research and MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and UX research and development at several early-stage startups.
