Tiffany Knearem

Alongside her role at MBZUAI, Professor Knearem is the founder of TK Research – a consultancy specializing in UX research, product management and foundational research in human-centered AI. She was previously a User Experience Researcher on Google’s Material Design team, focusing on how designers and developers collaborate and the role of AI in UX design. She co-organized Google’s UX of AI interest group to foster collaboration on AI product research across teams. Her research centers on human-AI alignment and AI-supported design workflows, with publications in CHI, DIS, and UIST. She is expanding the Bidirectional AI Alignment framework to improve AI’s understanding and critical thinking about AI itself.

As an educator and mentor, she has taught and supported students in both academic and industry settings, delivering guest lectures at several universities and global conferences. She has mentored interns and student researchers on projects involving AI and design. Recognized for excellence in teaching support, she has held leadership roles at major HCI conferences.

• Ph.D. in Information Sciences and Technology from Pennsylvania State University
• Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from The University of Kansas
• Bachelor of Arts in East Asian Languages and Cultures from The University of Kansas

• Resident columnist “Mundane Machineries” for Interactions Magazine, sharing insights around everyday implications of technology use (2025 - present)
• Received the CHI 2025 Honorable Mention award for “Hashtag re-appropriation for audience control on recommendation-driven social media Xiaohongshu (rednote)”
• Led the CHI 2025 Special Interest Group (SIG) on bi-directional human-AI alignment, which ran alongside the sister workshop on this topic at ICLR 2025.
• Invited speaker on AI alignment in various domains at multiple universities internationally: University of Copenhagen (Denmark), St. Andrews (Scotland), Northumbria University (UK), Birmingham City University (UK), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany) and others (2022 - present)
• Invited speaker and panelist for 2024 ACM Reflections | Projections, the largest student-led tech conference in the Midwest (USA)
• Appointed to give talks on behalf of Google as a CHI sponsor on "Transitioning from Academia to Industry" and “The Impact of AI on Design Tooling” to large audiences at CHI 2023 and CHI 2024
• Co-organized a 3 day seminar at Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (Germany) in 2023 with a dual focus on HCI in wearable tech and AI for UX design and personalization
• Received the Penn State College of IST Award for Excellence in Teaching Support, which recognizes outstanding commitment to student learning, reflective teaching practices, leadership, and a commitment to professional growth as a teacher (2021)
• Various international conference leadership roles, e.g., for ACM CSCW, ACM CHI, ACM Creativity and Cognition, iConference (2018 - present)

• Chen, X. A., Knearem, T., & Li, Y. (2025, July). The GenUI Study: Exploring the Design of Generative UI Tools to Support UX Practitioners and Beyond. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 1179-1196).
• Wan, R., Tong, L., Knearem, T., Li, T. J. J., Huang, T. H. K., & Wu, Q. (2025, April). Hashtag re-appropriation for audience control on recommendation-driven social media Xiaohongshu (rednote). In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-25).
• Huang, C. Y., Gautam, S., McClellan Brooks, S., Lin, Y. F., Knearem, T., & Huang, T. H. K. (2025, April). Inspo: Writing with Crowds Alongside AI. In Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-9).
• Shen, H., Knearem, T., Ghosh, R., Alkiek, K., Krishna, K., Liu, Y., ... & Jurgens, D. (2024). Towards bidirectional human-ai alignment: A systematic review for clarifications, framework, and future directions. arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.09264.
• Lu, Y., Knearem, T., Dutta, S., Blass, J., Kliman-Silver, C., & Bentley, F. (2024, May). AI Is Not Enough: A Hybrid Technical Approach to AI Adoption in UI Linting With Heuristics. In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-7).
• Knearem, T., Jo, J., Alliyu, O., & Carroll, J. M. (2024). Solidarity not charity! empowering local communities for disaster relief during covid-19 through grassroots support. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 33(4), 559-604.
• Knearem, T., Khwaja, M., Gao, Y., Bentley, F., & Kliman-Silver, C. E. (2023, April). Exploring the future of design tooling: The role of artificial intelligence in tools for user experience professionals. In Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-6).