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Benjamin Xie he|they

Postdoctoral Fellow

Stanford University

I design equitable and educational human-data interactions.

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow with Stanford University’s Human-Computer Interaction Group and Graduate School of Education. I will start as an Assistant Professor at the University of Denver Department of Computer Science in fall 2025. My research interest is in designing critical and equitable human-data interactions for educational and environmental outcomes. I engage with computing education, human-computer interaction, and AI ethics research communities.

I was previously an Embedded Ethics Fellow with Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI and McCoy Center for Ethics in Society. I completed my PhD at the University of Washington Information School with Prof. Amy Ko, where I was a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellow and also a research intern at non-profit Code.org. Prior to my PhD, I was an MIT EECS-Google Research and Innovation Scholar as an undergraduate and Master’s student at MIT researching with Prof. Hal Abelson and MIT App Inventor.

For more information, see about me, projects, or CV.

Interests

  • Computing Education
  • Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
  • Critical Data Studies
  • Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society
  • Participatory Design

Education

  • PhD in Information Science, 2022

    University of Washington

  • MEng in Computer Science, 2016

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • BS in Computer Science, 2015

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

News

Jun 2024: Paper on Benchmarking LLMs for CSEd Accepted to ICER!

Research on using automated benchmarking infrastructure to understand differences in LLM and student performance.accepted to ICER 2024 see paper

May 2024: Joining University of Denver CS as faculty! 🌄

I have accepted an offer to join Univ. of Denver CS as a tenure-track assistant professor, starting fall 2025. I will stay at Stanford during the 2024-25 academic year about DU CS

Feb 2024: Presented on AI in education at Kapor Foundation

Presented on ongoing research related to critically learning with and about AI. see slides

Dec 2023: Students’ paper on tool to scaffold ChatGPT use for high school students accepted to AAAI EAAI 2024

Master’s students’ paper on tool to scaffold ChatGPT usage for high school language arts accepted to AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence. see paper

Dec 2023: Paper on GenAI curriculum co-design accepted to AAAI EAAI 2024

Paper on co-designing Generative AI curriculum with cross-disciplinary high school teachers accepted to AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence. see paper

Projects

Addressing Environmental Data Inequities

Partnering with community organizations to build youth capacity to use data for environmental justice

AI and Computing Education

Research on teaching with and about AI

Critical Interpretations of Data

Designing opportunities for people to use data to identify and address structural inequities.

Equitable & Ethical Computing Education

Designing theory, strategies, and tools to make computing education more equitable and ethical.

Recent Papers

Using Benchmarking Infrastructure to Evaluate LLM Performance on CS Concept Inventories: Challenges, Opportunities, and Critiques

Used automated benchmarking infrastructure and expert review to understand differences in LLM and student performance on CS assessments with validity evidence.

Teaching Ethics in Computing: A Systematic Literature Review of ACM Computer Science Education Publications

Synthesized findings from 40 years of ACM CS Education research on ethics instruction in higher education computing courses.

Recent Posts

Job Calls for Research in CS & STEM Edu, HCI

Sharing a spreadsheet of job calls related to computing edu, STEM edu, HCI & edu research

Contact

Please reach out to me by email or Twitter direct message! If you are a Stanford affiliate, please send me a Slack direct message.