News + updates


10-1-2025
I will be moderating a panel with the incredible Lucy Suchman and Terry Winograd at Stanford HAI on October 10th. 
Link coming soon


09-17-2025
Excited to be speaking today on a panel around "AI Image Generation: Shaping Perception and Visual Influence" co-hosted by Harvard and Stanford IT Communities along with Dr. Douglas Guilbeault and Madeleine Woods. 
Link


09-05-2025
It was my pleasure to organize a gathering at 4S in Seattle around “Hope, Ontological Breakdown, and a World of Many Worlds,” with my wonderful co-organizers Mohammad Rashidujjaman Rifat, Jingyi Li, Alex Taylor, and Daniela Rosner.
Link


08-26-2025
I will be giving a talk at the IT University Human-Computer Interaction and Design.


08-13-2025
I will be giving a talk at Copenhagen University Human-Centred Computing (HCC).


08-18-2025
I will be attending Aarhus 2025.
Link


08-04-2025
I will be speaking as part of the NLP colloquium at The University of Bonn.
Link


07-09-2025
I will be spending time with the brilliant scholars at the Pioneer Center for AI (P1) in Copenhagen through the end of August. If you are in the area, I would love to connect with you!
Link


06-24-2025
I will be giving a talk at UCL Interaction Center seminar.
Link
06-15-2025
I will be attending HCIC 2025.
Link


05-12-2025
Last week, I presented our paper on “Ontologies in Design: How Imagining a Tree Reveals Possibilities and Assumptions in Large Language Models” at CHI 2025 in Yokohama.
Link 











Nava Haghighi



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Purple Zone
Ontologies in Design
Stranj(ers)
Disobedient Agents
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Ontologies in Design: How Imagining a Tree Reveals Possibilites and Assumptions in Large Language Models


with Sunny Yu, Daniela Rosner, James Landay

Link to CHI2025 paper Amid the recent uptake of Generative AI, sociotechnical scholars and critics have traced a multitude of resulting harms, with analyses largely focused on values and axiology (e.g., bias). While value-based analyses are crucial, we argue that ontologies---concerning what we allow ourselves to think or talk about---is a vital but under-recognized dimension in analyzing these systems. 
Proposing a need for a practice-based engagement with ontologies, we offer four orientations for considering ontologies in design: pluralism, groundedness, liveliness, and enactment. We share examples of potentialities that are opened up through these orientations across the entire LLM development pipeline by conducting two ontological analyses: examining the responses of four LLM-based chatbots in a prompting exercise, and analyzing the architecture of an LLM-based agent simulation. We conclude by sharing opportunities and limitations of working with ontologies in the design and development of sociotechnical systems.

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