Smit Desai will join the College of Art, Media and Design (CAMD) as an Assistant Professor in July 2025, with a joint appointment in Art+Design and Communication Studies and an affiliated appointment at Khoury College of Computer Science. Prior to this role, he will serve as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at CAMD. Smit received his Ph.D. from the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A specialist in conversational AI, his primary research focus centers on understanding the mental models of users as they engage with conversational agents, utilizing innovative research techniques such as metaphor analysis. He leverages this valuable insight to advance the development of conversational agents in diverse social roles, including teachers and storytellers. Smit was a Provocation Papers Co-Chair at the ACM Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) 2024 conference in Luxembourg. His research has yielded publications in esteemed HCI forums like the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), and the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW).
Departments
Art + Design
Education
- P.h.D in Information Sciences from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- M.S. in Information Management from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- B.E. in Computer Engineering from Gujarat Technological University, India