Kimi Wenzel

Home Speaking

Research

I’m a sociotechnical researcher at Carnegie Mellon University advised by Geoff Kaufman and Laura Dabbish. I work in the eHeart Lab and CoEx Lab.

Affiliations: 2026 Stuart Card Fellow.

My work investigates the psychological risks of generative AI. I'm especially interested in cross-cultural understandings of these risks, and in involving expert stakeholders for measurement. I've worked on this topic with industry collaborators, such as Apple and Google, as well as nonprofits like AImpower.

Research Questions

My primary work inquires about AI harms, and how we can help stakeholders combat harms.

Defining and Measuring Harm: What are users’ psychological responses to generative AI bias? How do these responses vary based on individual differences, especially across marginalized identities and cultures?
Blame Attribution & Redistribution: How do stakeholders attribute blame when a product has a harmful outcome? How might we appropriately redistribute this blame?
Mitigating and Reversing Harm: How might we design to mitigate or reverse the psychological harm inflicted by AI bias? I explore this through design interventions at all stages of the product pipeline. This includes interventions for both developers as well as end-users.

Secondary Interests

I am also intrigued by: collaborative work, feminist computing, design futurism, moral/positive psychology.

Publications

Full Conference Proceedings

EACL Karina Halevy, Kimi Wenzel, Seyun Kim, Maarten Sap. 2026. Common Sense or Ableism? Rethinking Commonsense Reasoning Through the Lens of Disability.
AIES *Pranav Khadpe, *Kimi Wenzel, George Loewenstein, Chinmay Kulkarni, Geoff Kaufman. 2025. Explaining the Reputational Risks of AI-Mediated Communication: Messages labeled as AI-assisted are viewed as less diagnostic of the sender’s moral character.
CHI Kimi Wenzel and Geoff Kaufman. 2024. 🏆 Best Paper Award.
Designing for Harm Reduction: Communication Repair for Multicultural Users' Voice Interactions.
CHI Kimi Wenzel, Nitya Devireddy, Cam Davison, and Geoff Kaufman. 2023.
Can Voice Assistants Be Microaggressors? Cross-Race Psychological Responses to Failures of Automatic Speech Recognition.
CHI *Isadora Krsek, *Kimi Wenzel, Sauvik Das, Jason I. Hong, and Laura Dabbish. 2022.
To Self-Persuade or be Persuaded: Examining Interventions for Users’ Privacy Setting Selection.

Workshops Organized

InterSpeech Robin Netzorg, Juliana Francis, Brooklyn Sheppard, Kimi Wenzel, Norman Makoto Su, Anna Leschanowsky, Abraham Glasser, Bowon Lee, Christine Murad, Cosmin Munteanu, Jay Cunningham, Shaomei Wu. Speech AI for All: Challenging Deficit-based Approaches to Speech Science and Technology.
CHI Kimi Wenzel, Alisha Pradhan, Maria Teleki, Tobias Weinberg, Robin Netzorg, Alyssa Hillary Zisk, Anna Seo Gyeong Choi, Jingjin Li, Raja Kushalnagar, Colin Lea, Abraham Glasser, Christian Vogler, Nan Bernstein Ratner, Ly Xīnzhèn M. Zhǎngsūn Brown, Allison Koenecke, Karen Nakamura, Shaomei Wu. Speech AI for All: The What, How, and Who of Measurement.
FAccT Kimi Wenzel, Avijit Ghosh, Sachin Pendse, Stephanie Milani, Ajeet Singh, Laura Dabbish, Geoff Kaufman. 2025. Invisible by Design? Generative AI and Mirrors of Misrepresentation.
CHI Shaomei Wu, Kimi Wenzel, Jingjin Li, Qisheng Li, Alisha Pradhan, Raja Kushalnagar, Colin Lea, Allison Koenecke, Christian Vogler, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Norman Makoto Su, Nan Bernstein Ratner. 2025. Speech AI for All: Promoting Accessibility, Fairness, Inclusivity, and Equity.

Short Papers

M2@NeurIPS pluralism@CSCW Kimi Wenzel, Geoff Kaufman, and Laura Dabbish. 2023.
Beyond Fairness: Alternative Moral Dimensions for Assessing Algorithms and Designing Systems.
CUI@CHI Kimi Wenzel and Geoff Kaufman. 2023.
Challenges in Designing Racially Inclusive Language Technologies.

Academic History

Prior to my PhD, I studied usable privacy & security under Lorrie Cranor, Laura Dabbish, and Jason Hong. I also briefly studied education equity tools and interventions with Audrey Bennett, Ron Eglash, and Rebecca Wright.
I completed my B.A. in computer science at Columbia University, Barnard College.
CV available upon request.