Seminar: Balancing User Experience and Privacy in Wearable AI Systems
Swetha Rajaram
PhD Candidate
School of Information,
University of Michigan
Tuesday, February 17, 2026
9:30 - 10:30 a.m.
1100 Torgersen Hall
Abstract
Wearable AI systems, such as display-free smartglasses and augmented reality (AR) devices, are emerging as a new paradigm of personal computing. However, they introduce novel privacy harms for both users and bystanders, relying on multimodal data that reveals people's identities, activities, and surroundings. In this talk, I demonstrate how building wearable AI systems for adaptation – enabling users and systems to dynamically adjust interactions across contexts – can mitigate privacy risks while supporting meaningful use. First, through co-design studies with AR and security & privacy researchers, I establish a design space of alternatives to traditional interactions that reduce data exposure while maintaining functionality. Second, I develop and evaluate lightweight interaction techniques that allow users to rapidly steer AI behavior towards their dynamic goals, without the attention and time demands of chat-based prompting. Finally, I investigate how to automatically balance user experience and privacy for wearable AI users and bystanders, proposing an optimization framework for system-driven “negotiations” of sensing capabilities. I conclude by discussing open challenges and future research towards this vision of privacy-adaptive wearable AI, from technical mechanisms to implications for regulation.
Biography
Shwetha Rajaram is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan School of Information. She studies topics at the intersection of human-computer interaction and usable security and privacy. Her research develops interactions with emerging technologies (e.g., augmented reality, generative AI), aiming to enhance human workflows while safeguarding privacy. Her work has been published in premier HCI venues, such as the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) and the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST). More information can be found at https://shwetharajaram.github.io/