Bridging Minds and Machines: AI, HCI & Psychology

Program Description

This program brings together experts in AI, psychiatry, and HCI to build mutual understanding and drive interdisciplinary collaboration. The goal is to strengthen Danish psychiatric and cognitive research through AI and to lay the “ground control” needed to launch a future P1 moonshot at the intersection of AI, cognition, and psychiatry. The program is mainly rooted in the XR Collaboratory but has strong potential to extend into other collaboratories, such as FG,CX, SD, with a particular focus on the health sciences column of the P1 matrix. Advancing psychiatric research requires AI-by-design, where artificial intelligence, clinical expertise, and human-computer interaction (HCI) are purposefully integrated to address the complex, human-centered challenges within psychiatric and cognitive domains. Psychologists possess deep domain knowledge and access to rich, nuanced data from large clinical studies but often lack the computational tools to analyze and model it at scale. Data scientists bring advanced analytical techniques but frequently work without a full understanding of the underlying psychological or clinical phenomena. This disconnect can lead to technically sophisticated models that are misaligned with clinical needs and fail to generate meaningful insight. HCI plays a critical role in bridging this gap. It shapes how AI models are designed, presented, interpreted, and applied, ensuring that technological solutions remain grounded in human needs, clinical relevance, and the realities of care. It also introduces new interaction principles that make complex systems usable, understandable, and responsive to diverse contexts. What is often missing at the intersection of AI, psychiatry, and HCI is a commitment to human experience; not only clinical expertise, but also the lived experiences of patients. Psychiatric care is deeply personal and context-dependent. Designing effective AI tools in this space requires engaging users early, addressing ethical concerns, and supporting interpretability, security and trust. By embedding HCI alongside AI and psychiatry, we can develop a new generation of tools that are not only powerful, but also responsible, human-centered, and transformative. The selected references reflect early yet promising collaborations, with the excellence of the program members reinforcing the strong potential of the program.