Rate My Professor Wally Smith

Wally Smith is Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computing and Information Systems, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, at the University of Melbourne. He holds a BSc with Honours and a PhD in Psychology from University College London. As co-leader of the Human Computer Interaction Group, Smith conducts research in human-computer interaction and science and technology studies. He serves as an executive of the Melbourne Chapter of the ACM Special Interest Group for Computer-Human Interaction. His projects examine how emerging AI might actively deceive people, how people use digital technologies to manage emotions, how community histories are created and shared online, and the design of educational technologies for health-related behaviour change.

Smith's key publications include the co-edited Routledge International Handbook of New Digital Practices in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums and Heritage Sites (2020). Selected papers are Digital Emotion Regulation in Everyday Life (CHI 2022), The Hidden Rules of Hanabi: How Humans Outperform AI Agents (CHI 2023), Human-AI Collaboration in Cooperative Games: A Study of Playing Codenames with an LLM Assistant (CHI PLAY 2024), Explaining the Inexplicable: A Study of People's Reactions to Futuristic AI (OzCHI 2024), Co-Designing with Orangutans: Enhancing the Design of Enrichment for Animals (DIS 2020), and Characterising Deception in AI: A Survey (2021). His paper Cooperating to Compete: The Mutuality of Cooperation and Competition in Boardgame Play received a CHI Honorable Mention Award (2018). Other contributions cover digital emotion regulation (Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2020), videoconferencing for language programs in rural schools (ReCALL, 2019), and digital design considerations in urban nature (Mindtrek, 2024). Smith's scholarship, with over 3350 citations on Google Scholar, impacts HCI, digital heritage practices, technology-mediated emotion regulation, and deception in interactive systems.