GET TO KNOW ROHAN SOMJI

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Methodology trumps all! Throughout my life this has been my battle cry! I am a post-graduate in philosophy who has been interested in human interactions with technology for a long time. Pursuing a Master’s degree within an interdisciplinary program called Communication, Culture & Technology at Georgetown University gave me the power to cross-pollinate my HCI studies with Culture Studies. Understanding tech, its ethics, its relationship to humanity, and the new paradigm that emerging with AI at the center, are all intricately tied up with applicability, commercial usage, and how users relate to technology at every stage of its development. The hands-on experience of it is what UX design & research are all about. I wish to be in the center of it when it booms.

What this means to me professionally, is that I must engage with ongoing UX design & research at technology companies that are creating new applications to power everything from cloud computing, music streaming, search engines, chatbots, conversational AIs to brand monitoring. I believe in building on the basics of any service and only later enhance it using new technological developments. Human-Computer interaction is ipso facto a multi-disciplinary field, something that the CCT program at Georgetown acknowledges like no other program, with its emphasis on communication and culture just as much as technology.

Since everything in the HCI field is soon to be touched by AI in one way or another, I think it is crucial for any UX researcher today to be in close contact with the latest in AI developments and be able to relate it with human behavior and cognitive psychology using techniques like applied ethnography. In the years to come, I would like to be working on some key UX issues while keeping one eye on AI lurking around those issues.