Dr. Earl W. Huff, Jr.
Director & Principal Investigator
Human-centered AI for learning and access outcomes.
We partner with the people AI too often leaves out — students with disabilities, older adults, and the educators who support them — designing, developing, and evaluating tools that are accessible from the ground up rather than retrofitted after the fact.
Our mission
The people who will use technology should help design it.
We are the HALO Lab — Human-centered AI for Learning & access Outcomes — housed in the Department of Information (iSchool) within the School of Computing at The University of Texas at Austin. We partner with the people AI too often leaves out: students with disabilities, older adults, and the educators who support them.
Our research sits at the intersection of human–computer interaction, human–AI interaction, and learning technologies. Using participatory and co-design methods, we design, develop, and evaluate AI-driven tools that are accessible from the ground up, not retrofitted after the fact.
Our work spans two connected goals: making education accessible for learners with disabilities across the full arc of lifelong learning, and making AI technology itself more ethical, trustworthy, and adoptable for the people who stand to benefit from it most.
The lab was previously known as the REALITY Lab; earlier work may appear under that name.
See how this shapes our research
What we study
Three areas of research.
Our projects differ in method and setting, but each one belongs to one of these three lines of work — and most of them speak to more than one.
01
Accessible AI-driven learning technologies
AI-powered learning tools built accessible from the ground up: course-specific tutors, learning management systems co-designed with blind and low-vision teachers and students, and evaluations against accessibility standards and Universal Design for Learning.
Read more 02AI across the lifespan
How chatbots, literacy tools, and interface design choices support learning, independence, and trust for populations mainstream AI overlooks — with a particular focus on older adults.
Read more 03Participatory & responsible AI design
Co-design with the people a technology affects, and the practical question of what responsible adoption requires: transparency, human-in-the-loop safeguards, data governance, and guardrails that support learning rather than replace it.
Read more
Areas of focus
Who we work with, and how.
HALO sits at the intersection of human–computer interaction, human–AI interaction, and learning technologies. In practice that means our collaborators are as likely to be students, older adults, and classroom educators as they are to be computer scientists.
Students with disabilities
Older adults
Educators
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Human–computer interaction How people encounter, understand, and work with interactive systems.
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Human–AI interaction Trust, transparency, and adoption in systems that reason and respond.
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Learning technologies How teachers and students leverage educational tools, in classrooms and beyond.
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Accessibility & Universal Design for Learning Measured against technical standards and against real classroom experience.
The team
No single discipline covers this work.
HALO brings together information science, computer science, software architecture, and design, with learning technologies running through all of it. That range is deliberate: these questions sit in the gaps between fields.
Monica Zhou
Doctoral Student
Shaini Nanayakkara
Doctoral Student
Pravinda Perera
Research Fellow
Work with us
Interested in joining HALO?
We welcome prospective graduate students, undergraduate researchers, and collaborators who care about access as much as they care about the technology.