About Me
Hello world! I’m Leilani, and thank you for checking out my DREAM research project website. The Distributed REsearch Apprenticeships for Master’s (DREAM) is funded by the National Science Foundation and MSCS Consortium partners to encourage participants in underrepresened groups’ to pursue a PhD in Computing.
I studied Psychology during my undergraduate years at the University of North Florida and worked as a research assistant at the Cognition Lab for two semesters. Then I went on to pursue my Master’s in Industrial-Organizational Psychology with an emphasis on cross-cultural research at Roosevelt University. I graduated in 2015 and have since worked in the recruitment and hiring field for 8 years. Driven by curiosity and a desire for a career change, I began exploring the field of User Experience/User Interface. In 2023, I decided to return to school, where I began my current field of study in a Master’s in Human-Computer Interaction, and I am on track to graduate in December 2025.
My research interest is driven by my personal experience working in the recruitment and hiring field, and my exposure to automated candidate tracking and selection software. I witnessed both the benefits and apprehensions of automation and AI-assisted hiring, as such decisions are among the most regulated yet subjective ones made within organizations. My passion is to understand and uncover the ramifications of human-AI interaction and human-AI collaboration in the recruitment and hiring field, with the aim of contributing to designing successful and responsible hiring technologies for the future.
My contact information:
- Connect with me on LinkedIn
- Email me at leilanihedstrom@gmail.com
- Check out my Portfolio
About My Advisor
David Ramsay is an Assistant Professor at DePaul University and Director of the Idea Realization Lab Makerspaces. He earned his PhD in 2023 from the MIT Media Lab’s Responsive Environments group under Dr. Joe Paradiso, studying how tool design alters daily attention dynamics. He integrates high-quality hardware systems with cutting-edge statistical modeling to enhance human experience.
A Fulbright-winning researcher, David spent years as an audio systems engineer at Bose Research before his PhD. At MIT, he worked on embedded machine learning models at Google AI and studied manufacturing in Shenzhen under Dr. Bunnie Huang. He created and taught MIT’s first for-credit class on psychology’s replication crisis and was nominated for MIT’s Goodwin Teaching Award. He has lectured in Dr. Roz Picard’s ‘AI and Mental Health’ class which has received two best paper awards and two patents, with his work featured on NPR and exhibited at the MIT Museum.
His area of research include:
- Human Computer Interaction
- Social Aspects of Computing
- Next generation Sensing Systems
About My Project
My project focuses on human-AI interaction within the context of employment interviews. The study aims to investigate job seekers’ unconscious behavioral and verbal responses when interviewing with an AI versus a human interviewer and how these responses might impact interview performance. We anticipate that anthropomorphic AI will become an integral feature of asynchronous video interviews in future recruitment technologies. Our study seeks to lay the groundwork for understanding critical psychological constructs that can influence interviewees’ performative differences, such as trust, perception, procedural justice, self-disclosure, and psychological distance.