The Human-Machine Communication Lab

The HMC Lab is proud to announce our most recent doctoral candidate, Wenrong Casper Cui! Congratulations, Wenrong!

Last night we celebrated $1.4 million in grant/fellowship applications submitted, 1,500+ participant survey responses, many publications, top papers, R&Rs, and an awesome year of .

In true human form, the team forgot to take a picture. Luckily AI was glad to step in and re-create the scene…kinda…

Thanks for a great year HMC lab team!

Exciting news! Lab Manager, Wenrong Cui will present the April 28th COMS Colloquium. Don't miss it!

In the lab we don’t set goals around acceptances. We set goals around submissions.

At our first Lab meeting of the semester, we borrowed a lesson from the card game Spades and “bid” on our scholarly output. We took an honest look at what projects were already underway, what was near completion, and what was realistically possible this term.

Then we set collective goals for submissions to conferences, fellowships, and grants. Not outcomes. Effort and follow-through.

The conversation was thoughtful, energizing, and grounded in reality. I genuinely can’t wait to see what this team puts into the world this semester.

Guess what lab just got a 3D printer? 👀
Hold on while we build a bot! 🤖

KU News is covering HMC Lab work. In this study, which we previously posted about, we found that job applicants are not buying the argument that "AI is unbiased." Find out more here:

Job applicants skeptical about employers’ use of AI screening Survey shows people believe AI can’t properly account for unique human qualities

The ICA Human-Machine Communication Interest Group is hosting its annual online mentoring event for students and early career researchers!

Join Lab Director Cameron Piercy and three highly accomplished scholars as they share their tips and strategies for collaboration and networking in HMC research.

Register now: https://uark.zoom.us/meeting/register/XM6MRrdrTGmNv7EKWrLB5w

KU COMS and the HMC Lab are excited to host Dr. Chad Edwards for a colloquium on Tuesday, Oct. 28th. If you're in Lawrence, please feel free to come by.

Lab director, Piercy, had a great talk yesterday with the radio/podcast Last Show with David Cooper! Check out our conversation about and communication via work with Ayman Alhammad and Chris Etheridge.

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ai-not-good-in-a-crisis-september-9-2025/id1168275879?i=1000725855479

Interview starts at 11:19

Paper here: https://doi.org/10.1108/CCIJ-01-2025-0005

For a TLDR check out The University of Kansas news release here: https://news.ku.edu/news/article/study-finds-news-releases-written-by-humans-more-credible-than-ai-content

Human PR more credible than AI, study finds A study from KU found readers judged news releases generated by a human more credible than AI work.

We’re diving deep into theorizing how AI is becoming the workplace’s newest communicator.

Check out the recent HMC lab publication “Socio-Technical Exchange with Machines” in the Human-Machine Communication journal (https://stars.library.ucf.edu/hmc/vol10/iss1/3/). This paper presents a novel theoretical tension of social exchange theory, positing a socio-technical exchange framework.

We interviewed working adults about how they relate to the complex tech they use—shifting away from seeing machines as mere tools and toward viewing them as actors in workplace communication .

This approach enriches HMC scholarship by focusing on how meaning unfolds between humans and machine “others." At the HMC Lab, we’re exploring these evolving communicative dynamics through interdisciplinary collaboration. Stay tuned for more!