Adam Coscia

When AI is used to make decisions, people remain accountable for judgments they can't control. My work explores new ways to make human-AI reasoning visual and interactive, ensuring human-AI collaboration is explainable and defensible.

Classically, machines automate computational tasks while humans provide judgement and guidance. Today, AI can act on information autonomously. Consider: teams of analysts offloading data mining to swarms of agents; students incorporating personalized AI feedback on an essay; operators chatting with a robot teammate that did something unexpected. These upheavals raise new questions: What does the AI know? How does it act on information? How do we support both sensemaking and learning with AI?

My group combines techniques from visual analytics, human-centered AI, and data science to build, deploy, and study interactive systems for sensemaking and learning with AI. We engage in iterative co-design and longitudinal field deployments with domain experts across intelligence analysis, robotics, and education. Our work contributes open-source software, empirical studies, and design guidelines to visualization, HCI, and AI communities.

Our most recent work spans two complementary research thrusts:
- Human-AI sensemaking. We are exploring how people can verify and steer AI reasoning against underlying data, including visual goal tracking for LLM conversations (OnGoal), traceable LLM and knowledge-graph document analysis (VisPile), LLM responses annotated on top of visual robot logs (Retrace), and visual probing of what language models have learned (KnowledgeVIS).
- Human-AI learning. We are exploring how educators, engineers, and learners can see and question the role of AI in learning, including provenance analytics for intelligent tutors (VisTA), interpretability tools for debugging AI-based essay scoring (iScore), and in-text traces of AI writing contributions to support learner self-reflection (DraftMarks).

Adam Coscia is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at Stevens Institute of Technology and member of the Stevens Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI). He received his Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from the Georgia Institute of Technology and holds a B.S. in Physics from Stevens. His research combines techniques from visual analytics, human-centered AI, and data science to build, deploy, and study interactive systems that make human-AI collaboration visual, explainable, and defensible for both sensemaking and learning. He has designed and deployed his tools for intelligence analysis, robotics, and healthcare, as well as education, in collaboration with researchers, analysts, educators, and scientists at the NSF AI Institute for Adult Learning and Online Education, National Security Agency, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Adobe Research, the NC State Laboratory for Analytic Sciences, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. His work appears at premier HCI and visualization venues, including ACM CHI, ACM UIST, ACM IUI, IEEE VIS, and IEEE TVCG, and has received a best paper award and three best poster awards. He was also a finalist for the Foley Scholars Award and a recipient of Georgia Tech’s President’s Fellowship. He serves on the Organizing and Program Committees for both IEEE VIS and PacificVis.

Research Assistant
Graduate Research Assistant, Visual Analytics Lab, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 2020-2026
Undergraduate Research Assistant, School of Information Systems and Architecture, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, 2018-2020

Internships
Artificial Intelligence Group, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA, 2025
AI Experiences Lab, Adobe Research, San Jose, CA, 2024
Human-Interfaces Group, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, 2023
Data to Discovery Program, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, 2021
Center for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, New York Life Insurance Company, New York, NY, 2020
Center for Data Science and Analytics, New York Life Insurance Company, New York, NY, 2019
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, 2017

Somethings, Technical Advisor, 2026-present

Assistant Professor, School of Computing, Stevens Institute of Technology, 2026-present

Research
Best Poster Award, CRIDC, 2025
Foley Scholar Award Finalist, GVU:IPAT, Georgia Tech, 2024
Best Poster Award, CRIDC, 2023
Best Poster Award, CRIDC, 2021

Teaching
Distinguished Teaching Assistant Award, Stevens Institute of Technology, 2018

Honor Societies, Fellowships, and Others
Sigma Xi Scientific Research Honor Society, Sigma Xi, lifetime member, inducted 2025
Sigma Pi Sigma Physics Honor Society, American Institute of Physics, lifetime member, inducted 2019
President's Fellowship, Georgia Tech, 2020
Alfred M. Mayer Prize, Stevens Institute of Technology, 2020
Presidential Scholarship, Stevens Institute of Technology, 2016

CS 538 Data Visualization, Spring 2027