OU Data Scientist Unveils Free Software for Researching Human-AI Interactions
OU Data Scientist Unveils Free Software for Researching Human-AI Interactions
http://ou.edu/content/news/articles/2026/may/free-software-for-researching-human-ai-interactions
Publish Date: 2026-05-18 16:44:00
Source Domain: ou.edu
NORMAN, Okla. – With artificial intelligence upending how people seek, interpret and act on information, efforts are underway to design AI systems that are equitable, efficient and inclusive.
A University of Oklahoma data scientist has created a free research tool to facilitate this process.
Called ECHO – Evaluation of Chat, Human Behavior, and Outcomes – the open source, low-code platform enables scholars to design and run behavioral experiments involving conversational AI, Web search and human-AI interaction.
“Our platform saves researchers time and money in front-end programming,” said Jiqun Liu, an associate professor specializing in data science at the OU School of Library and Information Studies. Liu created ECHO at his Human-Computer Interaction and Recommendation (HCIR) lab with OU graduate student Nischal Dinesh and Ran Yu, a senior researcher at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, in Germany.
“When a researcher wants to build a study that integrates an AI chatbot, they can install our platform and easily add components,” Liu said. “For most social science studies, ECHO will be easy to implement.”
Appetite for analyses of human-AI interaction is growing, said Liu. Not long ago, keyword search engines were the dominant way people found information online. Today, conversational AI-powered “answer engines” are increasingly delivering data, changing how people acquire and use information.
But researchers are still studying how these shifts influence learning, trust, and decision making. Studies incorporating human-AI interaction can help shed light on these developments.
To use ECHO, researchers must first install the software onto their own computer. The code is available for free on GitHub, and a step-by-step video tutorial guides users through the setup process. Installation takes about 20 minutes.
Once installed, researchers can configure experimental workflows through an administrator dashboard,…
