Vagner Figueredo de Santana

Vagner Figueredo de Santana has been developing software professionally since 2000. Before engaging in research activities, from 2001 to 2007, he served as webmaster at Folha de Sao Paulo (www.folha.com.br), a major Brazilian newspaper. He has been conducting research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) since 2006, with a focus on the intersections between HCI and Machine Learning ranging from problem understanding and field studies to data-oriented evaluation and the design of intelligent user interfaces.

Since 2016, he has been a voluntary collaborating professor at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC), where he supervises MSc and PhD students researching the intersection of HCI and Machine Learning. Previously, from 2009 to 2015, he was a visiting professor in various Software Engineering courses at Presbyterian University Mackenzie, and in 2021, he served as a visiting professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) in the MBA program ÒUser Experience Design and Beyond.

He has also been an active contributor to both Brazilian and international HCI communities. In Brazil, he served as General Chair of the XV Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computer Systems (IHC 2016), the leading HCI conference in Latin America, and later as Lead Program Chair of IHC 2019. For more than four years, he was the main liaison between the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC) and IBM Brazil, acting as SBC Institutional Representative within IBM. Moreover, he served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society from 2020 to 2024. Internationally, he has acted as a reviewer for several major HCI conferences and journals, including CHI, FAccT, HCII, IJHCS, UAIS, TACCESS, Multimedia Tools and Applications, and Interacting with Computers.

From 2012 to 2022, he was a Research Scientist at IBM Research Brazil, where he participated in multiple projects across industries such as IT services, finance, health insurance, education, oil & gas, agriculture, and responsible AI. In these projects, he led teams focused on user research, data science, and product development, employing agile methodologies. He became an IBM Master Inventor in 2016, and obtained Open Group Data Scientist certifications (L1 in 2019 and L2 in 2022). In 2020, he was elected an ACM Senior Member. He has also mentored numerous researchers in the Intellectual Property (IP) process and served as an IP review board member for IBM patents.

His research has resulted in numerous peer-reviewed publications, over 50 granted patents, and more than 1,200 citations on Google Scholar. From 2022 to 2025, he was a Staff Research Scientist as part of the Responsible Tech team based in Yorktown, NY, USA, where he studied methods to help teams identify and mitigate negative societal impacts in the research and development of emerging technologies such as Large Language Models and Generative AI. In 2025, he joined NIC.br as a Senior Researcher to study the impacts of new technologies on the Web and to inform public policy through research.

• Challenges and Opportunities for Responsible Prompting
  Generative AI systems such as ChatGPT and Midjourney are transforming how we create, learn, and innovate yet the responsible use of these technologies often remains an afterthought. In this talk,...
• Challenges and Opportunities in Responsible AI Project
  In this talk, I introduce the Responsible and Inclusive Technology Framework, a formative framework designed to guide technologists, researchers, and organizations toward more ethical and...
• LLM on the Web: Contexts of Creation & Use of Technology
  Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming how we access, produce, and understand information on the Web yet the distance between their contexts of creation and use is growing rapidly. This...
• My Journey as an Inventor
  In this talk I present the audience with my journey through the world of patents and innovation. From understanding what patents are and what can be protected, to exploring the differences between...