Dr. Jiqun Liu, Associate Professor in the School of Library and Information Studies (iSchool) at the University of Oklahoma and faculty member of the Data Institute for Societal Challenges (DISC), along with his students , Nischal Dinesh and Jamshed Karimnazarov, have developed ECHO (Evaluation of Chat, Human behavior, and Outcomes). ECHO is open, low-code research platform designed to support reproducible user studies and behavioral experiments involving conversational and generative AI.
ECHO enables researchers to design and manage studies focused on human-AI interaction, Web search, online information access, and generative AI systems. The platform was created to lower technical barriers for rigorous human-centered, behavioral, cognitive, and user experience research. This platform is particularly for faculty and students in the social sciences and humanities who may not have dedicated engineering support.
Through an intuitive administrative interface, OU researchers and students can build and deploy customized user studies with little to no coding required. By streamlining the technical infrastructure behind experimental design, ECHO allows interdisciplinary scholars to focus on research questions related to human behavior, online information seeking and evaluation, AI collaboration, interaction experience, and informal learning through interactive AI systems.
The ECHO platform is open source and actively maintained to support ongoing responsible and trustworthy GenAI research initiatives in Dr. Liu’s team at OU.
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Researchers interested in leveraging ECHO for their studies are encouraged to explore the platform and connect with Dr. Liu and his HCIR Lab.
