Àlex Armengol Urpí

I am a Research Scientist at MIT, where I also earned my PhD under the supervision of Prof. Sanjay Sarma. My work lies at the intersection of human–computer interaction, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. My research has been supported by La Caixa Fellowship.

Research

I develop human–computer interfaces to capture and convey experts’ tacit knowledge—forms of know-how that are difficult to verbalize. By instrumenting experts’ tools, bodies, and environments, I extract implicit signals of expertise using data-driven methods.

This knowledge is translated into interactive interfaces such as Augmented Reality to support training and guidance, and is also used to augment AI systems, enabling models to learn from human implicit behavior. During my PhD, I showed that unconscious visual attention—measured through eye tracking and neural signals—reveals task-relevant knowledge beyond expert awareness, and that feeding this extracted knowledge back to humans and AI improves performance.

I am currently extending this work to additional expert domains, including sports and skilled crafts, exploring how tacit expertise can be captured, reinforced, and transferred across humans and AI systems.