Co-Designing Safer Skies: Building Human-Centred AI in Aviation
With the rapid expansion of Large Language Models (LLMs), much of the public debate has revolved around their capacity to solve social problems—or to reproduce them. Yet both perspectives risk essentializing technology, overlooking how AI systems might also become sites of relational, situated, and collective learning.
This talk presents CRMSON (Crew Resource Management Safety Optimizer Nexus), an award-winning AI platform co-designed with airline pilots to enhance safety, decision-making, psychological resilience, and training in aviation. Developed through an iterative, ethnographic process, CRMSON treats co-design as a method of empowerment, where users participate in defining the system’s goals, tone, and ethical parameters. The talk reflects on how human-centred AI can specifically help in the context of CRM training, inviting collective reflection on how co-designed agents and models can support the work of HF teams.
Our speaker, Fabio Mattioli is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Melbourne, where he directs the Critical Ethnography Lab (CiEL). His research bridges anthropology, human-centred AI, and the political economy of technological innovation. Fabio is the co-lead and principal AI architect of CRMSON, an award-winning platform co-designed with pilots to enhance safety, decision-making, and psychological resilience in aviation.
Broadly, Fabio’s research explores how digital systems, automation, and data infrastructures shape human judgment and value creation in high-stakes industries. His recent work combines ethnographic and computational methods and focuses on building collaborative systems (including AI) intended to empower rather than replace people. He is the author of the award-winning book Dark Finance (Stanford University Press, 2020); his research has been supported by a variety of public and private funders, including the Australian Research Council, the Australian Department of Education, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Before joining the University of Melbourne, Fabio taught at New York University. He holds an MA from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris and a PhD in Anthropology from the City University of New York Graduate Center.
