I worked in research in human computer interactions, this is a very poor UI even in a research setting. The technology is impressive though.

Your parent comment didn't mean that this was a good UI for human-computer interaction research, he meant that it was a good UI considering it was probably just a quick demo built by the scientists who did the research to showcase their work.

I work in a research group and most of my colleagues would have a hard making an interface like this one, no matter how confusing. They are ML/DL scientists and usually have had absolutely 0 exposure to frontend.

Yes not every researcher is good in frontend development. But my research group wouldn't promote such a broken UI until someone fix it at least a little bit.