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ML + HCI - What Is Being Explored at The Intersection of Machine Learning and Human-Computer Interaction - Prog - World
ML + HCI - What Is Being Explored at The Intersection of Machine Learning and Human-Computer Interaction - Prog - World
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PROG.WORLD
ML + HCI: what is being explored at the intersection...
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Many are convinced that the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI or human-computer
interaction) comes down only to the design of sites or applications, and the main task of a
specialist is to satisfy users, increasing by several pixels the like button. In the post we want to
show that this is not at all, and to tell what is happening in HCI at the junction with the studies of
machine learning and artificial intelligence. Perhaps this will allow readers to look at this area from
a new perspective.
For review, we took the proceedings of the conference CHI: Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems over 10 years, and with the help of NLP and analysis of social networks, we
looked at topics and areas at the intersection of disciplines.
The focus on applied UX design problems is especially strong in Russia. Many of the events that
helped the growth of HCI abroad, we did not happen: did not appear iSchools, many specialists
who dealt with related aspects of engineering psychology, etc., left science. As a result, the
profession arose again, starting from applied tasks and research. One of the results of this is visible
even now – this is an extremely low representation of Russian work on HCI at key conferences.
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11/23/2020 ML + HCI: what is being explored at the intersection of machine learning and human-computer interaction - Prog.world
But outside of Russia, HCI has evolved very differently, focusing on many topics and directions. At
ML + HCI: program
the master’s what is“Information
being explored
Systemsatand
theHuman-Computer
intersection... Interaction”In the St.
Petersburg HSE, we are discussing, including with students, colleagues, graduates of similar
specialties from European universities, partners who help develop the program, what concerns the
field of human-computer interaction. And these discussions show the heterogeneity of the
direction in which each specialist has his own, incomplete picture of the area.
From time to time, we hear questions about how this area is related (and whether at all) to
machine learning and data analysis. To answer them, we turned to the research of recent years
presented at the conference Chi.
First of all, we will tell you what is happening in areas such as xAI and iML (eXplainable Artificial
Intelligence and Interpretable Machine Learning) on the part of interfaces and users, as well as
how HCI studies the cognitive aspects of the work of data science specialists, and we give examples
of interesting works of recent years in each area.
At the same time, if at conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, IJCAI, KDD, the algorithms and tools iML
and XAI are discussed, several topics related to the design features and experience of using these
systems will be in focus on CHI. For example, at CHI-2020 several sections were devoted to this
subject at once, including “AI / ML & seeing through the black box” and “Coping with AI: not
agAIn!”. But even before the appearance of individual sections, there were quite a lot of such
works. We identified four directions in them.
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11/23/2020 ML + HCI: what is being explored at the intersection of machine learning and human-computer interaction - Prog.world
visible on radiography, then it will show two examples. The first, supporting, example is a snapshot
ML +lungs
of the HCI:ofwhat is being
another patientexplored
who has theatsame
the disease.
intersection...
The second, contradictory, example is a
picture in which there is no disease, that is, a picture of the lungs of a healthy person. The main
idea is to reduce obvious errors and reduce the number of calls to third-party specialists in simple
cases in order to make a diagnosis faster.
Silva: graph of relationships between variables + graphs for comparing honesty metrics + color
highlighting of influential variables in each group
User research
Finally, the fourth direction is user research of algorithms and systems that interpret machine
learning models. In other words, this is research on whether new systems become more
understandable and transparent in practice, what difficulties users experience when working with
interpretive rather than original models, how to determine whether the system is used as planned
(or found a new application for it – maybe incorrect), what are the needs of users and do
developers offer them what they really need.
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A lot of tools and interpretation algorithms have appeared, so the question arises: how to
ML + HCI:which
understand whatalgorithm
is beingtoexplored
choose? In at theQuestioning
work intersection...
the AI: Informing Design Practices
for Explainable AI User Experiences just discusses the issues of motivation for using explanatory
algorithms and identifies problems that, with all the variety of methods, have not yet been
sufficiently resolved. The authors come to an unexpected conclusion: most of the existing methods
are designed so that they answer the question “why” (“why I have such a result”), while users also
need to answer the question “why not” (“why not another “), and sometimes -” what to do so that
the result changes. ”
The work also says that users need to understand what the limits of applicability of methods are,
what limitations they have – and this must be explicitly implemented in the proposed tools. This
problem is shown more clearly in the article. Interpreting Interpretability: Understanding Data
Scientists’ Use of Interpretability Tools for Machine Learning. The authors conducted a small
experiment with specialists in the field of machine learning: they showed them the results of
several popular tools for interpreting machine learning models and offered to answer questions
related to making decisions based on these results. It turned out that even experts too trust such
models and do not take results critically. Like any tool, explanatory models can be used incorrectly.
When developing tools, it is important to take this into account, attracting the accumulated
knowledge (or specialists) in the field of human-computer interaction in order to take into account
the features and needs of potential users.
Data Science, Notebooks, Visualization
Another interesting area of HCI is the analysis of the cognitive aspects of working with data.
Recently, a question has been raised in science about how the “degrees of freedom” of a researcher
— especially the data collection, design of experiments, and the choice of analysis methods —
affect the results of research and their reproducibility. Although the bulk of the discussion and
criticism is related to psychology and the social sciences, many problems relate to the reliability of
findings in the work of data analysts in general, as well as the difficulties in delivering these
findings to consumers of analysis.
Therefore, the subject of this HCI area is the development of new methods for visualizing
uncertainty in model predictions, creating systems for comparing analysis performed in different
ways, and also analyzing the work of analysts with tools, for example, Jupyter notebooks.
Visualization of uncertainty
Visualization of uncertainty is one of the features that distinguish scientific graphics from
presentation and business visualization. For quite some time, the principle of minimalism and focus
on the main trends was considered key in the latter. However, this leads to an overconfidence of
users in a point estimate of the value or forecast, which can be critical, especially if we must
compare forecasts with varying degrees of uncertainty. Job Uncertainty Displays Using Quantile
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Dotplots or CDFs Improve Transit Decision-Making analyzes how visualization methods for
ML + HCI:
prediction what is for
uncertainty being explored
scatter plots andat the intersection...
cumulative distribution functions help users make
more rational decisions using the mobile app as an example of estimating the time of bus arrival.
What is especially nice, one of the authors supports ggdist package for R with various variance
visualization options.
However, tasks of visualizing possible alternatives are often encountered, for example, for
sequences of user actions in web analytics or application analytics. Job Visualizing Uncertainty
and Alternatives in Event Sequence Predictions analyzes how graphically presenting alternatives
based on the Time-Aware Recurrent Neural Network (TRNN) model helps experts make decisions
and trust them.
Model Comparison
No less important than the visualization of uncertainty, an aspect of the work of analysts – a
comparison of how – often hidden – the researcher’s choice of different approaches to modeling at
all its stages can lead to different analysis results. In psychology and the social sciences, pre-
registration of research design and a clear separation of exploratory and confirmatory studies are
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gaining popularity. However, in tasks where the study is more based on data, an alternative may be
ML
tools+toHCI:
assesswhat is being
the hidden risksexplored
of analysis at the intersection...
by comparing
models. Job Increasing the Transparency
of Research Papers with Explorable Multiverse Analyzes suggests using interactive visualization
of several approaches to analysis in articles. In essence, the article turns into an interactive
application where the reader can evaluate what will change in the results and conclusions if a
different approach is applied. This seems like a useful idea for practical analytics.
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Summarizing
ML + HCI: what is being explored at the intersection...
Concluding part of the discussion “What is HCI doing” and “why does a HCI specialist know
machine learning”, I would like to once again note the general conclusion from the motivation and
results of these studies. As soon as a person appears in the system, this immediately leads to a
number of additional questions: how to simplify interaction with the system and avoid errors, how
the user changes the system, does the actual use differ from the planned one. As a result, we need
those who understand how the process of designing systems with artificial intelligence works and
know how to take into account the human factor.
We teach all this at the master’s program “Information systems and human-computer interaction“.
If you are interested in research in the field of HCI – look at the light (now just started reception
campaign) Or follow our blog: we’ll talk about projects that students worked on this year.
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