HCAIS Deep Dive - Peter Brusilovksy: Human-Centered AI

In recent years, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies expanded to many areas where they directly affect the lives of many people. AI-based approaches advise human decision-makers who should be released on bail, whether it is a good time to discharge a patient from a hospital and whether a specific student is at risk to fail a course. Such an extensive use in AI in decision making came with a range of protentional problems that have been extensively studied over the last few years. Recognition of these problems motivated a rapid rise of research on “human-centered AI”, which attempted to address and minimize the negative effects of using AI technologies. Among the ideas of human-centered AI is user control - engaging users in affecting AI decision making to prevent possible errors and biases. In my talk, I will focus on the application of user control in one popular area of AI application, adaptive information access. Adaptive information access systems such as personalized search and recommender systems attempt to model their users to help them in finding the most relevant information. Yet, user modeling and personalization mechanisms might not always work as expected resulting in errors, biases, and suboptimal behavior. Combining the decision power or AI with the ability of the user to guide and control it brings together the strong sides of artificial and human intelligence and could lead to better results. In this talk, I will review the work of our team and the broader research community focused on adding various kinds of user control to adaptive information access systems and discuss lessons learned, prospects, and challenges of this direction of research.