14–17 Oct 2019

The intersection of AI and HCI: Gamifying the latest artificial intelligence research

Casey Dugan (IBM Research), Zahra Ashktorab (IBM Research)
11:0511:45 Thursday, 17 October 2019
Location: Blenheim Room - Palace Suite
Secondary topics:  Design, Interfaces, and UX
Average rating: ***..
(3.67, 3 ratings)

Who is this presentation for?

  • User interface designers, engineers of AI systems, and AI researchers

Level

Beginner

Description

Here’s a challenge for you: Guess the backdoor of a hacked classifier. Or save a chatbot conversation from ending badly. Come enhance your AI knowledge by playing these and other games created by IBM Research over the last year.

IBM’s goal for creating these games is twofold: to teach AI novices about cutting-edge AI technologies and to study open research questions in how humans interact with AI systems. These games cover a diverse set of AI concepts from predicting chatbot interactions to security topics such as adversarial robustness. For example, “Guess the Backdoor” teaches players about a recent concern in the AI security space called poisoning attacks. In that game, you must use activation clustering, a technique developed to detect poisoned training data left by hackers, to help uncover the backdoor in the classifier and win the game.

IBM’s starting point for these games is research papers recently published at major AI conferences. Turning those into contextualized and consumable interactive experiences for nonacademics can be challenging, but Casey Dugan and Zahra Ashktorab describe the design and development process for building engaging web experiences around AI technologies. In particular, how it employs a design thinking process that brings together an interdisciplinary team of human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers, designers, and full stack engineers, as well as AI researchers, to create experiences that communicate the research and focus on pedagogy.

The result is Learn & Play, a collection of interactive AI experiences, which has been used by people all over the world to learn about these concepts. Building these has also afforded IBM the opportunity to study how humans interact with AI systems and Casey and Zahra share some of the latest experiments and research findings in this space. For example, in the “Fool the Bank” game, IBM compared how humans judge noisy, adversarial images generated by algorithms. In “Be the Bot,” IBM studied how players assuming the role of a chatbot could build empathy with such systems and how this effected later interactions with conversational systems. And in “Guess the Backdoor,” IBM conducted experiments on how different users react to varying levels of transparency in feedback from an AI system and how game players can generate different types of annotated data when presented with such feedback.

To foster major breakthroughs in AI we need to focus more on studying and creating at the intersections of diverse perspectives, whether through combining the disciplines of HCI and AI or increasing sharing between AI experts and AI novices. This will further the understanding of how both humans and AI can grow, whether through teaching people new AI concepts through fun learning experiences or improving AI systems through incorporating human feedback.

What you'll learn

  • Learn about the various AI technologies that have been turned into interactive experiences: activation clustering, detection of egregious chatbot conversations, preprocessing data to reduce bias, and evaluating the robustness of neural networks
  • Discover the interdisciplinary collaboration process between a team of research scientists, engineers, and designers
  • Learn the latest research findings in the area of HCI
Photo of Casey Dugan

Casey Dugan

IBM Research

Casey Dugan is the manager of the AI Experience Lab at IBM Research in Cambridge. Her group is an interdiscipinary team made up of designers, engineers, and human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers. They design, build, and study systems at the intersection of HCI and AI, especially human-AI interaction. She has worked in the research areas of social media, analytics and visualization dashboards, human computation and crowdsourcing, and recommender systems since joining IBM. Her projects have ranged from designing meeting rooms of the future to studying #selfiestations, or kiosks for taking selfies at IBM labs around the world. She earned a couple of degrees from MIT and spent two summers interning with the IBM lab. Outside of work, she’s taught chocolate sculpture to teenagers, drinks a lot of Starbucks, and has a big fluffy dog named Lincoln.

Photo of Zahra Ashktorab

Zahra Ashktorab

IBM Research

Zahra Ashktorab is a research staff member at IBM Thomas J. Watson Center. At IBM Research, she studies social technologies, AI systems, and their influence on user behavior and interaction. Her interests and prior work lie at the intersection of machine learning, human-computer interaction (HCI), and design. She uses a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods in her research to address HCI-related questions and interaction design. She has published her work at the ACM Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems (CHI), the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), and other reputable HCI and information systems conferences. She received her PhD on human-computer interaction at the University of Maryland, College Park.

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