Choosability Engineering
How can a better understanding of human choice and decision making benefit design of and research on interactive systems?
Users of computing technology are constantly making small choices and larger decisions. Research areas in a variety of disciplines have together produced a vast collection of knowledge about the different ways in which people make choices and decisions. But so far, only isolated parts of this knowledge have been used to improve people’s interaction with computing technology.
In collaboration with several colleagues, I have been working since 2008 on ways of synthesizing and complementing this research to make it useful for people who design and study interactive computing systems. I have given tutorials on this topic at IUI 2011, CHI 2011, and CHI 2012, and I’m offering the latest version at CHI 2013 (see the page on tutorials). I wrote a chapter on this topic for the 3rd edition of the Human-Computer Interaction Handbook. With my collaborators, I’m now working on a much longer journal article that is supposed to provide a solid foundation for further research in this area. A brief overview and motivation of the topic is given in the paper that we presented in the alt.chi track of CHI 2011.
Recent talks on this topic are listed on the page with Invited Talks. New projects in this area are currently in preparation.
Exploration of Events and Media
How can people explore events and associated media more effectively?
When exchanging media (such as photos and videos) on the web, we all have seen how useful it can be to relate them to geographical locations. But an additional type of organization – in terms of the events that the media depict – can have similar value.
The European Integrating Project GLOCAL worked on various fronts to make this sort of organization useful and usable in professional and amateur contexts. The DFKI team has developed innovative interaction designs that take into account the features of events that distinguish them from other types of entity.
In connection with the technology transfer project EventMAP, sponsored by EIT ICT Labs, we generalized the methods developed in the GLOCAL project to cover a much broader range of domains and to make more extensive use of the research on choice and decision making mentioned above. I explained the general theoretical basis of this work and illustrated it with our most recent results in a workshop keynote address at the workshop on Intelligent Exploration of Semantic Data at EKAW 2012 in early October of 2012. Many of these ideas are illustrated in the most recent version of our demonstrator for parallel faceted browsing
Binocular View of Interactive Intelligent Systems
How can we achieve a better synergy among different approaches to research on interactive intelligent systems?
Technology involving various forms of machine intelligence already serves useful functions in a wide variety of interactive computing systems, and the open-ended future possibilities are being explored in a number of research communities. These communities can learn a lot from each other about general issues that arise when human and machine intelligence interact.
The special issue of AI Magazine titled “Usable AI”, focused on questions of usability. As a broader effort, John Riedl and I founded the ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, which publishes relevant research from a wide range of areas.
Earlier Research Topics
Publications on the following research topics will be found on the publications page:
- User-adaptive systems in general
- User-centered design of systems based on semantic or language technologies
- Non-mainstream approaches to recommendation
- Ubiquitous and mobile computing
- Adaptation of human-computer dialogs to resource limitations
- Application of decision-theoretic inference, decision making, and learning techniques, where applicable, to the above problems
- Pragmatics of natural language dialog, ascription of knowledge and belief