42 research outputs found
Developing conversational agents for use in criminal investigations
The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in environments that involve high risk and high consequence decision-making is severely hampered by critical design issues. These issues include system transparency and brittleness, where transparency relates to (i) the explainability of results and (ii) the ability of a user to inspect and verify system goals and constraints; and brittleness, (iii) the ability of a system to adapt to new user demands. Transparency is a particular concern for criminal intelligence analysis, where there are significant ethical and trust issues that arise when algorithmic and system processes are not adequately understood by a user. This prevents adoption of potentially useful technologies in policing environments. In this article, we present a novel approach to designing a conversational agent (CA) AI system for intelligence analysis that tackles these issues. We discuss the results and implications of three different studies; a Cognitive Task Analysis to understand analyst thinking when retrieving information in an investigation, Emergent Themes Analysis to understand the explanation needs of different system components, and an interactive experiment with a prototype conversational agent. Our prototype conversational agent, named Pan, demonstrates transparency provision and mitigates brittleness by evolving new CA intentions. We encode interactions with the CA with human factors principles for situation recognition and use interactive visual analytics to support analyst reasoning. Our approach enables complex AI systems, such as Pan, to be used in sensitive environments, and our research has broader application than the use case discussed
Developing conversational agents for use in criminal investigations
The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in environments that involve high risk and high consequence
decision making is severely hampered by critical design issues. These issues include system transparency
and brittleness, where transparency relates to (i) the explainability of results and (ii) the ability of a user to inspect and verify system goals and constraints, and brittleness (iii) the ability of a system to adapt to new user demands. Transparency is a particular concern for criminal intelligence analysis, where there are significant ethical and trust issues that arise when algorithmic and system processes are not adequately understood by a user. This prevents adoption of potentially useful technologies in policing environments.
In this paper, we present a novel approach to designing a conversational agent (CA) AI system for intelligence analysis that tackles these issues.We discuss the results and implications of three different studies; a Cognitive Task Analysis to understand analyst thinking when retrieving information in an investigation, Emergent Themes Analysis to understand the explanation needs of different system components, and an interactive experiment with a prototype conversational agent. Our prototype conversational agent, named Pan, demonstrates transparency provision and mitigates brittleness by evolving new CA intentions. We encode interactions with the CA with human factors principles for situation recognition and use interactive visual analytics to support analyst reasoning. Our approach enables complex AI systems, such as Pan, to be used in sensitive environments and our research has broader application than the use case discussed
How Fast Can We Play Tetris Greedily With Rectangular Pieces?
Consider a variant of Tetris played on a board of width and infinite
height, where the pieces are axis-aligned rectangles of arbitrary integer
dimensions, the pieces can only be moved before letting them drop, and a row
does not disappear once it is full. Suppose we want to follow a greedy
strategy: let each rectangle fall where it will end up the lowest given the
current state of the board. To do so, we want a data structure which can always
suggest a greedy move. In other words, we want a data structure which maintains
a set of rectangles, supports queries which return where to drop the
rectangle, and updates which insert a rectangle dropped at a certain position
and return the height of the highest point in the updated set of rectangles. We
show via a reduction to the Multiphase problem [P\u{a}tra\c{s}cu, 2010] that on
a board of width , if the OMv conjecture [Henzinger et al., 2015]
is true, then both operations cannot be supported in time
simultaneously. The reduction also implies polynomial bounds from the 3-SUM
conjecture and the APSP conjecture. On the other hand, we show that there is a
data structure supporting both operations in time on
boards of width , matching the lower bound up to a factor.Comment: Correction of typos and other minor correction
MARLUI: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive UIs
Adaptive user interfaces (UIs) automatically change an interface to better
support users' tasks. Recently, machine learning techniques have enabled the
transition to more powerful and complex adaptive UIs. However, a core challenge
for adaptive user interfaces is the reliance on high-quality user data that has
to be collected offline for each task. We formulate UI adaptation as a
multi-agent reinforcement learning problem to overcome this challenge. In our
formulation, a user agent mimics a real user and learns to interact with a UI.
Simultaneously, an interface agent learns UI adaptations to maximize the user
agent's performance. The interface agent learns the task structure from the
user agent's behavior and, based on that, can support the user agent in
completing its task. Our method produces adaptation policies that are learned
in simulation only and, therefore, does not need real user data. Our
experiments show that learned policies generalize to real users and achieve on
par performance with data-driven supervised learning baselines
Enhancing explainability and scrutability of recommender systems
Our increasing reliance on complex algorithms for recommendations calls for models and methods for explainable, scrutable, and trustworthy AI. While explainability is required for understanding the relationships between model inputs and outputs, a scrutable system allows us to modify its behavior as desired. These properties help bridge the gap between our expectations and the algorithmâs behavior and accordingly boost our trust in AI. Aiming to cope with information overload, recommender systems play a crucial role in ďŹltering content (such as products, news, songs, and movies) and shaping a personalized experience for their users. Consequently, there has been a growing demand from the information consumers to receive proper explanations for their personalized recommendations. These explanations aim at helping users understand why certain items are recommended to them and how their previous inputs to the system relate to the generation of such recommendations. Besides, in the event of receiving undesirable content, explanations could possibly contain valuable information as to how the systemâs behavior can be modiďŹed accordingly. In this thesis, we present our contributions towards explainability and scrutability of recommender systems: ⢠We introduce a user-centric framework, FAIRY, for discovering and ranking post-hoc explanations for the social feeds generated by black-box platforms. These explanations reveal relationships between usersâ proďŹles and their feed items and are extracted from the local interaction graphs of users. FAIRY employs a learning-to-rank (LTR) method to score candidate explanations based on their relevance and surprisal. ⢠We propose a method, PRINCE, to facilitate provider-side explainability in graph-based recommender systems that use personalized PageRank at their core. PRINCE explanations are comprehensible for users, because they present subsets of the userâs prior actions responsible for the received recommendations. PRINCE operates in a counterfactual setup and builds on a polynomial-time algorithm for ďŹnding the smallest counterfactual explanations. ⢠We propose a human-in-the-loop framework, ELIXIR, for enhancing scrutability and subsequently the recommendation models by leveraging user feedback on explanations. ELIXIR enables recommender systems to collect user feedback on pairs of recommendations and explanations. The feedback is incorporated into the model by imposing a soft constraint for learning user-speciďŹc item representations. We evaluate all proposed models and methods with real user studies and demonstrate their beneďŹts at achieving explainability and scrutability in recommender systems.Unsere zunehmende Abhängigkeit von komplexen Algorithmen fĂźr maschinelle Empfehlungen erfordert Modelle und Methoden fĂźr erklärbare, nachvollziehbare und vertrauenswĂźrdige KI. Zum Verstehen der Beziehungen zwischen Modellein- und ausgaben muss KI erklärbar sein. MĂśchten wir das Verhalten des Systems hingegen nach unseren Vorstellungen ändern, muss dessen Entscheidungsprozess nachvollziehbar sein. Erklärbarkeit und Nachvollziehbarkeit von KI helfen uns dabei, die LĂźcke zwischen dem von uns erwarteten und dem tatsächlichen Verhalten der Algorithmen zu schlieĂen und unser Vertrauen in KI-Systeme entsprechend zu stärken. Um ein ĂbermaĂ an Informationen zu verhindern, spielen Empfehlungsdienste eine entscheidende Rolle um Inhalte (z.B. Produkten, Nachrichten, Musik und Filmen) zu ďŹltern und deren Benutzern eine personalisierte Erfahrung zu bieten. Infolgedessen erheben immer mehr In- formationskonsumenten Anspruch auf angemessene Erklärungen fĂźr deren personalisierte Empfehlungen. Diese Erklärungen sollen den Benutzern helfen zu verstehen, warum ihnen bestimmte Dinge empfohlen wurden und wie sich ihre frĂźheren Eingaben in das System auf die Generierung solcher Empfehlungen auswirken. AuĂerdem kĂśnnen Erklärungen fĂźr den Fall, dass unerwĂźnschte Inhalte empfohlen werden, wertvolle Informationen darĂźber enthalten, wie das Verhalten des Systems entsprechend geändert werden kann. In dieser Dissertation stellen wir unsere Beiträge zu Erklärbarkeit und Nachvollziehbarkeit von Empfehlungsdiensten vor. ⢠Mit FAIRY stellen wir ein benutzerzentriertes Framework vor, mit dem post-hoc Erklärungen fĂźr die von Black-Box-Plattformen generierten sozialen Feeds entdeckt und bewertet werden kĂśnnen. Diese Erklärungen zeigen Beziehungen zwischen BenutzerproďŹlen und deren Feeds auf und werden aus den lokalen Interaktionsgraphen der Benutzer extrahiert. FAIRY verwendet eine LTR-Methode (Learning-to-Rank), um die Erklärungen anhand ihrer Relevanz und ihres Grads unerwarteter Empfehlungen zu bewerten. ⢠Mit der PRINCE-Methode erleichtern wir das anbieterseitige Generieren von Erklärungen fĂźr PageRank-basierte Empfehlungsdienste. PRINCE-Erklärungen sind fĂźr Benutzer verständlich, da sie Teilmengen frĂźherer Nutzerinteraktionen darstellen, die fĂźr die erhaltenen Empfehlungen verantwortlich sind. PRINCE-Erklärungen sind somit kausaler Natur und werden von einem Algorithmus mit polynomieller Laufzeit erzeugt , um präzise Erklärungen zu ďŹnden. ⢠Wir präsentieren ein Human-in-the-Loop-Framework, ELIXIR, um die Nachvollziehbarkeit der Empfehlungsmodelle und die Qualität der Empfehlungen zu verbessern. Mit ELIXIR kĂśnnen Empfehlungsdienste Benutzerfeedback zu Empfehlungen und Erklärungen sammeln. Das Feedback wird in das Modell einbezogen, indem benutzerspeziďŹscher Einbettungen von Objekten gelernt werden. Wir evaluieren alle Modelle und Methoden in Benutzerstudien und demonstrieren ihren Nutzen hinsichtlich Erklärbarkeit und Nachvollziehbarkeit von Empfehlungsdiensten
On intelligible multimodal visual analysis
Analyzing data becomes an important skill in a more and more digital world. Yet, many users are facing knowledge barriers preventing them to independently conduct their data analysis. To tear down some of these barriers, multimodal interaction for visual analysis has been proposed. Multimodal interaction through speech and touch enables not only experts, but also novice users to effortlessly interact with such kind of technology. However, current approaches do not take the user differences into account. In fact, whether visual analysis is intelligible ultimately depends on the user.
In order to close this research gap, this dissertation explores how multimodal visual analysis can be personalized. To do so, it takes a holistic view. First, an intelligible task space of visual analysis tasks is defined by considering personalization potentials. This task space provides an initial basis for understanding how effective personalization in visual analysis can be approached. Second, empirical analyses on speech commands in visual analysis as well as used visualizations from scientific publications further reveal patterns and structures. These behavior-indicated findings help to better understand expectations towards multimodal visual analysis. Third, a technical prototype is designed considering the previous findings. Enriching the visual analysis by a persistent dialogue and a transparency of the underlying computations, conducted user studies show not only advantages, but address the relevance of considering the userâs characteristics. Finally, both communications channels â visualizations and dialogue â are personalized. Leveraging linguistic theory and reinforcement learning, the results highlight a positive effect of adjusting to the user. Especially when the userâs knowledge is exceeded, personalizations helps to improve the user experience.
Overall, this dissertations confirms not only the importance of considering the userâs characteristics in multimodal visual analysis, but also provides insights on how an intelligible analysis can be achieved. By understanding the use of input modalities, a system can focus only on the userâs needs. By understanding preferences on the output modalities, the system can better adapt to the user. Combining both directions imporves user experience and contributes towards an intelligible multimodal visual analysis