Micro-entries: Encouraging Deeper Evaluation of Mental Models Over Time for Interactive Data Systems

Many interactive data systems combine visual representations of data with embedded algorithmic support for automation and data exploration. To effectively support transparent and explainable data systems, it is important for researchers and designers to know how users understand the system. We discuss the evaluation of users' mental models of system logic. Mental models are challenging to capture and analyze. While common evaluation methods aim to approximate the user's final mental model after a period of system usage, user understanding continuously evolves as users interact with a system over time. In this paper, we review many common mental model measurement techniques, discuss tradeoffs, and recommend methods for deeper, more meaningful evaluation of mental models when using interactive data analysis and visualization systems. We present guidelines for evaluating mental models over time that reveal the evolution of specific model updates and how they may map to the particular use of interface features and data queries. By asking users to describe what they know and how they know it, researchers can collect structured, time-ordered insight into a user's conceptualization process while also helping guide users to their own discoveries.Comment: 10 pages, submitted to BELIV 2020 Worksho

Soliciting Human-in-the-Loop User Feedback for Interactive Machine Learning Reduces User Trust and Impressions of Model Accuracy

Mixed-initiative systems allow users to interactively provide feedback to potentially improve system performance. Human feedback can correct model errors and update model parameters to dynamically adapt to changing data. Additionally, many users desire the ability to have a greater level of control and fix perceived flaws in systems they rely on. However, how the ability to provide feedback to autonomous systems influences user trust is a largely unexplored area of research. Our research investigates how the act of providing feedback can affect user understanding of an intelligent system and its accuracy. We present a controlled experiment using a simulated object detection system with image data to study the effects of interactive feedback collection on user impressions. The results show that providing human-in-the-loop feedback lowered both participants' trust in the system and their perception of system accuracy, regardless of whether the system accuracy improved in response to their feedback. These results highlight the importance of considering the effects of allowing end-user feedback on user trust when designing intelligent systems.Comment: Accepted and to appear in the Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP) 202

The Influence of Visual Provenance Representations on Strategies in a Collaborative Hand-off Data Analysis Scenario

Conducting data analysis tasks rarely occur in isolation. Especially in intelligence analysis scenarios where different experts contribute knowledge to a shared understanding, members must communicate how insights develop to establish common ground among collaborators. The use of provenance to communicate analytic sensemaking carries promise by describing the interactions and summarizing the steps taken to reach insights. Yet, no universal guidelines exist for communicating provenance in different settings. Our work focuses on the presentation of provenance information and the resulting conclusions reached and strategies used by new analysts. In an open-ended, 30-minute, textual exploration scenario, we qualitatively compare how adding different types of provenance information (specifically data coverage and interaction history) affects analysts' confidence in conclusions developed, propensity to repeat work, filtering of data, identification of relevant information, and typical investigation strategies. We see that data coverage (i.e., what was interacted with) provides provenance information without limiting individual investigation freedom. On the other hand, while interaction history (i.e., when something was interacted with) does not significantly encourage more mimicry, it does take more time to comfortably understand, as represented by less confident conclusions and less relevant information-gathering behaviors. Our results contribute empirical data towards understanding how provenance summarizations can influence analysis behaviors.Comment: to be published in IEEE Vis 202

XFake: Explainable Fake News Detector with Visualizations

In this demo paper, we present the XFake system, an explainable fake news detector that assists end-users to identify news credibility. To effectively detect and interpret the fakeness of news items, we jointly consider both attributes (e.g., speaker) and statements. Specifically, MIMIC, ATTN and PERT frameworks are designed, where MIMIC is built for attribute analysis, ATTN is for statement semantic analysis and PERT is for statement linguistic analysis. Beyond the explanations extracted from the designed frameworks, relevant supporting examples as well as visualization are further provided to facilitate the interpretation. Our implemented system is demonstrated on a real-world dataset crawled from PolitiFact, where thousands of verified political news have been collected.Comment: 4 pages, WebConf'2019 Dem