SEA: User Control for Personalized Information Access

We are excited to host Prof. Dr. Peter Brusilovsky, who is visiting from the University of Pittsburgh, this Thursday in a special edition of SEA Single Shot (45-minute talk + 15-minute Q&A). The topic of the talk will be user control for personalized information access (more details will be announced soon).

You can join us online or in person at Lab42, room L3.36. Please note that this SEA meet-up starts at 13:00 CET.

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IMPORTANT: You can view the Zoom link once you 'attend' the meetup on this page.
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Speaker: Prof. Dr. Peter Brusilovsky (University of Pittsburgh)
Title: Two Brains are Better than One: User Control in Adaptive Information Access
Time: 13:00
Abstract: 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.

SEA Talk #269