Abstract

For most of my career (working at the intersection of HCI and AI), I declared success when the systems I helped build allowed people to do more, faster, with fewer errors and with less friction. Recently, however, in the context of AI-supported decision-making specifically, people for whose benefit I was supposedly doing my work would signal that these were not necessarily the most important success criteria for them. 

Psychiatrists pointed out that while choosing a medically optimal antidepressant was important, it was even more important that the patient left the office feeling confident about and invested in the choice. Research on workers using AI-assistance in their decision-making tasks indicated that these workers were losing their domain skills. People receiving adverse AI-supported decisions (such as benefit denials) shared that they could not evaluate if those decisions were correct and even if they were, they did not know how to act on those decisions. 

In this talk, I will share our research that surfaced some of these new objectives for AI-powered decision support technologies. I will also share some technical projects where we designed and evaluated novel human-AI interactions that bring us a little closer to meeting these objectives. My high-level conclusions are twofold: First, considering objectives that go beyond accuracy and efficiency open opportunities for new and valuable impacts in the real world. Second, considering this expanded universe of objectives also opens up a large and unexplored space of interesting design and computational challenges. 

Speaker Bio

Krzysztof Gajos is the Yahn W. Bernier and N. Elizabeth McCaw professor of Computer Science at the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Krzysztof’s current interests include 1. Principles and applications of intelligent interactive systems; 2. Tools and methods for behavioral research at scale (e.g., LabintheWild.org); and 3. Design for equity and social justice. He has also made contributions in the areas of accessible computing, creativity support tools, social computing, and health informatics. 

Krzysztof received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington (2009) and his M.Eng. and B.Sc. degrees from MIT. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research at the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group. From 2013 to 2016 Krzysztof was a coeditor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (ACM TiiS), he was the general chair of ACM UIST 2017, and he was a program co-chair of the 2022 ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. His work was recognized with a Sloan Fellowship and with best paper awards at ACM CHI, ACM COMPASS, and ACM IUI. In 2019, he received the Most Impactful Paper Award at ACM IUI for his work on automatically generating personalized user interfaces.