Tutorial / What every IUI researcher should know about human choice and decision making

  • Authors:
  • Anthony Jameson

  • Affiliations:
  • DFKI, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence , Saarbrücken, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

There are many reasons why a researcher in the area of intelligent user interfaces (IUI) might decide not to attend this tutorial: 1. I didn't take a tutorial at my last conference. 2. I'm not the kind of person who takes tutorials at conferences. 3. Hardly any of my friends take tutorials. 4. It's not the policy of my organization for researchers to take tutorials. 5. The topic does not seem at first glance to be one that I need to pay attention to. 6. The cost of taking this tutorial is immediate and clear, but the benefits would be spread out over years, and I'm not sure what they would be, or how large. 7. I'm feeling impatient, and I want to move on to the next page. But here's the catch: Every one of the reasons listed above can also cause users to disregard the recommendations of the researcher's novel recommender system, reject the adaptations of their adaptive interface, or generally make choices concerning the use of IUI innovations that seem wrong to the researchers who developed them and maybe to the users, if they took the trouble to reconsider them. In other words: IUI researchers do need to know something about human choice and decision making. Just consulting common knowledge or reading a textbook isn't enough, since the most IUI relevant concepts and results are found in a number of subareas of research on judgment and decision making, learning and habitual behavior, and strategies for influencing choices; and their relevance to IUI issues is hardly ever made explicit. This new tutorial aims to fill this gap: It presents relevant concepts and insights from psychological research with explicit reference to issues that IUI researchers typically encounter. With the help of the take-home supplementary material, participants will be able to understand and predict more realistically (though less confidently) the choices that users make about or with the help of their systems. And they can try in more imaginative ways to influence these choices. They might also think of a fresh research issue for their next project proposal.