Interacting with AI: A visualization perspective

In recent years, there has been a strong focus on fully autonomous AI technologies. While full automatization is easy to communicate in the media, contemporary rhetoric seems to forget that most problems will continue to necessitate meaningful interactions between humans and machines. Along the life cycle of AI, there are many steps for which humans are needed in the loop: humans need to be able to understand the underlying data, explain AI models, or even cooperate with AI to excel at tasks such as decision making and music composition. To foster such interfaces, we develop and study techniques that combine approaches from human-computer interaction, data visualization, and mixed reality. In the talk, we will look at different examples of such human-data and human-AI interfaces, and think about when they are needed and how to build them.

Short bio

Michael Sedlmair is a professor at the University of Stuttgart and leads the research group for Visualization and Virtual/Augmented Reality there. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Munich, Germany, in 2010. Further stops included the Jacobs University Bremen, University of Vienna, University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and the BMW Group Research and Technology, Munich. His research interests focus on visual and interactive machine learning, perceptual modeling for visualization, immersive analytics and situated visualization, novel interaction technologies, as well as the methodological and theoretical foundations underlying them.