No Arabic abstract
Uncertainty visualizations often emphasize point estimates to support magnitude estimates or decisions through visual comparison. However, when design choices emphasize means, users may overlook uncertainty information and misinterpret visual distance as a proxy for effect size. We present findings from a mixed design experiment on Mechanical Turk which tests eight uncertainty visualization designs: 95% containment intervals, hypothetical outcome plots, densities, and quantile dotplots, each with and without means added. We find that adding means to uncertainty visualizations has small biasing effects on both magnitude estimation and decision-making, consistent with discounting uncertainty. We also see that visualization designs that support the least biased effect size estimation do not support the best decision-making, suggesting that a chart users sense of effect size may not necessarily be identical when they use the same information for different tasks. In a qualitative analysis of users strategy descriptions, we find that many users switch strategies and do not employ an optimal strategy when one exists. Uncertainty visualizations which are optimally designed in theory may not be the most effective in practice because of the ways that users satisfice with heuristics, suggesting opportunities to better understand visualization effectiveness by modeling sets of potential strategies.
Todays large-scale algorithms have become immensely influential, as they recommend and moderate the content that billions of humans are exposed to on a daily basis. They are the de-facto regulators of our societies information diet, from shaping opinions on public health to organizing groups for social movements. This creates serious concerns, but also great opportunities to promote quality information. Addressing the concerns and seizing the opportunities is a challenging, enormous and fabulous endeavor, as intuitively appealing ideas often come with unwanted {it side effects}, and as it requires us to think about what we deeply prefer. Understanding how todays large-scale algorithms are built is critical to determine what interventions will be most effective. Given that these algorithms rely heavily on {it machine learning}, we make the following key observation: emph{any algorithm trained on uncontrolled data must not be trusted}. Indeed, a malicious entity could take control over the data, poison it with dangerously manipulative fabricated inputs, and thereby make the trained algorithm extremely unsafe. We thus argue that the first step towards safe and ethical large-scale algorithms must be the collection of a large, secure and trustworthy dataset of reliable human judgments. To achieve this, we introduce emph{Tournesol}, an open source platform available at url{https://tournesol.app}. Tournesol aims to collect a large database of human judgments on what algorithms ought to widely recommend (and what they ought to stop widely recommending). We outline the structure of the Tournesol database, the key features of the Tournesol platform and the main hurdles that must be overcome to make it a successful project. Most importantly, we argue that, if successful, Tournesol may then serve as the essential foundation for any safe and ethical large-scale algorithm.
As a contribution to the challenge of building game-playing AI systems, we develop and analyse a formal language for representing and reasoning about strategies. Our logical language builds on the existing general Game Description Language (GDL) and extends it by a standard modality for linear time along with two dual connectives to express preferences when combining strategies. The semantics of the language is provided by a standard state-transition model. As such, problems that require reasoning about games can be solved by the standard methods for reasoning about actions and change. We also endow the language with a specific semantics by which strategy formulas are understood as move recommendations for a player. To illustrate how our formalism supports automated reasoning about strategies, we demonstrate two example methods of implementation/: first, we formalise the semantic interpretation of our language in conjunction with game rules and strategy rules in the Situation Calculus; second, we show how the reasoning problem can be solved with Answer Set Programming.
Major depressive disorder is a debilitating disease affecting 264 million people worldwide. While many antidepressant medications are available, few clinical guidelines support choosing among them. Decision support tools (DSTs) embodying machine learning models may help improve the treatment selection process, but often fail in clinical practice due to poor system integration. We use an iterative, co-design process to investigate clinicians perceptions of using DSTs in antidepressant treatment decisions. We identify ways in which DSTs need to engage with the healthcare sociotechnical system, including clinical processes, patient preferences, resource constraints, and domain knowledge. Our results suggest that clinical DSTs should be designed as multi-user systems that support patient-provider collaboration and offer on-demand explanations that address discrepancies between predictions and current standards of care. Through this work, we demonstrate how current trends in explainable AI may be inappropriate for clinical environments and consider paths towards designing these tools for real-world medical systems.
In this paper, we present results from a human-subject study designed to explore two facets of human mental models of robots---inferred capability and intention---and their relationship to overall trust and eventual decisions. In particular, we examine delegation situations characterized by uncertainty, and explore how inferred capability and intention are applied across different tasks. We develop an online survey where human participants decide whether to delegate control to a simulated UAV agent. Our study shows that human estimations of robot capability and intent correlate strongly with overall self-reported trust. However, overall trust is not independently sufficient to determine whether a human will decide to trust (delegate) a given task to a robot. Instead, our study reveals that estimations of robot intention, capability, and overall trust are integrated when deciding to delegate. From a broader perspective, these results suggest that calibrating overall trust alone is insufficient; to make correct decisions, humans need (and use) multi-faceted mental models when collaborating with robots across multiple contexts.
In personalised decision making, evidence is required to determine suitable actions for individuals. Such evidence can be obtained by identifying treatment effect heterogeneity in different subgroups of the population. In this paper, we design a new type of pattern, treatment effect pattern to represent and discover treatment effect heterogeneity from data for determining whether a treatment will work for an individual or not. Our purpose is to use the computational power to find the most specific and relevant conditions for individuals with respect to a treatment or an action to assist with personalised decision making. Most existing work on identifying treatment effect heterogeneity takes a top-down or partitioning based approach to search for subgroups with heterogeneous treatment effects. We propose a bottom-up generalisation algorithm to obtain the most specific patterns that fit individual circumstances the best for personalised decision making. For the generalisation, we follow a consistency driven strategy to maintain inner-group homogeneity and inter-group heterogeneity of treatment effects. We also employ graphical causal modelling technique to identify adjustment variables for reliable treatment effect pattern discovery. Our method can find the treatment effect patterns reliably as validated by the experiments. The method is faster than the two existing machine learning methods for heterogeneous treatment effect identification and it produces subgroups with higher inner-group treatment effect homogeneity.