Search

In the shift towards human-centered manufacturing, our two-year longitudinal study investigates the real-world impact of deploying Cognitive Assistants (CAs) in factories. The CAs were designed to facilitate knowledge sharing among factory operators. Our investigation focused on smartphone-based voice assistants and LLM-powered chatbots, examining their usability and utility in a real-world factory setting. Based on the qualitative feedback we collected during the deployments of CAs at the factories, we conducted a thematic analysis to investigate the perceptions, challenges, and overall impact on workflow and knowledge sharing. Our results indicate that while CAs have the potential to significantly improve efficiency through knowledge sharing and quicker resolution of production issues, they also introduce concerns around workplace surveillance, the types of knowledge that can be shared, and shortcomings compared to human-to-human knowledge sharing. Additionally, our findings stress the importance of addressing privacy, knowledge contribution burdens, and tensions between factory operators and their managers., Comment: 32 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, under review

Pre-trained deep learning (DL) models are increasingly accessible in public repositories, i.e., model zoos. Given a new prediction task, finding the best model to fine-tune can be computationally intensive and costly, especially when the number of pre-trained models is large. Selecting the right pre-trained models is crucial, yet complicated by the diversity of models from various model families (like ResNet, Vit, Swin) and the hidden relationships between models and datasets. Existing methods, which utilize basic information from models and datasets to compute scores indicating model performance on target datasets, overlook the intrinsic relationships, limiting their effectiveness in model selection. In this study, we introduce TransferGraph, a novel framework that reformulates model selection as a graph learning problem. TransferGraph constructs a graph using extensive metadata extracted from models and datasets, while capturing their inherent relationships. Through comprehensive experiments across 16 real datasets, both images and texts, we demonstrate TransferGraph's effectiveness in capturing essential model-dataset relationships, yielding up to a 32% improvement in correlation between predicted performance and the actual fine-tuning results compared to the state-of-the-art methods., Comment: Accepted at 40th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2024)

ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) have proven useful in crowdsourcing tasks, where they can effectively annotate machine learning training data. However, this means that they also have the potential for misuse, specifically to automatically answer surveys. LLMs can potentially circumvent quality assurance measures, thereby threatening the integrity of methodologies that rely on crowdsourcing surveys. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to detect LLM-generated responses to surveys. The mechanism uses "prompt injection", such as directions that can mislead LLMs into giving predictable responses. We evaluate our technique against a range of question scenarios, types, and positions, and find that it can reliably detect LLM-generated responses with more than 93% effectiveness. We also provide an open-source software to help survey designers use our technique to detect LLM responses. Our work is a step in ensuring that survey methodologies remain rigorous vis-a-vis LLMs.

Machine learning (ML) practitioners and organizations are building model zoos of pre-trained models, containing metadata describing properties of the ML models and datasets that are useful for reporting, auditing, reproducibility, and interpretability purposes. The metatada is currently not standardised; its expressivity is limited; and there is no interoperable way to store and query it. Consequently, model search, reuse, comparison, and composition are hindered. In this paper, we advocate for standardized ML model meta-data representation and management, proposing a toolkit supported to help practitioners manage and query that metadata.

In an effort to regulate Machine Learning-driven (ML) systems, current auditing processes mostly focus on detecting harmful algorithmic biases. While these strategies have proven to be impactful, some values outlined in documents dealing with ethics in ML-driven systems are still underrepresented in auditing processes. Such unaddressed values mainly deal with contextual factors that cannot be easily quantified. In this paper, we develop a value-based assessment framework that is not limited to bias auditing and that covers prominent ethical principles for algorithmic systems. Our framework presents a circular arrangement of values with two bipolar dimensions that make common motivations and potential tensions explicit. In order to operationalize these high-level principles, values are then broken down into specific criteria and their manifestations. However, some of these value-specific criteria are mutually exclusive and require negotiation. As opposed to some other auditing frameworks that merely rely on ML researchers' and practitioners' input, we argue that it is necessary to include stakeholders that present diverse standpoints to systematically negotiate and consolidate value and criteria tensions. To that end, we map stakeholders with different insight needs, and assign tailored means for communicating value manifestations to them. We, therefore, contribute to current ML auditing practices with an assessment framework that visualizes closeness and tensions between values and we give guidelines on how to operationalize them, while opening up the evaluation and deliberation process to a wide range of stakeholders., Comment: Accepted at the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT'22)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly used to analyze large amounts of data in various practices, such as object recognition. We are specifically interested in using AI-powered systems to engage local communities in developing plans or solutions for pressing societal and environmental concerns. Such local contexts often involve multiple stakeholders with different and even contradictory agendas, resulting in mismatched expectations of these systems' behaviors and desired outcomes. There is a need to investigate if AI models and pipelines can work as expected in different contexts through co-creation and field deployment. Based on case studies in co-creating AI-powered systems with local people, we explain challenges that require more attention and provide viable paths to bridge AI research with citizen needs. We advocate for developing new collaboration approaches and mindsets that are needed to co-create AI-powered systems in multi-stakeholder contexts to address local concerns., Comment: This manuscript is peer-reviewed and accepted by the Patterns journal

Hybrid crowd-machine classifiers can achieve superior performance by combining the cost-effectiveness of automatic classification with the accuracy of human judgment. This paper shows how crowd and machines can support each other in tackling classification problems. Specifically, we propose an architecture that orchestrates active learning and crowd classification and combines them in a virtuous cycle. We show that when the pool of items to classify is finite we face learning vs. exploitation trade-off in hybrid classification, as we need to balance crowd tasks optimized for creating a training dataset with tasks optimized for classifying items in the pool. We define the problem, propose a set of heuristics and evaluate the approach on three real-world datasets with different characteristics in terms of machine and crowd classification performance, showing that our active hybrid approach significantly outperforms baselines.

In this paper, we explore how to efficiently combine crowdsourcing and machine intelligence for the problem of document screening, where we need to screen documents with a set of machine-learning filters. Specifically, we focus on building a set of machine learning classifiers that evaluate documents, and then screen them efficiently. It is a challenging task since the budget is limited and there are countless number of ways to spend the given budget on the problem. We propose a multi-label active learning screening specific sampling technique -- objective-aware sampling -- for querying unlabelled documents for annotating. Our algorithm takes a decision on which machine filter need more training data and how to choose unlabeled items to annotate in order to minimize the risk of overall classification errors rather than minimizing a single filter error. We demonstrate that objective-aware sampling significantly outperforms the state of the art active learning sampling strategies., Comment: Crowd Science Workshop at NeurIPS 2020

The way pages are ranked in search results influences whether the users of search engines are exposed to more homogeneous, or rather to more diverse viewpoints. However, this viewpoint diversity is not trivial to assess. In this paper we use existing and novel ranking fairness metrics to evaluate viewpoint diversity in search result rankings. We conduct a controlled simulation study that shows how ranking fairness metrics can be used for viewpoint diversity, how their outcome should be interpreted, and which metric is most suitable depending on the situation. This paper lays out important ground work for future research to measure and assess viewpoint diversity in real search result rankings.

Machine Learning (ML) is increasingly applied in real-life scenarios, raising concerns about bias in automatic decision making. We focus on bias as a notion of opinion exclusion, that stems from the direct application of traditional ML pipelines to infer subjective properties. We argue that such ML systems should be evaluated with subjectivity and bias in mind. Considering the lack of evaluation standards yet to create evaluation benchmarks, we propose an initial list of specifications to define prior to creating evaluation datasets, in order to later accurately evaluate the biases. With the example of a sentence toxicity inference system, we illustrate how the specifications support the analysis of biases related to subjectivity. We highlight difficulties in instantiating these specifications and list future work for the crowdsourcing community to help the creation of appropriate evaluation datasets., Comment: presented at the Rigorous Evaluation of Artificial Intelligence Systems (REAIS) workshop co-located with HCOMP 2019

Despite the high interest for Machine Learning (ML) in academia and industry, many issues related to the application of ML to real-life problems are yet to be addressed. Here we put forward one limitation which arises from a lack of adaptation of ML models and datasets to specific applications. We formalise a new notion of unfairness as exclusion of opinions. We propose ways to quantify this unfairness, and aid understanding its causes through visualisation. These insights into the functioning of ML-based systems hint at methods to mitigate unfairness., Comment: Human-Centered Machine Learning Perspectives (HCML) workshop at the CHI conference 2019

This paper presents a user modeling pipeline to analyze discussions and opinions shared on social media regarding polarized political events (e.g., public polls). The pipeline follows a four-step methodology. First, social media posts and users metadata are crawled. Second, a filtering mechanism is applied to filter spammers and bot users. As a third step, demographics information is extracted out of the valid users, namely gender, age, ethnicity and location information. Finally, the political polarity of the users with respect to the analyzed event is predicted. In the scope of this work, our proposed pipeline is applied to two referendum scenarios (independence of Catalonia in Spain and autonomy of Lombardy in Italy) in order to assess the performance of the approach with respect to the capability of collecting correct insights on the demographics of social media users and of predicting the poll results based on the opinions shared by the users. Experiments show that the method was effective in predicting the political trends for the Catalonia case, but not for the Lombardy case. Among the various motivations for this, we noticed that in general Twitter was more representative of the users opposing the referendum than the ones in favor., Comment: KDWeb Workshop 2018, co-located with ICWE 2018, Caceres, Spain, June 2018

Capturing the temporal dynamics of user preferences over items is important for recommendation. Existing methods mainly assume that all time steps in user-item interaction history are equally relevant to recommendation, which however does not apply in real-world scenarios where user-item interactions can often happen accidentally. More importantly, they learn user and item dynamics separately, thus failing to capture their joint effects on user-item interactions. To better model user and item dynamics, we present the Interacting Attention-gated Recurrent Network (IARN) which adopts the attention model to measure the relevance of each time step. In particular, we propose a novel attention scheme to learn the attention scores of user and item history in an interacting way, thus to account for the dependencies between user and item dynamics in shaping user-item interactions. By doing so, IARN can selectively memorize different time steps of a user's history when predicting her preferences over different items. Our model can therefore provide meaningful interpretations for recommendation results, which could be further enhanced by auxiliary features. Extensive validation on real-world datasets shows that IARN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods., Comment: Accepted by ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2017

In this paper, we outline the vision of chatbots that facilitate the interaction between citizens and policy-makers at the city scale. We report the results of a co-design session attended by more than 60 participants. We give an outlook of how some challenges associated with such chatbot systems could be addressed in the future., Comment: 2 pages, 1 figure, 1 table

Micro-task crowdsourcing has become a successful mean to obtain high-quality data from a large crowd of diverse people. In this context, trust between all the involved actors (i.e. requesters, workers, and platform owners) is a critical factor for acceptance and long-term success. As actors have no expectation for "real life" meetings, thus trust can only be attributed through computer-mediated trust cues like workers qualifications and requester ratings. Such cues are often the result of technical or social assessments that are performed in isolation, considering only a subset of relevant properties, and with asynchronous and asymmetrical interactions. In this paper, we advocate for a new generation of micro-task crowdsourcing systems that pursue an holistic understanding of trust, by offering an open, transparent, privacy-friendly, and socially-aware view on the all the actors of a micro-task crowdsourcing environment., Comment: Workshop on Weaving Relations of Trust in Crowd Work: Transparency and Reputation across Platforms (TURSTINCW), co-located with ACM WebSci'16