The Academic Fringe Festival – Judith Redi: When Automation is Not the Holy Grail: Designing for User-ML Collaboration in Software

Abstract

Making a software product more intelligent, powering it with ML-fuelled features to personalise experiences and automate tasks is the holy grail for many software companies. At the same time, as appealing as full task automation may sound to businesses, that’s not always the case for the final users. There is often a tension between the user desire of being more efficient in their work (where automation would certainly help) and their need to keep feeling in control as well as relevant (will this software take over my job??). In this talk, I am going to explore this tension between desire for efficiency, trust, and control and provide a couple of examples of how automation can be replaced by user-ML collaboration to still deliver the desired efficiency while keeping the user in the driver’s seat.