Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Humanizing AI: Filling the Gaps with Multi-faceted Research
Gold
Thursday, March 11, 2021 • Advancing Research 2021

This video is featured in the AI and UX playlist.

Share the love for this talk
Humanizing AI: Filling the Gaps with Multi-faceted Research
Speakers: Joel Branch
Link:

Summary

Artificial intelligence (AI) has graduated from science fiction to commoditized widget form, readily able to snap into many processes of daily life. Hence, enterprises of all maturity levels are increasingly eager to explore AI’s roles in their innovation, or outright survival strategies. Concurrently, ethical and responsible development and execution of AI-based solutions will increasingly become critical for purposes of safety and fairness. Ensuring that AI proliferates along the right path will require the infusion of multi-faceted research activities along the entire AI lifecycle. We will discuss the challenges and opportunities regarding this topic in this presentation.

Key Insights

  • 70% of enterprise AI projects show little to no business impact, and nearly 90% of data science projects fail to reach production.

  • AI bias, particularly intersectional bias in facial recognition, remains a critical unresolved challenge, exemplified by the Gender Shades project.

  • Black-box AI decision-making hinders stakeholder trust and adoption, due to AI’s probabilistic nature and complexity.

  • AI development teams are overly engineer-centric, lacking inclusion of product researchers and ethicists to address societal and user-centered concerns.

  • ML ops, adapted from DevOps, offers governance and accountability frameworks but currently remains engineer-focused.

  • Expanding ML ops to include human-centered researchers can improve AI explainability, trustworthiness, and fairness.

  • Visualization research is essential to analyze and interpret high-dimensional AI data and uncover hidden biases across intersectional subgroups.

  • AI explainability requires moving beyond feature importance towards causal reasoning and natural language explanations accessible to non-technical stakeholders.

  • AI trust is evolving and hinges on AI’s ability to provide convincing, interpretable answers that humans can understand and scrutinize in dialogue form.

  • Humanizing AI is not simply building human-like interfaces but creating governance frameworks that democratize responsible AI development.

Notable Quotes

"AI development is often uninformed and hurried, resulting in deployments that don’t operate well in the real world."

"Humanizing AI means creating governance frameworks that involve a broad array of research competencies for democratizing safe and effective AI."

"Almost 90% of data science projects do not make it into production—they die on the vine."

"Black box decision making is a hallmark problem—information goes in, something comes out, but we have no clue why."

"Bias is fueled by over-engineering without enough participation from non-technical roles that could reduce it."

"The Gender Shades project exposed how facial recognition algorithms had up to a 33% error rate disparity between demographic groups."

"ML ops offers governance, accountability, and a clear stakeholder responsibility framework borrowed from DevOps."

"We want to increase trust and engagement among end users by helping non-technical stakeholders participate in model evaluation."

"Explainability metrics like trustworthiness and understandability are hard, open research problems needing AI-HCI collaboration."

"AI trust will grow when AI can provide back-and-forth justifications like a human would in conversation."

Ask the Rosenbot
Jill Fruchter
Inconvenient Insights: The Researcher's Role is to Stay Curious
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Erin Malone
Understanding the past to prepare for the future
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Iram Shah
Closing Keynote: The View from the Top
2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Gold
Janaki Kumar
Innovate with Purpose
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Kate Towsey
ResearchOps AMA with Kate Towsey & Jake Burghardt
2025 • Advancing Research Community
Cheryl Platz
Collaborative Creativity through Improv
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Chris Govias
Perspectives on Civic Design
2021 • Civic Design Community
Mansi Gupta
Women-Centric Research: What, Why, How
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Samuel Martin
Co-Design vs Faux-Design: Navigating the Complexities of Sharing Power in Co-Design
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Kate Towsey
Ask Me Anything (AMA) with Kate Towsey
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Alnie Figueroa
The Future of Design Operations: Transforming Our Craft
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Dave Gray
Group Activity: Making Sense of DesignOps
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Onur Kocan
Understanding the Strategy for Civic Design in a Complex City: Istanbul
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Alla Weinberg
People Are Sick of Change: Psychological Safety is the Cure
2023 • DesignOps Community
Sam Proulx
Prototype Reviews, People With Disabilities, and You
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Ryan Matthew
DesignOps without Boundaries: Building More with What You Have
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold

More Videos

Dan Hill

"Designing a chair means considering its next larger context: the room, the house, the environment."

Dan Hill

Designing for the infrastructures of everyday life

June 4, 2024

Mansi Gupta

"Male universality is one of the leading causes of gender gaps."

Mansi Gupta

Women-Centric Research: What, Why, How

March 29, 2023

Angelos Arnis

"Design is navigating through unprecedented times."

Angelos Arnis

Navigating the Rapid Shifts in Tech's Turbulent Terrain

October 2, 2023

Emily Williams

"My race has been treated like guinea pigs for most of our existence."

Emily Williams Nora Fiore

When UX Research and Institutional Racism Collide: A Case Study

March 12, 2021

Louis Rosenfeld

"Dave Nicholson is a true hero—he captures incredible detail and speed in his notes."

Louis Rosenfeld

Welcome / Housekeeping

June 7, 2023

Marc Fonteijn

"The more experienced you are, the more satisfied you tend to be with your salary; it can almost be double compared to beginners."

Marc Fonteijn

First Insights from the 2025 Service Design Salary(+) Report

December 4, 2024

Jon Fukuda

"We’re lucky if we solve a single thing; everything else has to be parking lot."

Jon Fukuda Amy Evans Ignacio Martinez Joe Meersman

The Big Question about Innovation: A Panel Discussion

September 25, 2024

Katie Hansen

"Correlation does not equal causation. To say X causes Y, you’ve gotta do an experiment."

Katie Hansen

Experimental research: techniques for deep, psychology-driven insights

March 12, 2025

Bria Alexander

"Corey’s story of resilience during his 2023 to 2024 job search ends well because we accepted his offer at Adobe."

Bria Alexander

Theme 1 Intro

September 23, 2024