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
Nicole Aleong
Future Orientations to Everyday Life: Futures Anthropology as a Methodology
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Trisha Causley
[Demo] Complexity in disguise: Crafting experiences for generative AI features
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Jess Greco
Creating a Basis for Change: Scaling Design Maturity
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Heidi Trost
When AI Becomes the User’s Point Person—and Point of Failure
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Meghan Hellstern
The Next 100 Years of Civic Design: How Might We Better Rise to Meet the Challenges of Today and Tomorrow?
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Jaskiran Kang
Why Community is Key to Professionalizing Design
2022 • Civic Design Community
Jon Fukuda
Storytelling for DesignOps
2023 • DesignOps Community
Noel Lamb
Cultivating Business Partnerships to Grow Research Ops
2022 • Advancing Research Community
Uday Gajendar
Day 2 Welcome
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Magdalena Zadara
Zero Hour: How to Get Far Quickly When Starting Your Digital Service Unit Late
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Sahibzada Mayed
The Politics of Radical Research: A Manifesto
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Husani Oakley
Bias Towards Action: Building Teams that Build Work
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Billy Carlson
Principles of Team Wireframing
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Richard Buchanan
Creativity and Principles in the Flourishing Enterprise
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Mark Interrante
AI for Prioritization (3rd of 3 seminars)
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Jackie Velasquez-Ross
Talent Acquisition and Our Responsibility
2020 • DesignOps Community

More Videos

Nicole Aleong

"There are over 7 billion futures of right now."

Nicole Aleong

Future Orientations to Everyday Life: Futures Anthropology as a Methodology

March 26, 2024

Brennan Hartich

"Instead of adding more tools, we focused on removing unnecessary ones to reduce overhead."

Brennan Hartich

Communicating and Establishing DesignOps as a New Function

November 7, 2018

Peter Van Dijck

"The Rose Bot has read everything—every piece of Rosenfeld’s knowledge—to help users access it."

Peter Van Dijck

Building the Rosenbot

June 4, 2024

Patrizia Bertini

"Next year we need to have an accessibility budget. You do what you want, but that's the choice."

Patrizia Bertini

The (r)evolution of designOps: It’s Time to Think (really) BIG

September 11, 2025

Shawna Hein

"Reliable access to veterans and other users is fundamental to running quality, inclusive research across many teams and products."

Shawna Hein Kevin Hoffman

Create a Cohesive Civic Design Practice Across Agency, Vendors, and Contracts

November 17, 2022

Daniel J. Rosenberg

"The FDA-approved agile process is more like a controlled waterfall with strict traceability, especially for Class 3 devices."

Daniel J. Rosenberg

Digital Medicine Design

September 26, 2019

Craig Villamor

"What happens when a user customizes the UI? Does the experience break? This is the question to ask."

Craig Villamor

Resilient Enterprise Design

June 8, 2017

Melissa Eggleston

"Trust is the sum of credibility, reliability, intimacy, divided by self-orientation."

Melissa Eggleston Maya Israni Florence Kasule Owen Seely Andrea Schneider

Practical People Skills for Building Trust on Teams and with Partners

December 9, 2021

John Taschek

"I want there to be no hierarchy in communication. Even a junior associate should be able to talk directly to CEO Marc Benioff."

John Taschek

Making People the X-Factor in the Enterprise

June 15, 2018