Friday, March 6th, 2020 Prof. Dr. Claudia Müller-Birn and Dr.-Ing. Christoph Kinkeldey will give two talks at the Cluster of Excellence Matters of Activity of Humboldt-Universität Berlin. The talks are part of the research project "Cutting", where researchers from Art History, Computer Science, Biology, Neurosurgery, Linguistics and Brain Research, Physics, Design and Interaction Design jointly research a new perspective on material and data through cutting.

11:30 — "Changing Perspectives: Phenomenological Understanding of Human Experience in Human-Computer Interaction"

Abstract — Digital technologies are more and more interwoven with our society. This has changed the research field of computer science and, more specifically, human-computer interaction. Humans and technology should not be understood as two poles that interact; instead, they are the result of an interaction that characterizes both. Technologies mediate how humans understand the world. We still have many problems in computer science that are well defined and, thus, can be computationally solved. However, many problems today are wicked in nature; our developed technical solutions seem, therefore, somewhat ill-defined. Humans and technologies are part of a socio-material matrix where both are actors. This situation challenges our understanding of how to design technologies and has led to several new approaches in human-computer interaction, such as participatory design, value-centered design, and critical design. Interaction should not be treated as a form of information processing but as a form of creating meaning, in which technologies and humans and their context define each other—each technology creates specific relations between humans and the world. I will trace this changing perspective in human-computer interaction by differentiating three paradigms. I will also show how the new approaches in human-computer interaction refer to feminist philosophy and highlight the implications for our design practice.

13:30 — “Beyond Data-Driven Communication of Uncertainty: Supporting
Reasoning with Uncertainty Visualization"

Abstract — Despite arguments for their importance for visual analytics in various application domains, uncertainty visualizations are little used in practice. We argue that the main reason lies in people generally struggling to incorporate them into their reasoning processes. In the past, uncertainty visualizations have been studied from an information theory perspective, mainly focusing on communicating probabilities in order to inform experts about aleatoric uncertainty related to their computational models. Yet, providing reasoning support for non-technical stakeholders presents a different and open challenge. As a cause for this, we identify a lack of methodological approaches for assessing how people /do/ reason with uncertainty visualizations. To fill this gap, we reframe visualization of epistemic uncertainty with a focus on reasoning support (“reasoning uncertainty” visualization). For evaluating reasoning uncertainty, we propose a mixed-methods methodology consisting of two steps: (i) a pair analytics study for generating hypotheses about what reasoning strategies were supported by specific uncertainty visualizations, and (ii) a crowdsourcing experiment to test the hypotheses. We present the plan to adapt two use cases from interpretable machine learning to demonstrate how distinct uncertainty visualizations support the reasoning strategies of people with different backgrounds and in different use cases. Based on the insights from the use cases, we envisage to derive first implications for designing “reasoning uncertainty” visualizations.

Date: Friday, March 6th, 2020, 11:30 am and 1:30 pm
Location: Sophienstrasse 22a, 10178 Berlin