Horvitz’s paper “Principles of Mixed-Initiative User Interfaces” highlighted several principles important for allowing AI engineers to enhance human-computer interaction through a carefully designed coupling of automated services with direct manipulation by humans. The author demonstrated a middle ground of the human-computer interaction debate over opportunities of total automation of user needs (via intelligent agents) versus the importance of user control and decision making (via graphical user interfaces). By showing how to turn the proposed principles into potential improvements of an application, LookOut system for scheduling and meeting management, this paper explored the possibility to design innovative user interfaces and new human-computer interaction modalities by considering (from the ground up) designs that benefit of the power of direct manipulation and potentially valuable automated reasoning.
I think this discussion can be framed by noting the interesting duality between artificial intelligence(AI) and human-computer interaction(HCI). In AI, the goal is to mimic the way humans learn and think in order to create computer systems that can perform intelligent actions beyond naive tasks. In HCI, the target is to design computer interfaces that leverage off humans and provide aids to the users in the execution of intelligent actions. The basic idea of mixed-initiative interaction is to let agents work most effectively through a collaborative process. From the agents side, the major challenge is to deal with the uncertainties of users’ interests and intentions, thus know how to proceed to coordinate the users in a variety of tasks. It is indispensable to get humans in the interaction through an interaction mode convenient to the users. To achieve this, intelligent agents must be designed to be able to focus on various subproblems, fill in details, identify problem areas, and collaborate with different users to find the best personalized solutions. Without this mixed-initiative, AI designs would be very likely to fall into either human control or system control approaches. We also need to be aware that the mixed-initiative, also called co-creative, framework may come with a high cost. The system controlled frameworks are prevalent nowadays because they can save companies’ efforts and money. When we try to balance the operational expenses and improved customer service, it is important to ask how we can decide which framework to choose and at what stages we need to get humans involved.
In the mixed-initiative framework, a user and an AI agent work together to produce final products. Let us take a look at an example of mixed-initiative research led by the University of Rochester. Through years on mixed-initiative planning systems, one of their projects is to develop systems that can enhance human performance in managing plans, such as transportation network planning. There is no denying the fact that how intelligent planning systems and humans solve problems are highly different: automated agents require complete specifications of the goals and situation before knowing where to start; human experts incrementally learn about the scenario and modify the goals during the process of developing the plan. Faced with this dilemma, the research team decided to try to design a collaborative planning system which takes the advantages of both the user and machine to build the plan. The idea is that users bring intuition, concrete goals and trade-offs between goals, and advanced problem-solving strategies, while the agents bring an ability to manage details, allocate resources, and perform quantitative analysis of proposed actions. In this way, the capability of humans and the AI agents in creating desired output would be extended. I think the following questions are worthy of further discussion.
- What is the boundary between human control, system control, and mixed-initiative frameworks?
- How can we decide which framework to choose and at what stages we need to get humans involved to make the systems better?
- How can we bring personalized user experience in consideration of the countless uncertain decisions?
- Does all kinds of tasks require a mixed-initiative? What kind of projects would benefit more from the mixed-initiative framework?
