Introducing my PhD Project to Make AI Design More Inclusive

My approach is to utilize humanity’s most powerful resource to solve the challenges of AI: people.

I’ve recently published an article explaining why the field of artificial intelligence could greatly benefit from the approaches of design fields.

I believe that involving different stakeholders early on in AI-based projects is the most effective technique to battle the various kinds of biases and shortcomings embedded within AI systems. By starting at the very beginning, involved stakeholders and their insights can help shed light on inequitable processes of design, on systemic biases buried in data-sets and how they can disadvantage different groups of people, on use-cases and experiences that might otherwise be overlooked, and on potential consequences and implications that even the most rigorous testing might not capture.

Instead of creating overly-specific, bespoke solutions tailored to a specific project, or trying to focus on completely eradicating one of those problems, my approach is to bring the voices that matter into the design process and let them help the expert team navigate all these challenges. By providing a more generalized toolkit and methodology for supporting these stakeholders, different problems in different projects and during different phases can all be addressed in whatever way is needed.

The Nitty-Gritty Details

Because of this, my project is going to work on creating the mentioned toolkit and methodology to support this inclusive process of creating more value-sensitive and human-centered AI systems. I’ve decided to focus on conversational AI because:

1. It’s used in applications where decisions can literally mean life or death for the people affected.
2. Its use has increased exponentially in recent years and has started taking on a more social role.
3. Because of this more social role, it’s important to bring in a diverse range of voices to understand the needs and experiences of different people and how best to support them.

Conversational AI is any system that has a conversation with users, so things like Siri and Alexa, but also website chat-bots, as well as avatars and robots that communicate with us. These agents are being used more and more in domains like healthcare and education, so it’s especially important to make sure they uphold the values that matter most to stakeholders and put them first.

Conversational agents are starting to take on the roles of advisors, coaches, and mentors — having a much deeper and more meaningful impact on our lives.

My project’s going to come in three parts:

• For the first phase, I’ll be understanding how we can involve stakeholders with non-technical backgrounds like users, patients, carers, parents, etc. in the different phases of building a conversational AI.
• The second phase will involve creating a design intervention based on my findings from the first phase.
• The last phase will revolve around testing the intervention using design workshops.

Please Follow Along!

If you’ve enjoyed the previous article and want to keep up with this series on AI, or you’d like to get updates on how my project is coming along, then please consider following me! And as always, I’d really appreciate your comments, likes, and shares! :)

You can check out the official page for my project on the Imperial College London website here.

Now let’s get PhDing!

Onwards!