Humans and Computers…and Artificial Intelligence
Let’s meet and discuss in Hyderabad later this year (in Nov 2019).
It will be difficult to imagine a future where Artificial intelligence (AI) will not play roles in our lives. It is already ready to help buy me something similar to the green dress I have just seen.
By the way, you may not need to pay to the cashier at the store. In fact, there may not be any. AI should be able to track your purchase and bill it directly to your e-wallet.
AI can do so many other things. It can help your doctor diagnose the spell of coughs your child has every night. It can help you with your investment portfolio. It can help scientists make meaning out of a large amount of data. It can also help in government in decision-making.
As we could see from the above examples, AI is powerful. That makes it complicated, in the sense that it has the potential of great harm as well as great good. For example, face recognition is a great thing when you need to get into your apartment without hassle. However, you may not like someone else capturing your face to identify you to track your routine. Or, in another scenario, your bank refuses you a loan because the expenses tracking system has prepared a report about your spending behavior.
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that new methods in AI are evolving at a fast pace. Also, the shape of our planet is changing swiftly. Rising population, growing aspirations, climatic change, income disparity are real. It will be difficult to know how AI will affect a world with new and complex challenges. For example, what would a farmer in a remote place in India, as he sees his income dwindling on account of shifting climatic patterns, query using his voice assistant?
How to tackle Artificial Intelligence so that it helps the users?
- Would bringing the experts together to talk out future possibilities help?
- Or, we could go the stakeholders of the future, very importantly the ones with less voice, and illustrate the future scenarios with them?
- Or, should we educate the young generation, the decision makers of tomorrow for these challenges?
India HCI
India HCI is an attempt to do that. India HCI is the Indian conference of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). HCI is a wide and multidisciplinary field that focuses on the interface of humans and computers. The humans are understood to be in a wider sense that includes not only the physical but also the social, cultural, economic and political dimensions. Computers include all types of digital artifacts that work on a large number of devices-PC, mobile phones, ATM, kiosks etc. IndiaHCI, in particular, looks at the problems specific to India where the contexts are different and more complex than those of the developed nations.
Over the last decade, IndiaHCI has focused on many areas. It has been able to invite and publish high-quality research papers that discussed HCI in the Indian context. Examples include
1. Why WhatsApp became the preferred messaging application in India?
2. How low-income families use voice-user interfaces?
3. Gender and HCI: who technologies are designed for and in what ways?
The conference has also been able to invite renowned scholars from around the world. This is augmented by workshops on methods, which are of a wide variety, used in HCI. In addition, there have been a showcase of research from the industry as well as student’s work.
IndiaHCI 2019 is the tenth conference in the series. It will be held in Hyderabad from 1–3, November 2019. The theme of this year is ‘Agents and Agency: HCI in the age of Machine Intelligence’. It is driven by the fact, as we have earlier mentioned, that AI is too useful to be not talked about. However, agency to manipulate the technology which is a long-recognized topic under HCI needs a revisit. Therefore this year's conference will focus and examine the interplay of human and machine agency in an increasingly complex world resulting from AI.
To know more, write at:
outreach@indiahci.org
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