EICS 2021 workshop

Management of Risks and Benefits when Engineering Interactive Digital Systems

IFIP WG 2.7/13.4 workshop at EICS 2021

Topics and scope | Important dates | Program | Target audience | Goals and Outcomes | Organizers

Traditionally, most UX designers, computer scientists and software engineers have not had to consider risks to the public from using their systems. However, the current evolution of digital systems in terms of the increasing number of users, their growing complexity and the pervasiveness of Artificial Intelligence techniques allow common HCI designers and engineers to build systems that create risks for the individual, groups of people, or even to the entire society.

In this workshop, we aim at collecting the views and the current practice in the management of the risks and benefits in the engineering of interactive digital systems. Such a view will draw the way for new research, methods, and tools to incorporate the risk analysis into the current engineering and design practices.

Important Dates (Deadline extended!)

  • April 30, 2021May 9, 2021 – Paper submission deadline
  • May 7, 2021 May 15, 2021 – Paper notification deadline
  • May 16, 2021 Early Bird registration to EICS
  • May 14, 2021May 22, 2021 Camera-ready deadline
  • June 8, 2021 – Workshop day

Program

Since the workshop will happen online, and we will use a combination of tools to maximise interaction:

  • Zoom for paper presentation and live discussion. 
  • Discord for chatting
  • Miro for brainstorming.
Time (CET)ActivityTool
10:00-10:45Introduction + Participant Introduction (2-3 minutes per participants)Zoom + Discord
10:45-11:45Paper presentation (10min + 5 Q/A per paper)
1) Risks in AI-Supported Interactive Systems (J. Ziegler, L.D. Spano and L. Nigay)
2) Managing risks and benefits in computing, a task for interactive systems engineers (S. Chatty and A. Dix)
3) Methods, Technologies and Strategies for Mitigating Risks when Engineering Interactive Computing Systems (J. Creissac Campos, C. Martinie, P.  Palanque and J. Van den Bergh)
11:45-12:30Mind-mapping discussion with shared Miro, end with assignmentZoom + Discord + Miro
12:30-14:00Lunch break
14:00-17:00Working groups – asynchronous mode: work on shared documents (channels will be available) Discord
17:00-17:30Wrap-up & next stepsZoom + Discord

Topics and Scope

The workshop will focus on the following topics, which are not properly covered by the current research, methods and tools for engineering digital systems:

  • Exploring the risks in digital system interaction and their implications. In particular, we would like to identify the risks drivers and to build a categorization of the risks they produce.
  • Factors that impact the risk-benefit analysis and the information required. In this category, we would like to list the available scientific theories, the techniques for building a shared knowledge on such factors (e.g., databases, models and tools).
  • Accounting the risks put by the application of Artificial Intelligence algorithms in digital interactive systems. They include (but not limited to): transparency, interactive control, controllability and automation, explainability, biases in algorithms and data, decision support design, accountability, fairness and digital sobriety.
  • Techniques and interfaces for helping and/or nudging people on perceiving and understanding the risks in interacting with digital systems.

Target Audience

Different communities and disciplines are involved in developing such a topic, both in the research and in the development practice. Besides the UI engineering community, we expect relevant contributions by designers, safety and privacy experts, sociologists, psychologists, ethicists, etc. The workshop’s ultimate goal is to set-up a shared view on the risks related to the interaction, their severity, and their likelihood.

Goals and Expected Outcome

The workshop will last one day. We will start with a brief introduction of the elicited topics and a sequence of presentations of the different position papers in the first half. The second half will contain group activities for reaching a global consensus among the participants, which will result in the draft of a joint position paper, authored by all participants, which will depict the challenges and the opportunities raised in the discussion and the group’s view on future research in future risk and benefits management for interactive system engineering. The finalised version of such paper will be submitted for publication in an HCI journal.

Submissions

We solicit the submission of a two-page (minimum) abstract describing the view and identifying the risks in one or more workshop topics. We also encourage to propose further applications of risk management in engineering interactive digital systems. The abstract may include the description of a major challenge or opportunity set by risk management and/or the analysis of related work in the literature. The abstracts will serve as the basis for the discussion during the workshop.

Papers must be submitted through EasyChair and formatted according to LNCS guidelines. We plan to publish revised papers electronically (e.g CEUR-WS) after the workshop.

Submit a paper through EasyChair

Organizers

  • José Creissac Campos – University of Minho & HASLab/INESC TEC (Portugal)
  • T.C. Nicholas Graham – School of Computing, Queen’s University of Canada (Canada)
  • Jan Van Den Bergh – Hasselt University – EDM – IBBT (Belgium)
  • Lucio Davide Spano – Dept. Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Cagliari (Italy)