Abstract: Despite several decades of research, adaptive user interfaces remain limited to a few rigidly scoped areas, such as recommendation systems. In this talk, I review challenges in adaptive UIs, claiming that lack of progress can be attributed to three reasons: 1) inability to predict the consequences of an adaptation, 2) inability to infer factors behind observable human behavior, and 3) simultaneous adaptation by the human (restlessness). In the rest of the talk, I outline a simulator-based machine learning approach that addresses these problems. It provides a natural formulation of UI adaptation as an intervention to a non-stationary bounded agent under uncertainty. As an application case, I present our recent work on menu system adaptation using deep model-based reinforcement learning.
Bio: Antti Oulasvirta leads the User Interfaces research group at Aalto University and the FCAI Research Programme on Interactive AI. Prior to joining Aalto, he was a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and the Cluster of Excellence on Multimodal Computing and Interaction at Saarland University. He received his doctorate in Cognitive Science from the University of Helsinki in 2006, after which he was a Fulbright Scholar at the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley in 2007-2008 and a Senior Researcher at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT in 2008-2011. He was awarded the ERC Starting Grant (2015-2020) for research on the computational design of user interfaces. Dr. Oulasvirta serves as an associate editor for ACM TOCHI and frequently participates in the paper committees of HCI conferences, including the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). His work has been awarded the Best Paper Award and Best Paper Honorable Mention at CHI twelve times between 2008 and 2019. He has held keynote talks on computational user interface design at NordiCHI'14, CoDIT'14, EICS'16, IHCI'17, ICWE'19, and Chinese CHI '19. In 2019, he was invited to the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.
Speaker: Pr. Antti Oulasvirta
Affiliation: Department of Communications and Networking, Aalto University
Place of Seminar: Zoom (Now available on YouTube)