Pre-ECIS Workshop: The Interplay of Machines and Humans: State of the Art and a Research Agenda for Hybrid Intelligence

There will be a workshop in Portsmouth, UK, on 25 June 2018, immediately before the European Conference on Information Systems, on the topic of The Interplay of Machines and Humans: State of the Art and a Research Agenda for Hybrid Intelligence. Papers for the workshop are due by 30 April 2018.

Research in the field of information systems provides a long history of discussions of who is superior in predicting certain outcomes: statistical methods or the human brain (Meehl 1954). This debate keeps on flaring up due to the remarkable technological advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) such as solving tasks like object and speech recognition or achieving significant improvements in accuracy through deep-learning algorithms (Jordan and Mitchell 2015). Consequently, serious concerns arise whether general intelligent machines will take over jobs of humans and solves problems that previously required the human intellect (McAfee and Brynjolfsson 2017). However, achieving the development of human-level, general AI in the next decades is rather doubted (e.g. Stanford 2016). The most likely paradigm for the division of labor between humans and machines is thus Hybrid Intelligence. This concept aims at using the complementary strengths of human intelligence and AI to behave more intelligent than each of the two could be in separation (Kamar 2016).

While machines are particularly good in consistently solving repetitive tasks that require the fast procession of huge amount of date, humans have superior capabilities for emphatic or intuitive tasks. Therefore, artificial intelligence rather augments the human judgement through providing predictive assistance. In such setting, where AI provides the human with input that is then evaluated to make a judgement, human and machines act as teammates. Vice versa AI systems can benefit and learn from human input. This approach allows to integrate human domain knowledge in the AI to design, complement and evaluate the capabilities of machine intelligence in settings such as medicine or semi-autonomous driving, where humans monitor the performance of machines.

The paradigm of Hybrid Intelligence, thus, comprises two interrelated directions: hybrid teamwork, where AI enlarges the intelligence of humans and the augmentation of AI through the input of humans. Within this workshop we will describe both directions and provide insights into the current state of research and practical applications in various domains.