Now with PhD!

This Friday, the 23rd of April, I defended my thesis ‘People’s responses to autonomous and adaptive systems’ at the University of Amsterdam’s Agnietenkapel and was granted a PhD.

Paranimf Mattijs, me and my diploma. By Jochem Liem.

After a volcano almost prevented me from actually being in Amsterdam for my defense, actually hearing the beadle utter the words ‘hora est’ after the committee’s questions was great. Special thanks to my promotores Bob Wielinga & Vanessa Evers, my committee, including Noel Sharkey who stayed up until 5 AM to skype in, and of course paranimf Mattijs Ghijsen who watched my back.

Best note nomination for CHI’09 note on user interaction with spam filters!

One of the studies I did here at Human-Computer Studies on people’s interaction with adaptive and autonomous systems investigated user interaction with spam filters. While spam filters might not appear the most exciting subject, exploring users’ interaction with them actually offers quite some interesting insights for developers of adaptive and autonomous systems. Spam filters are one of the few types of systems that take semi-autonomous decisions on the user’s behalf AND are actually used in a real-life context by many, many people. They often can also be trained and sometimes operate on somewhat nontransparent criteria.

In this study, I investigated interaction with both adaptive (trainable) and non-adaptive, rule-based filters. Turns out that while many of our participants who used an adaptive filter invested a lot of effort in training, this didn’t increase their trust, nor the level of autonomy they granted their filters; investment doesn’t always translate into acceptance. Additionally, small, sub-optimal interface design features such as filters icons caused many participants to not understand interface items, induced ‘incorrect’ training behaviour and uncertainty about filter activity. It’s interesting that while research on developing adaptive and autonomous systems is on the rise, we haven’t as a community solved some of the seemingly ‘mundane’ interface design issues on less complex systems such as spam filters.

Paper will be available as: Henriette Cramer, Vanessa Evers, Maarten van Someren, Bob Wielinga, Awareness, Training and Trust in Interaction with Adaptive Spam Filters, CHI’09.  Will post link to the paper as soon as it’s available.

Not only has the note been accepted, it’s also been nominated for a best note award!

Paper accepted

“Dear Enrietta,
we have received the review of your new resubmission and we are pleased to inform you that the paper has been accepted with minor revisions.”

Alright, my name is spelled slightly differently, but who cares, I got my paper

And even though we might all want to change the world, I guess this is what a PhD-student should be happy about:”This work is not going to change the history of Human-computer Interaction but, together with other works on adaptive systems constitutes a background for further research.”