Description

Intelligent systems have become ubiquitous in modern life and increasingly shift the performance of tasks from humans to systems. Although this development has many advantages, the interplay between intelligent systems and humans remains a challenge. On the one hand, taking humans out of the loop may lead to “mindless” ways of working and result in various failures. On the other hand, human capabilities cannot always cope with intelligent systems’ functionalities. In sum, intelligent systems have increased their capabilities and functionalities with a rapid pace and thereby enlarged the gap to the humans’ (cognitive) capabilities to comprehend and utilize these systems.

One way to support humans in the usage of intelligent systems is providing assistance and there is some initial research addressing this. Recent assistance functionalities, primarily in the private life context, such as Apple’s Siri or Google Now, begin to show their usefulness and the major technology companies (Google, Amazon, and Microsoft) have announced even more intelligent, innovative, and interactive personal assistants for the future. Nevertheless, the interactions between humans and intelligent systems deserve more research. We define user assistance as a specific capability of interactive intelligent systems that help users perform their tasks better. Thereby, user assistance is a human-, task-, and context-dependent augmentation of task performance bridging the gap between the system’s functionalities and the human’s individual capabilities with the goal of positively influencing task outcomes. User assistance can be classified along two dimensions: (1) the degree of interaction enabled by user assistance, and (2) the degree of intelligence of user assistance. The degree of interaction characterizes the assistance systems capability to support humans in an ongoing reciprocal and activating dialog using, potentially, different channels. The degree of intelligence describes the capability to provide assistance based on the human, the context, and the current activity.

The workshop welcomes manuscripts that address one of the following topics:

* Theory-grounded conceptualization of user assistance in general or along the two dimensions interactivity and intelligence

* Design of user assistance in the form of decision aids, recommendation systems, virtual assistants, guidance systems, task-support systems, conversational agents, chatbots, and robo-advisors

* Research on the IT-based support of individuals’ working routines in organizational or private life contexts

* Empirical (qualitative or quantitative) evaluation of user assistance artifacts in, e.g. laboratory experiments or field studies

* Research addressing the context and situation when user assistance is required

* Understanding and designing anthropomorphic attributes of assistance systems

* Research on the individuals’ cognitive processes when using user assistance and the related outcomes

We welcome research from various domains like Business Intelligence & Analytics, E-commerce, Service, and Health Care.

This year’s workshop is furthermore intended to be a paper-development workshop for submissions to the BISE Special Issue on “User Assistance for Intelligent Systems”, which is going to appear in June 2020. The initial submission date of the Special Issue is one month after the ECIS 2019 workshop (July 15th, 2019) leaving time to revise and finalize the manuscript. Therefore, we especially invite authors planning to submit their research to the Special Issue to participate in this year’s workshop and discuss their manuscripts with the SI guest editors and potential reviewers.

Website of the BISE Special Issue: http://www.bise-journal.com/?p=1551

The workshop concludes with a senior scholar panel centering on how lessons from the past can inform the future of explanations in intelligent systems with new technologies.

 

Workshop Format & Submissions 

Interested researchers can participate in two ways in the workshop:

First, by submitting a working paper in English language (RIP or full paper according to the ECIS 2019 submission guidelines) that will be discussed during the workshop. The submitted manuscripts will be reviewed in a double-blind review process by at least two program committee members and authors of other workshop papers (if suitable). The review process will especially focus on the manuscripts’ relevance to the workshop, originality of the research, and research rigor. All submitted manuscripts will receive the review feedback before the workshop in order to have the chance to improve the manuscript for the workshop. All submitted and accepted manuscripts will be distributed among all workshop participants in order to read the manuscript as workshop presentation. Conceptual papers are also welcome.

Second, interested researchers can participate in the workshop without submitting an own paper, but by discussing the manuscripts of the workshop participants presented during the workshop.

 

Panel Discussion 

After the paper discussions, we will run a senior scholar panel entitled “Explanations in Advice Giving Systems: Lessons from the past for designing user assistance in future intelligent systems

Time & Date: 11 June 2019, 4:00 – 5:00pm (TBC)

Panel chair: Izak Benbasat

Discussants: Izak Benbasat, Shirley Gregor, Alexander Maedche

 

Workshop Proceedings 

If wished by the author(s), accepted workshop papers can be published as either extended abstracts or full paper in the KIT SCIENTIFIC WORKING PAPERS series depending on the authors’ choice. The proceedings from last year’s workshop are available here: https://publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu/1000083107.

Accepted papers will also be made available to other attendees for the period of the workshop and a printed abstract will be included as part of the workshop package.

 

-- Important Dates --

* Submission deadline: 15.03.2019

* Authors notification: 15.04.2019

* Workshop: 11.06.2019 (TBC)

 

Workshop Chairs 

Stefan Morana, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany (corresponding chair)stefan.morana@kit.edu

Jella Pfeiffer, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany

Program Committee 

* Marc T. P. Adam, The University of Newcastle, Australia

* Benedikt Berger, Ludwigs-Maximilian University Munich, Germany

* Henner Gimpel, University of Augsburg, Germany

* Shirley Gregor, Australian National University, Australia

* Alan Hevner, University of South Florida, USA

* Oliver Hinz, University of Frankfurt, Germany

* Christian Matt, University of Bern, Switzerland

* Martin Meißner, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark

* Matthias Söllner, University of Kassel, Germany and University of St. Gallen, Switzerland

* Ali Sunyaev, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany

* Timm Teubner, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

* Verena Tiefenbeck, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

* Manuel Trenz, University of Augsburg, Germany

* Barbara Weber, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark

* Christof Weinhardt, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany

* Markus Weinmann, University of Liechtenstein, Liechtenstein