Misc,
Usable AI Requires Commonsense Knowledge
(2008)
Abstract
Artificial Intelligence techniques are increasingly being applied to the user interface, as evidenced by growing numbers of CHI papers which have some AI aspect, and standalone conferences on the subject, such as the Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) Conference (and this workshop!). I argue that an important, but underappreciated component for assuring the adherence of AI interfaces to CHI principles for usable interfaces, is capturing Commonsense knowledge. Commonsense knowledge can be viewed as a collection of simple facts about people and everyday life, such as "Things fall down, not up", and "People eat breakfast in the morning". One reason that conventional interfaces are stupid and frustrating to use, is that they lack such knowledge. At the MIT Media Lab, we have a large body of experience in creating applications across a wide variety of domains that make use of such knowledge 6. We distill from our experience some principles for application of Commonsense knowledge to make interfaces more usable.
