Rosenverse
Humanizing AI: Filling the Gaps with Multi-faceted Research

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Humanizing AI: Filling the Gaps with Multi-faceted Research

Gold
Thursday, March 11, 2021 • Advancing Research 2021

This video is featured in the AI and UX playlist.

Share the love for this talk
Humanizing AI: Filling the Gaps with Multi-faceted Research
Speakers: Joel Branch
Link:

Summary

Artificial intelligence (AI) has graduated from science fiction to commoditized widget form, readily able to snap into many processes of daily life. Hence, enterprises of all maturity levels are increasingly eager to explore AI’s roles in their innovation, or outright survival strategies. Concurrently, ethical and responsible development and execution of AI-based solutions will increasingly become critical for purposes of safety and fairness. Ensuring that AI proliferates along the right path will require the infusion of multi-faceted research activities along the entire AI lifecycle. We will discuss the challenges and opportunities regarding this topic in this presentation.

Key Insights

  • 70% of enterprise AI projects show little to no business impact, and nearly 90% of data science projects fail to reach production.

  • AI bias, particularly intersectional bias in facial recognition, remains a critical unresolved challenge, exemplified by the Gender Shades project.

  • Black-box AI decision-making hinders stakeholder trust and adoption, due to AI’s probabilistic nature and complexity.

  • AI development teams are overly engineer-centric, lacking inclusion of product researchers and ethicists to address societal and user-centered concerns.

  • ML ops, adapted from DevOps, offers governance and accountability frameworks but currently remains engineer-focused.

  • Expanding ML ops to include human-centered researchers can improve AI explainability, trustworthiness, and fairness.

  • Visualization research is essential to analyze and interpret high-dimensional AI data and uncover hidden biases across intersectional subgroups.

  • AI explainability requires moving beyond feature importance towards causal reasoning and natural language explanations accessible to non-technical stakeholders.

  • AI trust is evolving and hinges on AI’s ability to provide convincing, interpretable answers that humans can understand and scrutinize in dialogue form.

  • Humanizing AI is not simply building human-like interfaces but creating governance frameworks that democratize responsible AI development.

Notable Quotes

"AI development is often uninformed and hurried, resulting in deployments that don’t operate well in the real world."

"Humanizing AI means creating governance frameworks that involve a broad array of research competencies for democratizing safe and effective AI."

"Almost 90% of data science projects do not make it into production—they die on the vine."

"Black box decision making is a hallmark problem—information goes in, something comes out, but we have no clue why."

"Bias is fueled by over-engineering without enough participation from non-technical roles that could reduce it."

"The Gender Shades project exposed how facial recognition algorithms had up to a 33% error rate disparity between demographic groups."

"ML ops offers governance, accountability, and a clear stakeholder responsibility framework borrowed from DevOps."

"We want to increase trust and engagement among end users by helping non-technical stakeholders participate in model evaluation."

"Explainability metrics like trustworthiness and understandability are hard, open research problems needing AI-HCI collaboration."

"AI trust will grow when AI can provide back-and-forth justifications like a human would in conversation."

Ask the Rosenbot
Kristin Skinner
Theme 1 Intro
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Amy Brana Stuart
Rest in Peace Fly-in-fly-out Design
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Lisa Gironda
Opener: Chief of Staff–An unexpected journey
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Samuel Martin
Co-Design vs Faux-Design: Navigating the Complexities of Sharing Power in Co-Design
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Jaskiran Kang
Why Community is Key to Professionalizing Design
2022 • Civic Design Community
Megan Blocker
A Selectively Scrappy Approach to ResearchOps
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Uday Gajendar
Theme One Intro
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Mujtaba Hameed
The new horizon of ethnography: using AI to unlock the full potential of in-person research
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold
Dana Bishop
2022: The Year UX Demonstrates its Business Impact
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Mary-Lynne Williams
Exit Interview #4: From Product Design Leadership to Sound Healing
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Dave Hoffer
UX Job Search AMA #2 with Joanne Weaver and Dave Hoffer
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Ryan Matthew
Bridging Design and Code: AI-Powered Design System Integration
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Kit Unger
Theme 3 Intro
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Alla Weinberg
Workers Are Sick of Change: The Cure is Psychological Safety
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Kevin Bethune
Reimagining Design: Unlocking Strategic Innovation
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Ryan Matthew
DesignOps without Boundaries: Building More with What You Have
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold

More Videos

Surya Vanka

"Design thinking has to be embedded at scale to capture and align creativity across a massive company."

Surya Vanka

Unleashing Swarm Creativity to Solve Enterprise Challenges

June 10, 2021

Patrick Boehler

"We’ve worked on news organizations that folded creating content that just went out there into the void."

Patrick Boehler Madison Karas

The service shift: transforming media organizations to create real value through design

November 19, 2025

Andreas Huebner

"Research and design together tell a continuous story that guides what problems we tackle and how we solve them."

Andreas Huebner Amy Takata Craig Brookes

What Is It Like To Be Part of The UX Team at Compass?

March 11, 2021

Patrizia Bertini

"We have a moral duty to bring global conversations back to local communities to increase diversity and richness."

Patrizia Bertini Alexandra Mengoni León

Pushing DesignOps’ Influence into New Global Markets

September 9, 2022

Phil Gilbert

"The Austin studio’s walls can be put up and taken down by a 90-pound person on a Home Depot shopping cart."

Phil Gilbert

A Consistent Culture of Design

May 14, 2015

Yulya Besplemennova

"You need a lot of annoying handholding with the AI: reminding it of how many people you have or simple things."

Yulya Besplemennova

[Demo] Stress-testing GenAI in user research synthesis

June 4, 2024

Sarah Rink

"We recruited 50% more than we needed because no-shows are incredible in remote sessions."

Sarah Rink

Remote User Research: Dos and Don'ts from the Virtual Field

June 11, 2020

Mujtaba Hameed

"When clients join us in the field and experience research deeply, they often become advocates who come back for more."

Mujtaba Hameed

The new horizon of ethnography: using AI to unlock the full potential of in-person research

March 11, 2026

Sheryl Cababa

"One of the challenges for designers is to orient around forces rather than only people."

Sheryl Cababa

Living in the Clouds: Adopting a Systems Thinking Mindset

June 6, 2023