Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Many critical problems in society, whether they be legal, economic or social, require a group of people to agree on a joint vision that represents all their values; examples include a panel of federal judges drafting a joint opinion, city planners and citizens reaching an agreement on how to change a neighbourhood, a committee of human teachers training a machine learning algorithm to make decisions, or a group of musicians creating a concert program without the central direction of a conductor.   Creating an artefact that expresses the joint vision of the group, and in such a way that embodies everyone's values, is a challenging task.  My proposed research program aims to develop social computing technologies that enable a group of people, working on a collaborative annotation or co-creation task, to more efficiently arrive at a value-aligned solution.  This research will systematically explore technological solutions to three core issues: 1) in some problem domains, people may not be clear about the underlying values that drove their actions; 2) to achieve a common goal, members of a group need to be aware of and understand the underlying values behind each other's action; finally, 3) the values of different group members may be conflicting and need to be iteratively clarified and prioritized. To generate insights into these three core issues, we propose to conduct user-centred design and evaluation of tools, specifically interfaces and agents, that can facilitate value discovery, articulation and negotiation. These tools include interactive self-reflection interfaces, scalable visualizations for summarizing group values, mechanisms for sharing and concretizing values, curiosity mechanisms for encouraging attention to knowledge gaps (about one's own values or others' values), and agents for facilitating emotion regulation and group action coordination. This work will contribute a systematic investigation into the design of technologies for supporting value-based collaboration. We plan to deploy our technology framework to a wide range of problem settings, in collaboration with industry partners, local art/music organizations and public institutions, and investigate how to integrate our developed technologies into everyday collaboration tools, in order to extend the benefits of this research to potentially millions of end users around the world. As such, beyond technological innovations, our proposed research will have tangible social and economic impact for Canada and beyond. My lab and the research ecosystem at University of Waterloo provide a unique training environment for students that is focused on responsible technology design and synergistic use of HCI and AI methodologies to tackle problems. Most importantly, our research introduces technologies that make human values a front-and-centred consideration in collaborative work, enabling people with diverse values to work together to shape their creations and their visions for society.