HCIL Team Wins Best Paper Award from ACM Intelligent Systems

A team based in the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL) was recently recognized with a best paper award for their work in using visual analytics to improve recommender systems.

The award, from the Association for Computing Machinery’s ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems journal, is given to a paper that stands out based on technical excellence and innovation, and that has the potential impact for creating intelligent and interactive systems.

In “EventAction: A Visual Analytics Approach to Explainable Recommendation for Event Sequences,” researchers developed an interactive sequence recommender that gives users more control and transparency to make consequential life choices compared to existing systems. These event sequence systems provide guidance to make decisions related to college courses, careers and medical treatments.

The paper was based on a dissertation by former HCIL doctoral student Fan Du, who now works at Adobe Research. UMIACS faculty members Catherine Plaisant, Ben Shneiderman and Neil Spring also contributed to the paper, along with Kenyon Crowley from the Robert H. Smith School of Business.

HCIL is jointly supported by the College of Information Studies (iSchool) and the University of Maryland Institute for Advance Computer Studies.

–Story by Maria Herd