Summary
In Fixing the Program My Computer Learned: Barrier for End Users, Challenges for the Machine, the researchers focused on the field of machine-learned programs, in which the computer takes measurements of user interaction and learns things from them, in order to make the program better suit the user. But, as the machine could learn the wrong things and have errors, the program may not work as well as it is supposed to. The researchers in this paper wanted to provide a way for users to debug and fix errors that have been "learned" into the knowledge base of a machine-learned program, and make this debugging process as easy and stress-free as possible.
The goal of this paper was to discover the issues faced when debugging learning systems, including the gender differences in debugging, and common issues faced by users in the process. They produced a prototype email application that learned from the way users sorted emails, and would archive and sort emails into folders based on past user actions. The debugging process in this prototype made sure to explain the logic behind the sorting of emails, so that the user can directly change and debug the logic of the program. The program allowed the user to ask the system questions such as "Why was this email filed in Personal?", or "Why is this email undecided?", and in this way they can directly change the logic.
Doing a study with the system (with half males and half females), it was found that the barrier most encountered was the "selection" barrier, which meant that they had difficulties choosing the right words or messages to modify to give feedback to the system, but they also encountered "coordination" barriers, which meant that they didn't know how their feedback would help change the learning process of the computer. Females in general had more barriers that they encountered than males, although males were more vocal in talking through their barriers.
Discussion
I thought this was an interesting way to debug a program. It would be really nice if I could ask my program when it crashed with errors what happened, and have it answer in English directly and explain to me what the error was. Especially for users that are not from a technical background, they can still tweak the performance of their programs and make them do exactly what they want to do, instead of having recommendation programs that continually recommend a movie or music that you don't really want to experience.
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