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Researcher profile

Alex Endert

Alex Endert contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Human-Computer InteractionArtificial Intelligencecs.CYInformation Retrieval

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Published work

6 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Guidelines for Designing AI Technologies to Support Adult Learning

AI-powered educational technologies have demonstrated measurable benefits for learners, but their design and evaluation have largely centered on K-12 contexts. As a result, many AI-supported learning systems remain poorly aligned with the needs, constraints, and goals of adult learners. To better understand how AI systems function in adult education, this paper examines the deployment of several AI learning technologies developed within a multidisciplinary, national research institute in the United States focused on adult learning and online education. Drawing on longitudinal deployment data, we conducted a reflexive thematic analysis to identify recurring challenges and design considerations across systems. These insights were synthesized into a set of 19 design guidelines intended to inform future AI-supported adult learning technologies. We demonstrate the utility of these guidelines through a heuristic evaluation of the deployed systems. Lastly, we present a guideline exploration tool that aids in the ideation of technologies by connecting the guidelines to stakeholder statements surfaced in the analysis process.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Facilitating Conversational Interaction in Natural Language Interfaces for Visualization

Natural language (NL) toolkits enable visualization developers, who may not have a background in natural language processing (NLP), to create natural language interfaces (NLIs) for end-users to flexibly specify and interact with visualizations. However, these toolkits currently only support one-off utterances, with minimal capability to facilitate a multi-turn dialog between the user and the system. Developing NLIs with such conversational interaction capabilities remains a challenging task, requiring implementations of low-level NLP techniques to process a new query as an intent to follow-up on an older query. We extend an existing Python-based toolkit, NL4DV, that processes an NL query about a tabular dataset and returns an analytic specification containing data attributes, analytic tasks, and relevant visualizations, modeled as a JSON object. Specifically, NL4DV now enables developers to facilitate multiple simultaneous conversations about a dataset and resolve associated ambiguities, augmenting new conversational information into the output JSON object. We demonstrate these capabilities through three examples: (1) an NLI to learn aspects of the Vega-Lite grammar, (2) a mind mapping application to create free-flowing conversations, and (3) a chatbot to answer questions and resolve ambiguities.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

Causal Perception in Question-Answering Systems

Root cause analysis is a common data analysis task. While question-answering systems enable people to easily articulate a why question (e.g., why students in Massachusetts have high ACT Math scores on average) and obtain an answer, these systems often produce questionable causal claims. To investigate how such claims might mislead users, we conducted two crowdsourced experiments to study the impact of showing different information on user perceptions of a question-answering system. We found that in a system that occasionally provided unreasonable responses, showing a scatterplot increased the plausibility of unreasonable causal claims. Also, simply warning participants that correlation is not causation seemed to lead participants to accept reasonable causal claims more cautiously. We observed a strong tendency among participants to associate correlation with causation. Yet, the warning appeared to reduce the tendency. Grounded in the findings, we propose ways to reduce the illusion of causality when using question-answering systems.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

CAVA: A Visual Analytics System for Exploratory Columnar Data Augmentation Using Knowledge Graphs

Most visual analytics systems assume that all foraging for data happens before the analytics process; once analysis begins, the set of data attributes considered is fixed. Such separation of data construction from analysis precludes iteration that can enable foraging informed by the needs that arise in-situ during the analysis. The separation of the foraging loop from the data analysis tasks can limit the pace and scope of analysis. In this paper, we present CAVA, a system that integrates data curation and data augmentation with the traditional data exploration and analysis tasks, enabling information foraging in-situ during analysis. Identifying attributes to add to the dataset is difficult because it requires human knowledge to determine which available attributes will be helpful for the ensuing analytical tasks. CAVA crawls knowledge graphs to provide users with a a broad set of attributes drawn from external data to choose from. Users can then specify complex operations on knowledge graphs to construct additional attributes. CAVA shows how visual analytics can help users forage for attributes by letting users visually explore the set of available data, and by serving as an interface for query construction. It also provides visualizations of the knowledge graph itself to help users understand complex joins such as multi-hop aggregations. We assess the ability of our system to enable users to perform complex data combinations without programming in a user study over two datasets. We then demonstrate the generalizability of CAVA through two additional usage scenarios. The results of the evaluation confirm that CAVA is effective in helping the user perform data foraging that leads to improved analysis outcomes, and offer evidence in support of integrating data augmentation as a part of the visual analytics pipeline.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Characterizing Automated Data Insights

Many researchers have explored tools that aim to recommend data insights to users. These tools automatically communicate a rich diversity of data insights and offer such insights for many different purposes. However, there is a lack of structured understanding concerning what researchers of these tools mean by "insight" and what tasks in the analysis workflow these tools aim to support. We conducted a systematic review of existing systems that seek to recommend data insights. Grounded in the review, we propose 12 types of automated insights and four purposes of automating insights. We further discuss the design opportunities emerged from our analysis.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Should We Trust (X)AI? Design Dimensions for Structured Experimental Evaluations

This paper systematically derives design dimensions for the structured evaluation of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) approaches. These dimensions enable a descriptive characterization, facilitating comparisons between different study designs. They further structure the design space of XAI, converging towards a precise terminology required for a rigorous study of XAI. Our literature review differentiates between comparative studies and application papers, revealing methodological differences between the fields of machine learning, human-computer interaction, and visual analytics. Generally, each of these disciplines targets specific parts of the XAI process. Bridging the resulting gaps enables a holistic evaluation of XAI in real-world scenarios, as proposed by our conceptual model characterizing bias sources and trust-building. Furthermore, we identify and discuss the potential for future work based on observed research gaps that should lead to better coverage of the proposed model.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access