Research Manager who designs, builds, and evaluates intelligent systems and interactive visualizations for augmenting human workflows and decision making.
My research lies at the intersection of AI/ML and human-computer interaction, focusing on transparency and control for human-in-the-loop systems to engender appropriate trust and improve human performance and efficiency.
Publications
I live at the intersection of AI/ML and HCI.
Jason Ding, Alison Smith-Renner, Isabel Zhang, Joel Tetreault, Alex Jaimes. Harnessing the Power of LLMs: Evaluating Human-AI text Co-Creation through the Lens of News Headline Generation. EMNLP, 2024.
[pdf]
Vivian Lai, Chacha Chen, Q Vera Liao, Alison Smith-Renner, Chenhao Tan. Towards a Science of Human-AI Decision Making: A Survey of Empirical Studies. FAccT, 2023.
[pdf]
Regina Cheng, Alison Smith-Renner, Ke Zhang, Joel Tetreault, Alex Jaimes. Mapping the Design Space of Human-AI Interaction in Text Summarization. NAACL, 2022.
[pdf]
Vivian Lai, Alison Smith-Renner, Ke Zhang, Isabel Zhang, Regina Cheng, Joel Tetreault, Alex Jaimes. An Exploration of Post-Editing Effectiveness in Text Summarization. NAACL, 2022.
[pdf]
Alison Renner. Designing for the Human in the Loop: Transparency and Control in Interactive Machine Learning. PhD Dissertation, Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park,, 2020.
[pdf]
Alison Smith-Renner, Ron Fan, Melissa Birchfield, Sherry Wu, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Dan Weld, Leah Findlater. No Explainability without Accountability: An Empirical Study of Explanations and Feedback in Interactive ML. CHI, 2020.
[pdf]
Alison Smith-Renner, Varun Kumar, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Kevin Seppi, Leah Findlater. Digging into User Control: Perceptions of Adherence and Instability in Transparent Models. IUI, 2020.
[pdf]
Varun Kumar, Alison Smith-Renner, Leah Findlater, Kevin Seppi, Jordan Boyd-Graber. Why Didn't You Listen to Me? Comparing User Control of Human-in-the-Loop Topic Models. ACL, 2019.
[pdf]
Bran Knowles, Alison Smith, Forough Poursabzi-Sangdeh,
Di Lu, Halmit Alabi. Uncertainty in Current and Future Health
Wearables. Communications of the ACM, 2018.
[pdf]
Alison Smith, Varun Kumar, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Kevin
Seppi, Leah Findlater. Closing the Loop: User-Centered Design
and Evaluation of a Human-in-the-Loop Topic Modeling System. Intelligent User Interfaces, 2018.
Best Student Paper Honorable Mention.[pdf]
Alison Smith and James J. Nolan. The Problem of Explanations without User Feedback. IUI Workshop on Explainable Smart Systems, 2018.
[pdf]
Tak Yeon Lee, Alison Smith, Kevin Seppi, Niklas
Elmqvist, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Leah Findlater. The Human Touch:
How Non-Expert Users Perceive, Interpet, and Fix Topic Models. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 2017.
[pdf]
Alison Smith, Tak Yeon Lee, Forough Poursabzi-Sangdeh,
Jordan Boyd-Graber, Niklas Elmqvist, Leah Findlater. Evaluating
Visual Representations for Topic Understanding and Their Effects on Manually Generated
Labels. Transactions of the Association of Computational
Linguistics, 2017.
[pdf]
Alison Smith, Tak Yeon Lee, Forough Poursabzi-Sangdeh,
Jordan Boyd-Graber, Niklas Elmqvist, Kevin Seppi, Leah Findlater. Human-Centered and Interactive: Expanding the Impact of Topic
Models. CHI 2016 Workshop on Human-Centered Machine
Learning, 2016.
[pdf]
Alison Smith, Sana Malik, and Ben Shneiderman. Visual Analysis of Topical Evolution in Unstructured Text: Design
and Evaluation of TopicFlow. Applications of Social Media
and Social Network Analysis. Springer International Publishing, 2015.
[pdf]
Alison Smith, Timothy Hawes, Jim Nolan. Towards an Automated Intelligence Product Generation
Capability. SPIE Sensing Technology + Applications.
International Society for Optics and Photonics, 2015. [proceedings]
Alison Smith, Timothy Hawes, and Meredith Myers. Hierarchie: Interactive Visualization for Hierarchical Topic
Models. ACL 2014 Workshop on Interactive Language Learning,
Visualization, and Interfaces, 2014.
[pdf]
Alison Smith, Jason Chuang, Yuening Hu, Jordan
Boyd-Graber, and Leah Findlater. Concurrent Visualization of
Relationships between Words and Topics in Topic Models. ACL
2014 Workshop on Interactive Language Learning, Visualization, and Interfaces, 2014.
[pdf]
Sana Malik, Alison Smith, Timothy Hawes, Panagis
Papadatos, Jianyu Li, Cody Dunne, Ben Shneiderman. TopicFlow:
Visualizing Topic Alignment of Twitter Data over Time. Proceedings of 2013 IEEE/ACM ASONAM. ACM, 2013.
Yuening Hu, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Brianna Satinoff, and Alison
Smith. Interactive Topic Modeling. Machine Learning Journal. Springer International Publishing, 2013.
[journal]
Yuening Hu, Alison Smith, Jordan Boyd-Graber. User Study for Interactive Topic Modeling. Women in Machine Learning. NIPS, 2013.
[poster]
samples
visualign
interface and visualization of genomic sequence alignment
{d3, javascript, html5, css3} @ 2013
Termite UI
interface and visualization to support interactive topic modeling
Workshop on Trust and Reliance in AI-Assisted Tasksat
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2022 and 2023.
organizers: Gagan Bansal, Alison Smith-Renner, Zana Bucinca, Tongshuang (Sherry) Wu, Kenneth Holstein, Jessica Hullman, Simone Stumpf.
Journal Special Issue Human-centered Explainable AIin ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TIIS),
2022.
editors: Upol Ehsan, Alison Smith-Renner, Q Vera Liao, Styliani Kleanthous, Advait Sarkar, Mark Riedl
Journal Special Issue AI for (and by) the Peoplein Multimodal Technologies and Interaction (MDPI),
2021.
editors: Alison Smith-Renner, Gagan Bansal, Gonzalo Ramos
From "Explainable AI" to "Graspable AI"at Conference on Tangible Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI),
2021 and 2022.
organizers: Jeffrey Bardzell, Laurens Boer, David Cuartielles, Maliheh Ghajargar, Kristina Höök, Peter Gall Krogh, Alison Smith-Renner, and Mikael Wiberg.
Explainable Smart Systems for Algorithmic Transparency in Emerging Technologiesat
ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), 2020.
organizers: Casey Dugan, Styliani Kleanthous, Tsvi Kuflik, Brian Lim, Jahna Otterbacher, Advait Sarkar, Avital Shulner, Alison Smith-Renner, and Simone Stumpf; keynote: Carrie Cai.
Human-Centered Machine Learning Perspectivesat ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems,
2019.
organizers: Saleema Amershi, Richard Banks, Gagan Bansal, Rebecca Fiebrink, Soroush Ghorashi, Christopher Meek, Gonzalo Ramos, Alison Smith-Renner, and Jina Suh.
2nd Workshop on Explainable Smart Systemsat ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), 2019.
organizers: Brian Lim, Advait Sarkar, Alison Smith, and Simone Stumpf; keynote: Margaret Burnette.
Workshop on Explainable Smart Systemsat ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), 2018.
organizers: Brian Lim, Alison Smith, and Simone Stumpf; keynote: Dave Gunning.
Program Committees
Conferences and journals: CHI PC (2017-2022), AC 2023; EMNLP SAC HCI+NLP track 2023; IUI PC (2018-2021), SPC (2022), organizing committee--workshops and tutorials (2022-2023); ACL (2018-2020); NAACL ``Human-Centered NLP'' Special Theme PC (2022); CSCW (2020, 2021); UIST (2018); IEE AIVR (2018); VIS (2019); TIIS PC (2020), editorial board--distinguished reviewer (2021-2023); IJHC (2020), TSC (2020), UIST (2022)
