Introduction to the Special Issue on Human-Centered Machine Learning

Machine learning is one of the most important and successful techniques in contemporary computer science. Although it can be applied to myriad problems of human interest, research in machine learning is often framed in an impersonal way, as merely algorithms being applied to model data. However, this viewpoint hides considerable human work of tuning the algorithms, gathering the data, deciding what should be modeled in the first place, and using the outcomes of machine learning in the real world. Examining machine learning from a human-centered perspective includes explicitly recognizing human work, as well as reframing machine learning workflows based on situated human working practices, and exploring the co-adaptation of humans and intelligent systems. A human-centered understanding of machine learning in human contexts can lead not only to more usable machine learning tools, but to new ways of understanding what machine learning is good for and how to make it more useful. This special issue brings together nine articles that present different ways to frame machine learning in a human context. They represent very different application areas (from medicine to audio) and methodologies (including machine learning methods, human-computer interaction methods, and hybrids), but they all explore the human contexts in which machine learning is used. This introduction summarizes the articles in this issue and draws out some common themes.