Telling Stories from Computational Notebooks: AI-Assisted Presentation Slides Creation for Presenting Data Science Work

Creating presentation slides is a critical but time-consuming task for data scientists. While researchers have proposed many AI techniques to lift data scientists' burden on data preparation and model selection, few have targeted the presentation creation task. Based on the needs identified from a formative study, this paper presents NB2Slides, an AI system that facilitates users to compose presentations of their data science work. NB2Slides uses deep learning methods as well as example-based prompts to generate slides from computational notebooks, and take users' input (e.g., audience background) to structure the slides. NB2Slides also provides an interactive visualization that links the slides with the notebook to help users further edit the slides. A follow-up user evaluation with 12 data scientists shows that participants believed NB2Slides can improve efficiency and reduces the complexity of creating slides. Yet, participants questioned the future of full automation and suggested a human-AI collaboration paradigm.

Human-Centered AI for Data Science: A Systematic Approach

Human-Centered AI (HCAI) refers to the research effort that aims to design and implement AI techniques to support various human tasks, while taking human needs into consideration and preserving human control. In this short position paper, we illustrate how we approach HCAI using a series of research projects around Data Science (DS) works as a case study. The AI techniques built for supporting DS works are collectively referred to as AutoML systems, and their goals are to automate some parts of the DS workflow. We illustrate a three-step systematical research approach(i.e., explore, build, and integrate) and four practical ways of implementation for HCAI systems. We argue that our work is a cornerstone towards the ultimate future of Human-AI Collaboration for DS and beyond, where AI and humans can take complementary and indispensable roles to achieve a better outcome and experience.

How AI Developers Overcome Communication Challenges in a Multidisciplinary Team: A Case Study

The development of AI applications is a multidisciplinary effort, involving multiple roles collaborating with the AI developers, an umbrella term we use to include data scientists and other AI-adjacent roles on the same team. During these collaborations, there is a knowledge mismatch between AI developers, who are skilled in data science, and external stakeholders who are typically not. This difference leads to communication gaps, and the onus falls on AI developers to explain data science concepts to their collaborators. In this paper, we report on a study including analyses of both interviews with AI developers and artifacts they produced for communication. Using the analytic lens of shared mental models, we report on the types of communication gaps that AI developers face, how AI developers communicate across disciplinary and organizational boundaries, and how they simultaneously manage issues regarding trust and expectations.