What is "Intelligent" in Intelligent User Interfaces? A Meta-Analysis of 25 Years of IUI
It addresses the vague understanding of intelligence in HCI and AI communities, offering a meta-analysis to clarify foundational concepts for researchers and practitioners.
This paper analyzes the meaning of 'intelligence' in intelligent user interfaces by conducting a text analysis of all IUI proceedings over 25 years, identifying what is deemed intelligent and how it is characterized, concluding with suggestions for more explicit definitions.
This reflection paper takes the 25th IUI conference milestone as an opportunity to analyse in detail the understanding of intelligence in the community: Despite the focus on intelligent UIs, it has remained elusive what exactly renders an interactive system or user interface "intelligent", also in the fields of HCI and AI at large. We follow a bottom-up approach to analyse the emergent meaning of intelligence in the IUI community: In particular, we apply text analysis to extract all occurrences of "intelligent" in all IUI proceedings. We manually review these with regard to three main questions: 1) What is deemed intelligent? 2) How (else) is it characterised? and 3) What capabilities are attributed to an intelligent entity? We discuss the community's emerging implicit perspective on characteristics of intelligence in intelligent user interfaces and conclude with ideas for stating one's own understanding of intelligence more explicitly.