Public sector organizations increasingly use artificial intelligence to augment, support, and automate decision-making. However, such public AI can potentially infringe on citizens’ right to autonomy. Contestability is a system quality that protects against this by ensuring systems are open and responsive to disputes throughout their life cycle. While a growing body of work is investigating contestable AI by design, little of this knowledge has so far been evaluated with practitioners. To make explicit the guiding ideas underpinning contestable AI research, we construct the generative metaphor of the Agonistic Arena, inspired by the political theory of agonistic pluralism. Combining this metaphor and current contestable AI guidelines, we develop an infographic supporting the early-stage concept design of public AI system contestability mechanisms. We evaluate this infographic in five workshops paired with focus groups with a total of 18 practitioners, yielding ten concept designs. Our findings outline the mechanisms for contestability derived from these concept designs. Building on these findings, we subsequently evaluate the efficacy of the Agonistic Arena as a generative metaphor for the design of public AI and identify two competing metaphors at play in this space: the Black Box and the Sovereign.

Introducing students to different perspectives and roles in the development process allows them to engage in the work of cross-disciplinary diverse teams and even can enable them to change roles in designer-developer interactions. Industry work often places recent graduates in preexisting polarized relationship dynamics between different participants in the design and development process. This paper describes a two-stage attempt at co-alignment of software engineering and user-centered design courses: from full alignment with topic intersections and joint project to partial alignment through separate activities. We discuss challenges of both ways including time or technical constraints, increased effort from the program developers and instructors, students' and instructors' frustrations. We finalize by describing benefits of providing students with early experience identifying trade-offs between design requirements and architecture and opportunities for diverse group with different background in computer science.

In recent years, conversational agents (CAs) have been receiving more attention as tools for collecting data through qualitative interviews. The problem is we know little about how CAs affect both the interviewees and interviewers. This PhD project is dedicated to studying how to evaluate CA-mediated interviews and their effects on participants (both interviewees and interviewers). The findings of this project will allow us to support the interview practitioners with the tools for interview analytics and interview data analysis. It will be especially helpful in the large-scale settings which CA-mediated interviews enable. This proposal describes State-of-the-art on the topic and presents the motivation of a study with key research questions to answer.