The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into work and educational settings is rapidly increasing, yet accurately gauging its adoption remains a challenge. The majority of research uses self-reported surveys. The resulting estimates vary widely, sometimes differing by as much as 40 percentage points in the same setting. This paper studies whether social desirability bias–--the tendency to answer surveys in a way that would be viewed favorably by an outside party–--can potentially explain this discrepancy. We collect data on AI use in a large representative sample of university students. We assess the potential for social desirability bias using a common tool from psychology, indirect questioning: all students report both their own AI use and the use of their peers. The data reveals a significant gap, with approximately 60% of students reporting using AI themselves compared to 90% of their peers. In a follow-up study, natural language processing reveals social desirability bias as key driver of the gap between own and others’ AI use: students are hesitant to admit AI use due to negative perceptions. This suggests that using self-reports may underestimate the actual prevalence of AI in settings where social desirability bias plays a role, such as education.

Visualizing data often entails data transformations that can reveal and hide information, operations we dub disclosure tactics. Whether designers hide information intentionally or as an implicit consequence of other design choices, tools and frameworks for visualization offer little explicit guidance on disclosure. To systematically characterize how visualizations can limit access to an underlying dataset, we contribute a content analysis of 425 examples of visualization techniques sampled from academic papers in the visualization literature, resulting in a taxonomy of disclosure tactics. Our taxonomy organizes disclosure tactics based on how they change the data representation underlying a chart, providing a systematic way to reason about design trade-offs in terms of what information is revealed, distorted, or hidden. We demonstrate the benefits of using our taxonomy by showing how it can guide reasoning in design scenarios where disclosure is a first-order consideration. Adopting disclosure as a framework for visualization research offers new perspective on authoring tools, literacy, uncertainty communication, personalization, and ethical design.

Visualizations play a critical role in validating and improving statistical models. However, the design space of model check visualizations is not well understood, making it difficult for authors to explore and specify effective graphical model checks. VMC defines a model check visualization using four components: (1) samples of distributions of checkable quantities generated from the model, including predictive distributions for new data and distributions of model parameters; (2) transformations on observed data to facilitate comparison; (3) visual representations of distributions; and (4) layouts to facilitate comparing model samples and observed data. We contribute an implementation of VMC as an R package. We validate VMC by reproducing a set of canonical model check examples, and show how using VMC to generate model checks reduces the edit distance between visualizations relative to existing visualization toolkits. The findings of an interview study with three expert modelers who used VMC highlight challenges and opportunities for encouraging exploration of correct, effective model check visualizations.

Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic approach to allocating municipal spending that has been adopted in many places in recent years, including in Chicago. Current PB voting resembles a ballot where residents are asked which municipal projects, such as school improvements and road repairs, to fund with a limited budget. In this work, we ask how interactive visualization can benefit PB by conducting a design probe-based interview study (N=13) with policy workers and academics with expertise in PB, urban planning, and civic HCI. Our probe explores how graphical elicitation of voter preferences and a dashboard of voting statistics can be incorporated into a realistic PB tool. Through qualitative analysis, we find that visualization creates opportunities for city government to set expectations about budget constraints while also granting their constituents greater freedom to articulate a wider range of preferences. However, using visualization to provide transparency about PB requires efforts to mitigate potential access barriers and mistrust. We call for more visualization professionals to help build civic capacity by working in and studying political systems.

Visual analytics (VA) tools support data exploration by helping analysts quickly and iteratively generate views of data which reveal interesting patterns. However, these tools seldom enable explicit checks of the resulting interpretations of data-e.g., whether patterns can be accounted for by a model that implies a particular structure in the relationships between variables. We present EVM, a data exploration tool that enables users to express and check provisional interpretations of data in the form of statistical models. EVM integrates support for visualization-based model checks by rendering distributions of model predictions alongside user-generated views of data. In a user study with data scientists practicing in the private and public sector, we evaluate how model checks influence analysts' thinking during data exploration. Our analysis characterizes how participants use model checks to scrutinize expectations about data generating process and surfaces further opportunities to scaffold model exploration in VA tools.

Scientists often use meta-analysis to characterize the impact of an intervention on some outcome of interest across a body of literature. However, threats to the utility and validity of meta-analytic estimates arise when scientists average over potentially important variations in context like different research designs. Uncertainty about quality and commensurability of evidence casts doubt on results from meta-analysis, yet existing software tools for meta-analysis do not provide an explicit software representation of these concerns. We present MetaExplorer, a prototype system for meta-analysis that we developed using iterative design with meta-analysis experts to provide a guided process for eliciting assessments of uncertainty and reasoning about how to incorporate them during statistical inference. Our qualitative evaluation of MetaExplorer with experienced meta-analysts shows that imposing a structured workflow both elevates the perceived importance of epistemic concerns and presents opportunities for tools to engage users in dialogue around goals and standards for evidence aggregation.

There are myriad ways to analyse a dataset. But which one to trust? In the face of such uncertainty, analysts may adopt multiverse analysis: running all reasonable analyses on the dataset. Yet this is cognitively and technically difficult with existing tools—how does one specify and execute all combinations of reasonable analyses of a dataset?—and often requires discarding existing workflows. We present multiverse, a tool for implementing multiverse analyses in R with expressive syntax supporting existing computational notebook workflows. multiverse supports building up a multiverse through local changes to a single analysis and optimises execution by pruning redundant computations. We evaluate how multiverse supports programming multiverse analyses using (a) principles of cognitive ergonomics to compare with two existing multiverse tools; and (b) case studies based on semi-structured interviews with researchers who have successfully implemented an end-to-end analysis using multiverse. We identify design tradeoffs (e.g. increased flexibility versus learnability), and suggest future directions for multiverse tool design.

Machine learning (ML) interpretability techniques can reveal undesirable patterns in data that models exploit to make predictions-potentially causing harms once deployed. However, how to take action to address these patterns is not always clear. In a collaboration between ML and human-computer interaction researchers, physicians, and data scientists, we develop GAM Changer, the first interactive system to help domain experts and data scientists easily and responsibly edit Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) and fix problematic patterns. With novel interaction techniques, our tool puts interpretability into action-empowering users to analyze, validate, and align model behaviors with their knowledge and values. Physicians have started to use our tool to investigate and fix pneumonia and sepsis risk prediction models, and an evaluation with 7 data scientists working in diverse domains highlights that our tool is easy to use, meets their model editing needs, and fits into their current workflows. Built with modern web technologies, our tool runs locally in users' web browsers or computational notebooks, lowering the barrier to use. GAM Changer is available at the following public demo link: https://interpret.ml/gam-changer.

Analysts often make visual causal inferences about possible data-generating models. However, visual analytics (VA) software tends to leave these models implicit in the mind of the analyst, which casts doubt on the statistical validity of informal visual "insights". We formally evaluate the quality of causal inferences from visualizations by adopting causal support-a Bayesian cognition model that learns the probability of alternative causal explanations given some data-as a normative benchmark for causal inferences. We contribute two experiments assessing how well crowdworkers can detect (1) a treatment effect and (2) a confounding relationship. We find that chart users' causal inferences tend to be insensitive to sample size such that they deviate from our normative benchmark. While interactively cross-filtering data in visualizations can improve sensitivity, on average users do not perform reliably better with common visualizations than they do with textual contingency tables. These experiments demonstrate the utility of causal support as an evaluation framework for inferences in VA and point to opportunities to make analysts' mental models more explicit in VA software.

Uncertainty visualizations often emphasize point estimates to support magnitude estimates or decisions through visual comparison. However, when design choices emphasize means, users may overlook uncertainty information and misinterpret visual distance as a proxy for effect size. We present findings from a mixed design experiment on Mechanical Turk which tests eight uncertainty visualization designs: 95% containment intervals, hypothetical outcome plots, densities, and quantile dotplots, each with and without means added. We find that adding means to uncertainty visualizations has small biasing effects on both magnitude estimation and decision-making, consistent with discounting uncertainty. We also see that visualization designs that support the least biased effect size estimation do not support the best decision-making, suggesting that a chart user's sense of effect size may not necessarily be identical when they use the same information for different tasks. In a qualitative analysis of users' strategy descriptions, we find that many users switch strategies and do not employ an optimal strategy when one exists. Uncertainty visualizations which are optimally designed in theory may not be the most effective in practice because of the ways that users satisfice with heuristics, suggesting opportunities to better understand visualization effectiveness by modeling sets of potential strategies.

Multiverse analysis is an approach to data analysis in which all "reasonable" analytic decisions are evaluated in parallel and interpreted collectively, in order to foster robustness and transparency. However, specifying a multiverse is demanding because analysts must manage myriad variants from a cross-product of analytic decisions, and the results require nuanced interpretation. We contribute Baba: an integrated domain-specific language (DSL) and visual analysis system for authoring and reviewing multiverse analyses. With the Boba DSL, analysts write the shared portion of analysis code only once, alongside local variations defining alternative decisions, from which the compiler generates a multiplex of scripts representing all possible analysis paths. The Boba Visualizer provides linked views of model results and the multiverse decision space to enable rapid, systematic assessment of consequential decisions and robustness, including sampling uncertainty and model fit. We demonstrate Boba's utility through two data analysis case studies, and reflect on challenges and design opportunities for multiverse analysis software.

To make evidence-based recommendations to decision-makers, researchers conducting systematic reviews and meta-analyses must navigate a garden of forking paths: a series of analytical decision-points, each of which has the potential to influence findings. To identify challenges and opportunities related to designing systems to help researchers manage uncertainty around which of multiple analyses is best, we interviewed 11 professional researchers who conduct research synthesis to inform decision-making within three organizations. We conducted a qualitative analysis identifying 480 analytical decisions made by researchers throughout the scientific process. We present descriptions of current practices in applied research synthesis and corresponding design challenges: making it more feasible for researchers to try and compare analyses, shifting researchers' attention from rationales for decisions to impacts on results, and supporting communication techniques that acknowledge decision-makers' aversions to uncertainty. We identify opportunities to design systems which help researchers explore, reason about, and communicate uncertainty in decision-making about possible analyses in research synthesis.

Abstract Journalists, educators, and technical writers are increasingly publishing interactive content on the web. However, popular analytics tools provide only coarse information about how readers interact with individual pages, and laboratory studies often fail to capture the variability of a real‐world audience. We contribute extensions to the Idyll markup language to automate the detailed instrumentation of interactive articles and corresponding visual analysis tools for inspecting reader behavior at both micro‐ and macro‐levels. We present three case studies of interactive articles that were instrumented, posted online, and promoted via social media to reach broad audiences, and share data from over 50,000 reader sessions. We demonstrate the use of our tools to characterize article‐specific interaction patterns, compare behavior across desktop and mobile devices, and reveal reading patterns common across articles. Our contributed findings, tools, and corpus of behavioral data can help advance and inform more comprehensive studies of narrative visualization.

Understanding and accounting for uncertainty is critical to effectively reasoning about visualized data. However, evaluating the impact of an uncertainty visualization is complex due to the difficulties that people have interpreting uncertainty and the challenge of defining correct behavior with uncertainty information. Currently, evaluators of uncertainty visualization must rely on general purpose visualization evaluation frameworks which can be ill-equipped to provide guidance with the unique difficulties of assessing judgments under uncertainty. To help evaluators navigate these complexities, we present a taxonomy for characterizing decisions made in designing an evaluation of an uncertainty visualization. Our taxonomy differentiates six levels of decisions that comprise an uncertainty visualization evaluation: the behavioral targets of the study, expected effects from an uncertainty visualization, evaluation goals, measures, elicitation techniques, and analysis approaches. Applying our taxonomy to 86 user studies of uncertainty visualizations, we find that existing evaluation practice, particularly in visualization research, focuses on Performance and Satisfaction-based measures that assume more predictable and statistically-driven judgment behavior than is suggested by research on human judgment and decision making. We reflect on common themes in evaluation practice concerning the interpretation and semantics of uncertainty, the use of confidence reporting, and a bias toward evaluating performance as accuracy rather than decision quality. We conclude with a concrete set of recommendations for evaluators designed to reduce the mismatch between the conceptualization of uncertainty in visualization versus other fields.

Animated representations of outcomes drawn from distributions (hypothetical outcome plots, or HOPs) are used in the media and other public venues to communicate uncertainty. HOPs greatly improve multivariate probability estimation over conventional static uncertainty visualizations and leverage the ability of the visual system to quickly, accurately, and automatically process the summary statistical properties of ensembles. However, it is unclear how well HOPs support applied tasks resembling real world judgments posed in uncertainty communication. We identify and motivate an appropriate task to investigate realistic judgments of uncertainty in the public domain through a qualitative analysis of uncertainty visualizations in the news. We contribute two crowdsourced experiments comparing the effectiveness of HOPs, error bars, and line ensembles for supporting perceptual decision-making from visualized uncertainty. Participants infer which of two possible underlying trends is more likely to have produced a sample of time series data by referencing uncertainty visualizations which depict the two trends with variability due to sampling error. By modeling each participant's accuracy as a function of the level of evidence presented over many repeated judgments, we find that observers are able to correctly infer the underlying trend in samples conveying a lower level of evidence when using HOPs rather than static aggregate uncertainty visualizations as a decision aid. Modeling approaches like ours contribute theoretically grounded and richly descriptive accounts of user perceptions to visualization evaluation.