Artificial intelligence (AI) applications have become ubiquitous in their impact on individuals and society, highlighting a crucial need for their responsible development. Recent research has called for participatory AI auditing, empowering individuals without AI expertise to audit AI applications throughout the entire AI development pipeline. Our work focuses on investigating how to support these kinds of auditors through participatory AI auditing tools and processes. We conducted a series of co-design workshops, using two health-related predictive AI applications as examples. Our results show that participants wanted to be part of AI audits, and were insightful in identifying the potential impacts of applications, but needed to be assisted in conducting audits, especially how to measure impacts. Importantly, participants provided examples of impacts not considered in current risk/harm taxonomies. Our findings provide implications for the design of tools and processes to empower everyone to contribute to responsible AI development in the future.

In the realm of Information Seeking and Retrieval (ISR), searching the literature for relevant references in the context of academic work, such as theses or publications, is widely recognised as an exploratory search task. This task becomes particularly challenging when searchers lack prior knowledge of the subject matter. To help address the growing need for supporting exploratory search endeavours, ISR researchers have developed exploratory search models and interfaces. However, while much attention has been given to conceptualising exploratory searches, little focus has been placed on understanding the specific approaches and behaviours that searchers employ during conducting literature reviews. This paper aims to bridge this gap by conducting semi-structured interviews with 30 Master’s students at the end of a user study. This paper provides comprehensive definitions for the fundamental exploratory characteristics from the recent conceptual model, pinpoints potential factors that could influence these characteristics, introduces new exploratory dimensions, and extends our comprehension of existing ones in the academic context. It also uncovers a spectrum of approaches used in literature searches, shedding light on how individuals rely on specific paper sections to measure their relevance and highlighting essential facets of knowledge acquisition in the context of literature searches.

Exploratory search is an intuitive concept in interactive information retrieval. It is known that searchers use exploratory search strategies when learning and investigating a new domain. Many definitions for Exploratory Search have been proposed. However, the main dimensions involve high uncertainty with respect to the problem context, the user expertise, and the search process. In this work, we study exploratory search in the literature, and we provide a conceptual model of exploratory search. We also conduct a user study to examine how literature searches are exploratory and what factors influence the exploratory dimensions and characteristics. Moreover, we review the exploratory support tasks, and we try to better design and evaluate exploratory user interfaces.

Exploratory search is an intuitive concept in interactive information retrieval. While many definitions for Exploratory Search have been proposed, the main dimensions involve high uncertainty with respect to the problem context, the user expertise, and the search process. In this paper, we draw together the different characteristics relating to the three main exploratory dimensions to provide a conceptual model of exploratory search. We build an exploratory search questionnaire using this model. We then use the questionnaire instrument to examine how literature searches are exploratory and what factors influence the exploratory dimensions and characteristics. We provide one of the first detailed investigations into the nature of exploratory literature review searches. Our analysis of the 368 responses reveals that about 84% of the participants described their literature review task as somewhat exploratory or very exploratory in nature. Also, the analysis points to another dimension of the exploratory search, the knowledge gain/change dimension. Furthermore, we investigated how users’ experience influences how people rate the exploratory search characteristics (e.g., whether they find surprising information, learn new concepts and keywords).