Position paper presented at Engineering Interactive Systems Embedding AI Technologies at EICS 2023, Swansea, Wales, UK. 27 June. 2023. https://alandix.com/academic/papers/EISEAIT2023-hidden/ Many critical user interaction design decisions are made in the heat of detailed development. These include simple parameter choices or more complex weightings in intelligent algorithms. Many would be appropriate for expert design review, user-preference choices or optimisation by machine learning, but they are buried deep in the code. Although the developer may realise this potential, the location of the decision is far removed in the code from where user feedback occurs, data can be collected and machine learning could be applied. This position paper describes several case studies and use them to frame an architectural challenge for tools and infrastructure to uncover these hidden variables to make them available for machine learning and user inspection.

1. Alan Dix
https://alandix.com/
@alanjohndix
Hidden Figures
architectural challenges to expose
parameters lost in code

2. in the heat of code …

3. hidden values
0010101000100
1011100010101
0001010100101
0100001010010
100
parameters
buried
in code
create
derived
values
which are
used in UI

4. Ethics
Human
like
Computing
AI
helping
UI
UI
helping
AI
front-end user-facing
back-end developer-facing

5. Ethics
Human
like
Computing
AI
helping
UI
UI
helping
AI
front-end user-facing
back-end developer-facing

6. reference list parser

7. matching concerts mentioned in
different notices

8. Snip!t
1
users selects in
web page and
presses “Snip!t”
bookmarklet
2
Snip!t pops up page with
suggested things to do with
the snip (and saves it for
later, like bookmark)

9. recognisers

10. exposing hidden values
00101010001
00101110001
01010001010
10010101000
01010010100
parameters
buried
derived
values
used in UI
scan code to find parameters or
make easy for coders to identify
track point
of use
record usage and
user interactions
feed into ML to tune
parameters

11. Hidden Figures
architectural challenges to
expose parameters lost in code
Alan Dix
https://alandix.com/academic/papers/EISEAIT-2023-hidden/