Human-Computer Interaction and Knowledge Discovery (HCI-KDD): What Is the Benefit of Bringing Those Two Fields to Work Together?

A major challenge in our networked world is the increasing amount of data, which require efficient and user-friendly solutions. A timely example is the biomedical domain: the trend towards personalized medicine has resulted in a sheer mass of the generated (-omics) data. In the life sciences domain, most data models are characterized by complexity, which makes manual analysis very time-consuming and frequently practically impossible. Computational methods may help; however, we must acknowledge that the problem-solving knowledge is located in the human mind and - not in machines. A strategic aim to find solutions for data intensive problems could lay in the combination of two areas, which bring ideal pre-conditions: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Knowledge Discovery (KDD). HCI deals with questions of human perception, cognition, intelligence, decision-making and interactive techniques of visualization, so it centers mainly on supervised methods. KDD deals mainly with questions of machine intelligence and data mining, in particular with the development of scalable algorithms for finding previously unknown relationships in data, thus centers on automatic computational methods. A proverb attributed perhaps incorrectly to Albert Einstein illustrates this perfectly: “Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, but stupid. Humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate, but brilliant. Together they may be powerful beyond imagination”. Consequently, a novel approach is to combine HCI & KDD in order to enhance human intelligence by computational intelligence.