User hints: a framework for interactive optimization

Innovative improvements in the area of human-computer interaction and user interfaces have enabled intuitive and effective applications for a variety of problems. On the other hand, there has also been the realization that several real-world optimization problems still cannot be totally automated. Very often, user interaction is necessary for refining the optimization problem, managing the computational resources available, or validating or adjusting a computer-generated solution. This paper presents an interactive framework called user hints for having humans help optimization methods to solve difficult problems. In the framework users play a dynamic and important role by providing hints. Hints are actions that help to insert domain knowledge, to escape from local minima, to reduce the space of solutions to be explored, or to avoid ambiguity when there is more than one optimal solution. User hints are given in an intuitive way through a graphical interface. Visualization tools are also included in order to inform the user about the state of the optimization process. We discuss applications of the user hints framework to the graph drawing and the map labeling problems. An evaluation of some user hints systems indicates that optimization processes can benefit from human interaction.

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