Kristian Hammond - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Kristian Hammond

Artificial Intelligence and Law

We implemented a user-centered approach to the design of an artificial intelligence (AI) system t... more We implemented a user-centered approach to the design of an artificial intelligence (AI) system that provides users with access to information about the workings of the United States federal court system regardless of their technical background. Presently, most of the records associated with the federal judiciary are provided through a federal system that does not support exploration aimed at discovering systematic patterns about court activities. In addition, many users lack the data analytical skills necessary to conduct their own analyses and convert data into information. We conducted interviews, observations, and surveys to uncover the needs of our users and discuss the development of an intuitive platform informed from these needs that makes it possible for legal scholars, lawyers, and journalists to discover answers to more advanced questions about the federal court system. We report on results from usability testing and discuss design implications for AI and law practitioner...

AI Magazine

To craft effective public policy, modern governments must gather and analyze data on both the per... more To craft effective public policy, modern governments must gather and analyze data on both the performance of their public functions and the responses by the public. Federal administrative agencies such as the Patent Office and Centers for Disease Control routinely do this, as does the United States Congress. More importantly, they make such data freely accessible. Within the United States government, however, the judicial branch is a conspicuous outlier. In theory, federal court records could be used to evaluate the efficiency and fairness of the justice system. In practice, court records are effectively out of reach because they sit behind a government paywall. This financial barrier, along with an equally important myriad of technical obstacles, have forestalled the development of AI-driven analysis that could enable a systematic understanding and evaluation of the work of the courts. The Systematic Content Analysis of Litigation EventS Open Knowledge Network (SCALES OKN) seeks to...

AI & SOCIETY, 2022

In this paper, we outline a new method for evaluating the human impact of machine-learning (ML) a... more In this paper, we outline a new method for evaluating the human impact of machine-learning (ML) applications. In partnership with Underwriters Laboratories Inc., we have developed a framework to evaluate the impacts of a particular use of machine learning that is based on the goals and values of the domain in which that application is deployed. By examining the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in particular domains, such as journalism, criminal justice, or law, we can develop more nuanced and practically relevant understandings of key ethical guidelines for artificial intelligence. By decoupling the extraction of the facts of the matter from the evaluation of the impact of the resulting systems, we create a framework for the process of assessing impact that has two distinctly different phases.

ArXiv, 2021

A politically informed citizenry is imperative for a welldeveloped democracy. While the US govern... more A politically informed citizenry is imperative for a welldeveloped democracy. While the US government has pursued policies for open data, these efforts have been insufficient in achieving an open government because only people with technical and domain knowledge can access information in the data. In this work, we conduct user interviews to identify wants and needs among stakeholders. We further use this information to sketch out the foundational requirements for a functional political information technical system.

It is clear that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the world in ways that no other set... more It is clear that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the world in ways that no other set of technologies ever have. Technologies of machine learning, text analysis, recommendation, and natural language processing are all being applied to a wide variety of problems and yet most of us still struggle to understand what their results mean or even the numbers behind them. The numbers alone simply do not provide us with what we really need: information and insight. The data and the algorithms are only the first step in finding the insights we want and making them useful to the decision makers who need them.

Agents that provide just-in-time access to relevant online material by observing user behavior in... more Agents that provide just-in-time access to relevant online material by observing user behavior in everyday applications have been the focus of much research, both in our lab, and elsewhere. These systems analyze information objects the user is manipulating in order to recommend additional information. Designers of such systems typically make the assumption that objects similar to the one being manipulated by the user will be useful to her. Our own experiments show that users do find many of the documents retrieved by a system of this type are relevant. Yet in the context of a specific task, users find fewer of these documents are useful. Our main point is that in order to make just-in-time information systems truly useful, we need to reexamine the “similarity assumption” inherent in many of these systems’ designs. In light of this, we propose techniques that bring modest amounts of task-specific knowledge to bear in order to perform lexical transformations on the queries these syste...

The Intelligent Classroom is an automated lecture facility where one of the primary goals is that... more The Intelligent Classroom is an automated lecture facility where one of the primary goals is that speakers be able to control it by interacting with it as they would with a human A/V technician. In this paper we describe our research in imbedding Microsoft Powerpoint into the Intelligent Classroom. In particular we discuss how we use two modes of sensing (Computer Vision and Speech Recognition) to provide hands-free control of slide presentations. We look at utterances and gestures that serve as commands. And, more interestingly, we discuss some probabilistic techniques that can be used to match slide content to the speaker's words, providing new and useful ways of performing a presentation.

Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces - IUI '02, 2002

mpME! introduces users to new music and interweaves old music the listener has heard of before an... more mpME! introduces users to new music and interweaves old music the listener has heard of before and enjoys. mpME! exposes listeners to new music by using existing music information on the Internet such as musical artist directories. mpME! also provides complementary information about the artist to educate the user throughout the listening experience. MpME! uses a feature intersection algorithm to

■ This article describes FAQ FINDER, a natural language question-answering system that uses files... more ■ This article describes FAQ FINDER, a natural language question-answering system that uses files of frequently asked questions as its knowledge base. Unlike AI question-answering systems that focus on the generation of new answers, FAQ FIND-ER retrieves existing ones found in frequently asked question files. Unlike information-retrieval approaches that rely on a purely lexical metric of similarity between query and document, FAQ FIND-ER uses a semantic knowledge base (WORDNET) to improve its ability to match question and answer. We include results from an evaluation of the system’s performance and show that a combination of semantic and statistical techniques works better than any single approach.

This paper presents and details 'Pato and Perro on the Movies,' a system that generates w... more This paper presents and details 'Pato and Perro on the Movies,' a system that generates web comics about recently released movies. Information is extracted about movies from the internet and a series of panels are drawn with dialogue to set up a punchline in the comic's final frame. Definitions of creativity commonly used to examine computational processes are presented and used to examine this system. The system is used to discuss a common critique of creative systems, namely that procedural creation inherently limits the range of potential content produced. This paper argues that procedure and creativity can be reconciled, and that much of the content produced by humans is subject to similar critique. Finally, we discuss the implications of characterizing many human acts of creation as procedural. Pato and Perro on the Movies 'Pato and Perro on the Movies' is a web comic written and drawn by a machine. Each comic gives bite sized impressions of a recently relea...

In planning and activity research there are two common approaches to matching agents with environ... more In planning and activity research there are two common approaches to matching agents with environments. Either the agent is designed with a specific environment in mind, or it is provided with learning capabilities so that it can adapt to the environment it is placed in. In this paper we look at a third and underexploited alternative: designing agents which adapt their environments to suit themselves. We call this s&d&ion, and we present a taxonomy of types of stability that human beings typically both rely on and enforce. We also taxonomize the ways in which stabilization behaviors can be cued and learned. We illustrate these ideas with a program called FIXPOINT, which improves its performance over time by stabilizing its environment.

Fourth IEEE Region 10 International Conference TENCON

Abstract Handling exceptional occurrences during computation is a problem in most functional prog... more Abstract Handling exceptional occurrences during computation is a problem in most functional programming languages, even where the computation is eager and sequential. A version of the error value method is presented which allows lazy computation with deterministic semantics for parallel evaluation even in the presence of errors. The realization of this technique is illustrated by reference PSML, a referentially transparent variant of standard ML designed for parallel evaluation

Page 1. A Plan Based Approach to Information Agents Kristian J. Hammond Robin D. Burke CM Intelli... more Page 1. A Plan Based Approach to Information Agents Kristian J. Hammond Robin D. Burke CM Intelligent Information Laboratory University of Chicago 1100 E. 58th St. Chicago, IL 60637 Our aim in this work was to develop ...

It is a time consuming and difficult task for an individ- ual, a group, or an organization to cla... more It is a time consuming and difficult task for an individ- ual, a group, or an organization to classify large collec- tions of documents under a content-driven taxonomy. In this paper, we outline an approach for building a system which makes the classification process the re- sponsibility of the author of the document, thus allow- ing the author to explain

The Information Source Adapter Platform (or ISA Platform, for short) is a set of practical enabli... more The Information Source Adapter Platform (or ISA Platform, for short) is a set of practical enabling technologies for developing intelligent information systems. The platform provides an infrastructure for building lightweight interfaces to existing resources that can be composed automatically using means-ends analysis. The ISA Platform enables developers to rapidly create new and innovative applications that leverage existing resources, without requiring

Ai Magazine, Jun 15, 2002

Int J Radiat Oncol Biol Phys, 1990

Case-based reasoning is receiving much attention as a technology for building knowledge repositor... more Case-based reasoning is receiving much attention as a technology for building knowledge repositories that can be queried for task-relevant information. Taking the CBR problem-solving model seriously, however, suggests the value of a much stronger integration between knowledge management systems and the tasks that they serve. In this integrated view, knowledge management systems should be designed to do justin-time retrieval, anticipating task-based information needs and satisfying them automatically before the user requests information, and should learn unobtrusively by monitoring the user's task performance. Key issues include how to integrate knowledge access into the user's problem-solving process, how to automatically provide the user with task-relevant information from multiple sources, and how to build up knowledge for transmission between task phases and for longterm storage. This paper describes how these issues are addressed in the Stamping Advisor, a system to aid the design of stamped automotive parts. This system automatically presents the designer with needed information in a natural way, uses CB1% and task-focused information retrieval to access useful information, and automatically captures relevant information to support downstream task processes and build its memory of cases.

Http Dx Doi Org 10 1207 S15327809jls0102_1, Nov 17, 2009

This article is concerned with the study of analogy and memory as viewed from the perspectives of... more This article is concerned with the study of analogy and memory as viewed from the perspectives of both artificial intelligence (AI) and psychology. Its aim is to combine what seem to be two distinct and conflicting approaches to memory-the functional approach of A1 and the empirical ...