Search for: All records

Teachable interfaces can empower end-users to attune machine learning systems to their idiosyncratic characteristics and environment by explicitly providing pertinent training examples. While facilitating control, their effectiveness can be hindered by the lack of expertise or misconceptions. We investigate how users may conceptualize, experience, and reflect on their engagement in machine teaching by deploying a mobile teachable testbed in Amazon Mechanical Turk. Using a performance-based payment scheme, Mechanical Turkers (N=100) are called to train, test, and re-train a robust recognition model in real-time with a few snapshots taken in their environment. We find that participants incorporate diversity in their examples drawing from parallels to how humans recognize objects independent of size, viewpoint, location, and illumination. Many of their misconceptions relate to consistency and model capabilities for reasoning. With limited variation and edge cases in testing, the majority of them do not change strategies on a second training attempt. 

Teachable interfaces can enable end-users to personalize machine learning applications by explicitly providing a few training examples. They promise higher robustness in the real world by significantly constraining conditions of the learning task to a specific user and their environment. While facilitating user control, their effectiveness can be hindered by lack of expertise or misconceptions. Through a mobile teachable testbed in Amazon Mechanical Turk, we explore how non-experts conceptualize, experience, and reflect on their engagement with machine teaching in the context of object recognition.