Grudin, J. (2006). Timelines: Turing maturing: the separation of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction, interactions, Volume 13, Number 5 (2006), Pages 54-57. This paper addresses an interesting topic to me, the connections between artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction, two fields that belongs to Computer Science. It tackles the problem of why HCI has not been closer to AI. The article goes through the different steps of AI history and describes some issues related to that.

AI's focus on future possibilities has relied heavily on government funding. CHI, focused on applications that are or could be in widespread use, has received support primarily from industry. This results in different priorities, methods, and assessment criteria. (...) With appropriately modest goals, machine learning is contributing to interaction design, often by focusing on specific user behaviors. Working AI applications strengthen the tie to HCI by requiring acceptable interfaces. Still, not many researchers contribute to both CHI and IUI, much less to CHI and mainstream AI venues. But AI researchers are acquiring basic HCI skills and HCI researchers employ AI techniques. Shared understanding may be indispensable for the next generation of researchers and system builders.

Why do I blog this? the article describes how AI and CHI are intertwined. This was of interest to me because my background is in cognitive sciences (psychology, lingusitics, AI, neuroscience) and I followed AI for a while. I have to admit that I left this aside in a past few years, rather focusing a lot on user experience research (I turned myself to ethnography and social sciences). I now feel the gap between the HCI I am interested in and AI issues.