There will be one workshop at this year’s conference.

Designing Human-Intensive Software Systems
Sunday, September 18

• Workshop’s web site

How should we design systems in which software and people must collaborate to perform critical or sensitive tasks? Such systems often evolve from purely human protocols for existing tasks. Software that takes over portions of human protocols must function effectively within the original operating contexts. People must learn to work effectively with a new partner that may lack flexibility in adapting to new situations. Some challenges in designing such systems concern behavior in exceptional circumstances: while people can naturally make judgment calls and circumvent a formal protocol if necessary, software must be explicitly designed to gracefully handle such situations. Others arise when people circumvent the software to perform a task more effectively, perhaps not understanding the consequences of doing so. Designing these systems requires bringing insights from the human sciences into software engineering.

This workshop seeks to bring together researchers from the human and software sciences to discuss challenges, techniques, and ideas around designing effective human-intensive software systems. Questions to explore include:

• What questions should we ask about human context while scoping requirements of such systems?
• How can the software design mitigate risks of people circumventing its security or safety features?
• How do we identify the sweet spot between a system remaining flexible for human context and reliability or security?
• How do we model interactions and acceptable exceptional actions of people and software?
• What mistakes led to failures of prior human-intensive software systems?

Insights from software engineering, HCI, cognitive science, and behavioral economics would help inform all of these questions.

For more information and to submit to the workshop, please visit the workshop’s web site.