31.10.2024SNF Project Grant for Jürgen Bernard and Mennatallah El-Assady

Jürgen Bernard (Department of Informatics) has received a prestigious SNF Project Grant on «Personalized Visual Analytics: Human Preference Elicitation for Ranking-Based Multi-Criteria Decision Support». Together, with Mennatallah El-Assady (Interactive Visualization and Intelligence Augmentation Lab, ETH), he will explore multi-criteria decision support through interactive item ranking, as an understudied research direction for people lost in choosing between thousands of relevant items (cars, houses, stocks, etc.). In interactive solutions, people will be enabled to express multiple preferences through item and attribute interactions as well as semantic visual and verbal interactions, used by algorithms to compute human-centered and personal rankings.

Their Visual Analytics approach will support this complex human decision-making task by bringing together human intellectuality with the computational power of algorithms and AI in effective human-in-the-loop approaches.

Multi-criteria decision support through item ranking is an understudied research direction. Current solutions exhibit considerable limitations, primarily due to their inability to meet the multi-faceted nature of human decision-making. Choosing between thousands of relevant items is a common task, where people are left alone with the need to express and balance multiple desirable preferences at once. Item rankings are a popular and universal approach to structuring unorganized item collections by multiple criteria at the same time.

In interactive solutions, people can express multiple preferences, used by algorithms to compute human-centered and personal rankings. Visual Analytics (VA) is a field of research that supports complex human decision-making tasks by bringing together human intellectuality with the computational power of algorithms in effective human-in-the-loop approaches.

https://www.ifi.uzh.ch/en/ivda/research/ranking-creation.html