What is Human-Centered about Human-Centered AI? A Map of the Research Landscape

TLDR

AI’s widespread use has sparked high expectations and misuse concerns, yet its design has been largely technology‑centric, prompting HCI and AI researchers to explore human‑centered AI while ambiguity remains about its definition, design, and evaluation. The study critically reviews the growing HCAI literature to characterize how the community defines human‑centered AI. The authors map HCAI research by cataloguing studies that explicitly use the terms “human‑centered artificial intelligence” or related variations, and propose future challenges and research directions. The map shows HCAI’s breadth, established clusters, and emerging Interaction with AI and Ethical AI areas, and the paper proposes a new definition, urges stronger AI‑HCI collaboration, and introduces new HCAI constructs.

Abstract

The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) across a wide range of domains comes with both high expectations of its benefits and dire predictions of misuse. While AI systems have largely been driven by a technology-centered design approach, the potential societal consequences of AI have mobilized both HCI and AI researchers towards researching human-centered artificial intelligence (HCAI). However, there remains considerable ambiguity about what it means to frame, design and evaluate HCAI. This paper presents a critical review of the large corpus of peer-reviewed literature emerging on HCAI in order to characterize what the community is defining as HCAI. Our review contributes an overview and map of HCAI research based on work that explicitly mentions the terms 'human-centered artificial intelligence' or 'human-centered machine learning' or their variations, and suggests future challenges and research directions. The map reveals the breadth of research happening in HCAI, established clusters and the emerging areas of Interaction with AI and Ethical AI. The paper contributes a new definition of HCAI, and calls for greater collaboration between AI and HCI research, and new HCAI constructs.