At the beginning of June, the “International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI) 2022 “ took place in Rome (Frascati). Marco Fries, Julia Nießner and Prof. Thomas Ludwig had submitted a workshop paper on the topic “HCI AND WORKER WELL-BEING IN MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY” with the title “Supporting Production Planning with AI from a Socio-Technical Perspective: First Insights into Current Practices and Needs”, which was accepted in the first round.

Julia Nießner presented this workshop paper and participated in the associated workshop in Rome, where a lively international exchange took place on how to improve the well-being of workers in the manufacturing sector and what challenges need to be considered by the HCI community. In addition to the area of “Explainable AI”, which the ExPro project deals with, many other possibilities to improve the well-being of workers were presented.

Julia Nießner and Marco Fries are working together in the Expro project on the question of how explainable artificial intelligence can be used to simplify the planning of very complex and constantly changing production processes in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Since production planning, especially in SMEs, takes up a large part of the daily working time, the question arises here of how this process can be made more pleasant for employees. In order for the predictions of artificial intelligence to actually be applied in practice, it is an important factor that the processes are presented in an understandable and comprehensible way for the planners. Concrete research on the ExPro project can be found here.