research area Human-Computer Interaction, research area Tools, Platforms, Frameworksconference CHI
content type paperpublished June 2023

Symphony: Composing Interactive Interfaces for Machine Learning

In collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, Ulm University

AuthorsAlex Bäuerle*, Ángel Alexander Cabrera*, Fred Hohman, Megan Maher, David Koski, Xavier Suau, Titus Barik, Dominik Moritz

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Interfaces for machine learning (ML), information and visualizations about models or data, can help practitioners build robust and responsible ML systems. Despite their benefits, recent studies of ML teams and our interviews with practitioners (n=9) showed that ML interfaces have limited adoption in practice. While existing ML interfaces are effective for specific tasks, they are not designed to be reused, explored, and shared by multiple stakeholders in cross-functional teams. To enable analysis and communication between different ML practitioners, we designed and implemented Symphony, a framework for composing interactive ML interfaces with task-specific, data-driven components that can be used across platforms such as computational notebooks and web dashboards. We developed Symphony through participatory design sessions with 10 teams (n=31), and discuss our findings from deploying Symphony to 3 production ML projects at Apple. Symphony helped ML practitioners discover previously unknown issues like data duplicates and blind spots in models while enabling them to share insights with other stakeholders.

*=Contributed equally

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