Artificial Intelligence (AI) is significantly impacting foreseeing fields offering a better-automated decision making process and autonomous systems. Therefore, it is important to design high-quality AI systems that focus on the users’ priorities and avoid potential unethical and undesired behaviours. In the current scenario, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and AI are not separate fields but they contaminate each other and, consequently, the symbiosis between humans and AI system is fostered. Ensuring that AI development benefits humans, while providing an high-level automation, remains a primary concern. For this reason, the human-centered design approach should be adopted to create systems that being trustworthy, safe, reliable, and governance compliant are able to enhance the user’s cognitive abilities and protect they from potential risks. In this context, it is fundamental to identify guidelines to follow while designing high-quality Symbiotic AI (SAI) systems and metrics for their appropriate evaluation. Assessing the empirical validity of the proposed solution is of crucial importance and the planning and execution of a user study is one of the main aspects of this work. The research project concerns the design of SAI systems, more specifically the definition of best practices and metrics to adopt while creating and evaluating these systems. This contribution presents the preliminary results obtained during the initial part of my research. The main opportunities and challenges in this new research field are also discussed.

I am Miriana Calvano, a PhD Student in the Depertment of Computer Science at the University of Bari. I am member of the Information Visualization and Usability (IVU) Laboratory. My supervisor is Antonio PIccinno (Associate Professor at the University of Bari) and my co-supervisor is Rosa Lanzilotti (Full Professor at the University of Bari). My research interest is in Human-Computer Interaction and its relationships with Artificial Intelligence. My research project concerns the definition of metrics to assess the human-AI symbiotic relationship. I am a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the ACM SIGCHI.