Special issue of interacting with computers: Symbiotic performance between humans and intelligent systems

Performance assessment and enhancement strategies have often focused upon the user or the intelligent technology rather than the interaction between the two. Where system interaction has occurred, we have often settled for co-operation rather than collaboration or symbiosis. This special issue is devoted to the topic of the symbiotic relationship that people have with intelligent systems, and nontraditional computer support for design and user evaluation of this relationship. An objective in coordinating this issue was to encourage a range of papers that addressed the nature of the relationship between human and intelligent agents, the ways in which performance could be augmented, measured and improved, and the need for additional and nontraditional measures of performance for evaluating the anticipated progress as people interact with intelligent computer systems. The potential benefit of such measurement tools and techniques has been recognized in numerous domains including education, information visualization, digital libraries, and computer supported cooperative work. The summaries from several conferences and workshops on human-centered systems contain many references to this subject. However, many questions still remain on how and what to measure for interactive symbiotic systems. Currently, if systems are tested, designers rely on users to test their systems. While this constitutes an acceptable metric it also raises many issues including comparison of skills of users, standardization of test situations, amount of training given, help given, and time allotted for the evaluation. In addition, the influence of the interactions on the users’ performance is rarely studied.