On September 8th, 2023 at 11.00 am Mersedeh Sadeghi, Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Cologne, will hold a seminar on "SmartEx: A Framework for Generating User-Centric Explanations in Smart Environments" in DEIB PT1 Room.

Explainability has emerged as a critical aspect of complex systems, empowering them to provide insightful justifications for their behaviors. In the realm of smart environments, where data from various sensors and external sources converge, and multiple stakeholders' rules come into play to control a range of actuators, the need for comprehensible explanations to users becomes paramount. However, existing approaches in the domain often fall short, as they furnish static explanations, irrespective of the recipient's context and fail to address the user's perspective adequately.

To address these limitations, we introduce SmartEx, a pioneering framework that infuses user-centric explanations into smart environments. Our focus is on moving beyond algorithmic explanations, which may not be easily digestible by the ordinary end-users living in smart environments. Instead, our approach revolves around the concept of user-centric explanations, which are context-aware, personalized, and surpass purely causal reasoning.
In this seminar talk, I present our formalized conceptual model for user-centric explanations, illustrating how it enhances the understanding of smart environment behaviors. Additionally, we showcase a reference architecture for a state-of-the-art explanation generation machine that embodies our approach. Our work represents a pioneering technical approach, marking a significant advancement in the domain of smart environments by equipping them with the capability to offer user-centric explanations.

Mersedeh Sadeghi obtained her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Politecnico di Milano, where her research activity particularly focused on context-aware pervasive systems and IoT applications. Currently, she is pursuing her postdoctoral research at the University of Cologne. Her main research interest includes software engineering, distributed systems, semantic-aware systems, and the explainability of context-aware and self-adaptive cyber-physical systems.