Towards Visual Analytics for Explainable AI in Industrial Applications

As the levels of automation and reliance on modern artificial intelligence (AI) approaches increase across multiple industries, the importance of the human-centered perspective becomes more evident. Various actors in such industrial applications, including equipment operators and decision makers, have their needs and preferences that often do not align with the decisions produced by black-box models, potentially leading to mistrust and wasted productivity gain opportunities. In this paper, we examine these issues through the lenses of visual analytics and, more broadly, interactive visualization, and we argue that the methods and techniques from these fields can lead to advances in both academic research and industrial innovations concerning the explainability of AI models. To address the existing gap within and across the research and application fields, we propose a conceptual framework for visual analytics design and evaluation for such scenarios, followed by a preliminary roadmap and call to action for the respective communities.