DFG-Project Dare2Del

Focus of Dare2Del is to support employees in administration and production to regulate their digital knowledge by hiding and deleting irrelevant digital objects. Digital objects that have become irrelevant can hinder the search for information, delay decision-making processes, divert attention away from the actual task and thus impair work performance and well-being. With the ever growing amount of digital data, it becomes more and more important that employees are supported in getting rid of digital clutter (see, e.g. “Desktop Messie” Video, in German) and in avoiding digital hoarding (see, e.g. Zeit Online article, in German).

In the interdisciplinary project, we empirically research intentional forgetting in the working context, on the other, we are developing an interactive, intelligent assistance system that helps employees to detect and delete irrelevant digital objects. Dare2Del is designed as a cognitive companion, that is system decisions have to be made transparent and comprehensible to the user in form of explanations. The system should be able to take into account general and domain-specific knowledge such as specific regulations of an organisation. Decisions which digital objects are irrelevant and consequently can be deleted partially can be based on such organisatorial rules. However, they also strongly depend on user characteristics such as personal preferences and personality traits. To fulfil these requirements, Dare2Del is based on an interactive machine learning approach based on inductive logic programming (ILP). In the project, the generation of different types of expalantions (verbal, example-based) and the use of mutual explanations to guide model adaption and to inspire trust is investigated. For more information about the psychological aspects of Dare2Del refer to Chair of Work and Organizational Psychology’s website.

Dare2Del Video