A spin-off of Germany's leading AI research center ...
Contaction is a spin-off of DFKI, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, the leading German research institute in the field of innovative software technology.
Founder Anthony Jameson was a Principal Researcher at DFKI for 16 years, collaborating there for 5 years with full-stack software engineer Adrian Spirescu.
... providing intelligent support for group activities
Team
Most relevant contributions of the founder
Before founding Contaction, Anthony Jameson acquired decades of experience in research and practice at the intersection of psychology and artificial intelligence.
The following contributions are especially relevant to Contaction's work.
Publication of widely cited analyses of the possible negative side-effects of systems that adapt to their users—and of interactive intelligent systems more generally.
These analyses systematically illuminate the potentially problematic phenomena in interaction with AI-based systems: their typical causes and how they can be prevented; their typical consequences and how they can be mitigated; and the evolution of these phenomena over time.
- Jameson, A. (2008). Adaptive interfaces and agents. In A. Sears & J. A. Jacko (Eds.), The human-computer interaction handbook: Fundamentals, evolving technologies and emerging applications (2nd edition) (pp. 433-458). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
- Jameson, A. (2009). Understanding and dealing with usability side effects of intelligent processing. AI Magazine, 30(4), 23-40.
Publication in 2007 of of the most widely cited comprehensive analysis to date of the problem of generating and presenting recommendations to groups.
The analysis is still widely used today, because of its forward-looking focus on human factors as well as technical issues.
- Jameson, A., & Smyth, B. (2007). Recommendation to groups. In P. Brusilovsky, A. Kobsa, & W. Nejdl (Eds.), The adaptive web: Methods and strategies of web personalization (pp. 596-627). Berlin: Springer.
ACM TiiS is the first scientific journal devoted entirely to interactions between humans and AI-based systems.
The six years as founding coeditor-in-chief involved collaboration with hundreds of relevant researchers around the world.
.
Publication in 2014 and 2026 comprehensive syntheses for designers of interactive systems of knowledge from psychology and other fields about how people make choices and how they can be helped to make better choices.
Because of the complexity of the topic and the vast and diverse amount of relevant research that exists, most people who design and evaluate interactive systems have difficulty getting a comprehensive and representative understanding of the relevant issues.
This knowledge is especially relevant now that may people agree that AI should aim to help people make better choices themselves instead of just making choices on their behalf.
- Jameson, A., Berendt, B., Gabrielli, S., Gena, C., Cena, F., Vernero, F., & Reinecke, K. (2014). Choice architecture for human-computer interaction. Foundations and Trends in Human-Computer Interaction, 7(1-2), 1-235.
- Jameson, A. (2026). The whole elephant: Understanding and supporting human choice in HCI. In J. Jacko (Ed.), Human-computer interaction handbook (4th ed.). Taylor & Francis. (Preprint available from the author on request.)
Publication in 2022 of the only comprehensive analysis to date of the relationships between individual and group decision making and recommender systems.
This analysis generalizes the models in the book Choice architecture for human-computer interaction to cover group decision making and analyses the many different ways in which recommender systems can support individual and group decisions.
- Jameson, A., Willemsen, M., & Felfernig, A. (2022). Individual and group decision making and recommender systems. In F. Ricci, L. Rokach, & B. Shapira (Eds.), Recommender systems handbook (3nd edition) (p. 789-832). Berlin: Springer.