human-computer interaction

We report some challenges encountered in developing Prometheus, a software environment that supports the construction and revision of explanatory scientific models. Our responses to these challenges include the use of quantitative processes, to encode models and background knowledge, and the combination of AND/OR search through a space of model structures with gradient descent to estimate parameters.

We present a language for stating process models and background knowledge in terms familiar to scientists, along with an interactive environment for knowledge discovery that lets the user construct, edit, and visualize scientific models, use them to make predictions, and revise them to better fit available data.