Human-data interaction (HDI) presents fundamentally different challenges from traditional data management. HDI systems must meet latency, correctness, and consistency needs that stem from usability rather than query semantics; failing to meet these expectations breaks the user experience. Moreover, interfaces and systems are tightly coupled; neither can easily be optimized in isolation, and effective solutions demand their co-design. This dependence also presents a research opportunity: rather than adapt systems to interface demands, systems innovations and database theory can also inspire new interaction and visualization designs. We survey a decade of our lab's work that embraces this coupling and argue that HDI systems are the foundation for reliable, interactive, AI-driven applications.
@article{arxiv.2511.15585,
title = {A Decade of Systems for Human Data Interaction},
author = {Eugene Wu and Yiru Chen and Haneen Mohammed and Zezhou Huang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.15585},
year = {2026}
}