As AI technology continues to advance, the importance of human-AI collaboration becomes increasingly evident, with numerous studies exploring its potential in various fields. One vital field is data science, including feature engineering (FE), where both human ingenuity and AI capabilities play pivotal roles. Despite the existence of AI-generated recommendations for FE, there remains a limited understanding of how to effectively integrate and utilize humans' and AI's knowledge. To address this gap, we design a readily-usable prototype, human\&AI-assisted FE in Jupyter notebooks. It harnesses the strengths of humans and AI to provide feature suggestions to users, seamlessly integrating these recommendations into practical workflows. Using the prototype as a research probe, we conducted an exploratory study to gain valuable insights into data science practitioners' perceptions, usage patterns, and their potential needs when presented with feature suggestions from both humans and AI. Through qualitative analysis, we discovered that the Creator of the feature (i.e., AI or human) significantly influences users' feature selection, and the semantic clarity of the suggested feature greatly impacts its adoption rate. Furthermore, our findings indicate that users perceive both differences and complementarity between features generated by humans and those generated by AI. Lastly, based on our study results, we derived a set of design recommendations for future human&AI FE design. Our findings show the collaborative potential between humans and AI in the field of FE.

翻译：随着人工智能技术的持续进步，人机协作的重要性日益凸显，众多研究已探索其在各领域的应用潜力。数据科学（包括特征工程）是其中一个关键领域，人类的创造力和AI能力在此均发挥着核心作用。尽管目前已存在AI生成的特征工程建议，但如何有效整合与利用人类和AI的知识仍缺乏深入理解。为填补这一空白，我们设计了一个即用型原型系统——基于Jupyter notebook的人机协同特征工程工具。该系统融合人类与AI的优势，为用户提供特征建议，并将这些推荐无缝集成到实际工作流程中。我们以该原型作为研究探针，开展了一项探索性研究，旨在深入理解数据科学从业者在同时接收人类与AI特征建议时的认知模式、使用习惯及潜在需求。通过定性分析，我们发现特征的创建者（即AI或人类）显著影响用户的特征选择，且建议特征的语义清晰度对其采纳率具有重要影响。此外，我们的研究结果表明，用户能感知到人类生成特征与AI生成特征之间的差异性与互补性。最后，基于研究结果，我们为未来人机协同特征工程设计提出了一系列设计建议。本研究表明，在特征工程领域，人类与AI具有显著的协作潜力。