Hearing Ambiguity: Exploring Beyond-Gender Impressions of Artificial Ambiguous VoicesVoice perception plays a fundamental role in all types of interactions, from human-to-human communication to human-technology interaction. When it comes to technology, we sometimes have the option to choose the type of voice we want to hear. But why is the default (almost) always a feminine or masculine voice? In this research, we evaluated user perceptions of gender-ambiguous voices, a relatively unexplored option. In our novel comparative study, we evaluated six gender-ambiguous voices with participants of diverse gender identities (men, women, and non-binary individuals), with 74 participants in each group. Additionally, half of the participants were told in advance that the voices had been designed to be gender-ambiguous, and half were not. We aimed to move beyond subjective perceptions of voice gender by exploring how such voices are perceived across different dimensions: trustworthiness, appeal, comfort, anthropomorphism, and aversion. Our findings reveal that while men and women had similar perceptions, non-binary participants rated the voices more negatively, with lower trust and higher aversion. Interestingly, priming participants about the voices' ambiguity did not significantly affect overall perceptions, though it increased critical evaluations from non-binary individuals. These findings contribute to growing research on gender-ambiguous voices by providing perceptual comparisons of multiple voices and highlighting the need for more inclusive voice designs that appeal to non-binary users.2025MCMartina De Cet et al.Voice User Interface (VUI) DesignMultilingual & Cross-Cultural Voice InteractionAgent Personality & AnthropomorphismCUI
Crafting the Unspoken: Engaging Japanese Older Adults with Data Physicalization WorkshopsEngaging individuals in creating physical representations of personal data facilitates storytelling and collaborative reflection. However, its potential to encourage older adults to share their personal stories remains underexplored. This study introduces a craft-centered data physicalization approach where participants create tangible representations of their emotions and experiences related to community events, involving both event attendees and event organizers, through a series of workshops. This collaborative crafting process encourage group discussions and collective reflections on past experiences, enabling participants to express thoughts and feelings that would otherwise remain unspoken. Our work contributes a practical workshop approach that merges craft practice with data physicalization to support deep social expressions and connections among older adults.2025CLChengtian Li et al.Data PhysicalizationMakerspace CultureEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsDIS
Unintended, Percolated Work: Overlooked Opportunities for Collaboration Between Informal Caregivers and Healthcare Professionals During the End-Of-Life Care ProcessBereavement often places a psychological burden on families and should be addressed appropriately. Although end-of-life care is a collaborative activity with interaction between family caregivers and medical professionals, further research is needed to explore family caregivers’ support needs as collaborative workers and the challenges they face. This study examined the collaboration during the end-of-life process between family caregivers and medical professionals to understand the cooperative activities and factors surrounding them based on unrealized or regrettable experiences during end-of-life care. Semi-structured interviews with bereaved family caregivers who provided end-of-life care and medical professionals who provided support revealed that family caregivers’ aspirations and medical professionals’ support for family caregivers crossed paths, steering end-of-life caregiving in an unintended direction. Characteristic work carried out by each actor in this situation is defined as "unintended, percolated work" and considered an overlooked collaboration opportunity, proposing support suggestions for handling family caregivers’ original intentions and needs.2025SSShun Saito et al.Institute of Science Tokyo, School of Environment and Society, Department of Innovation ScienceElderly Care & Dementia SupportAging-in-Place Assistance SystemsCHI
Inter(sectional) Alia(s): Ambiguity in Voice Agent Identity via Intersectional Japanese Self-ReferentsConversational agents that mimic people have raised questions about the ethics of anthropomorphizing machines with human social identity cues. Critics have also questioned assumptions of identity neutrality in humanlike agents. Recent work has revealed that intersectional Japanese pronouns can elicit complex and sometimes evasive impressions of agent identity. Yet, the role of other ``neutral'' non-pronominal self-referents (NPSR) and voice as a socially expressive medium remains unexplored. In a crowdsourcing study, Japanese participants (N=204) evaluated three ChatGPT voices (Juniper, Breeze, and Ember) using seven self-referents. We found strong evidence of voice gendering alongside the potential of intersectional self-referents to evade gendering, i.e., ambiguity through neutrality and elusiveness. Notably, perceptions of age and formality intersected with gendering as per sociolinguistic theories, especially ぼく (boku) and わたくし (watakushi). This work provides a nuanced take on agent identity perceptions and champions intersectional and culturally-sensitive work on voice agents.2025TFTakao Fujii et al.Institute of Science Tokyo, Department of Industrial Engineering and EconomicsIntelligent Voice Assistants (Alexa, Siri, etc.)Multilingual & Cross-Cultural Voice InteractionAgent Personality & AnthropomorphismCHI
Super Kawaii Vocalics: Amplifying the “Cute” Factor in Computer Voice"Kawaii" is the Japanese concept of cute, which carries sociocultural connotations related to social identities and emotional responses. Yet, virtually all work to date has focused on the visual side of kawaii, including in studies of computer agents and social robots. In pursuit of formalizing the new science of kawaii vocalics, we explored what elements of voice relate to kawaii and how they might be manipulated, manually and automatically. We conducted a four-phase study (grand 𝑁 = 512) with two varieties of computer voices: text-to-speech (TTS) and game character voices. We found kawaii "sweet spots" through manipulation of fundamental and formant frequencies, but only for certain voices and to a certain extent. Findings also suggest a ceiling effect for the kawaii vocalics of certain voices. We offer empirical validation of the preliminary kawaii vocalics model and an elementary method for manipulating kawaii perceptions of computer voice.2025YMYuto Mandai et al.Tokyo Institute of Technology, Department of Industrial Engineering and EconomicsIntelligent Voice Assistants (Alexa, Siri, etc.)Agent Personality & AnthropomorphismCHI
PiaMuscle: Improving Piano Skill Acquisition by Cost-effectively Estimating and Visualizing Activities of Miniature Hand MusclesUnderstanding neuromusculoskeletal mechanisms significantly impacts skill specialization and proficiency. While existing methods can infer large muscle activities during gross motor movements, the estimation of dexterous motor control involving miniature muscles remains underexplored. Targeting the coordinated hand muscles in advanced piano performance, we learn spatiotemporal discrete representations of electromyography (EMG) data and hand postures utilizing a multimodal dataset. Subsequently, we train a precise and cost-effective neural network model. Based on this model, PiaMuscle is introduced to investigate if visualizing muscle activities during piano training enhances piano performance. Quantitative and qualitative results of a user study with highly skilled professional pianists demonstrate that PiaMuscle provides reliable muscle activation data to support and optimize force control. Our research underscores the potential of a naturalistic workflow to estimate small muscles' activities from readily accessible human-centric information and more accurately when combined with tool-centric data, thereby enhancing skill acquisition.2025RLRuofan Liu et al.Tokyo Institute of Technology, School of Computing; Sony Computer Science Laboratories Inc.Human Pose & Activity RecognitionBiosensors & Physiological MonitoringCHI
SolePoser: Real-Time 3D Human Pose Estimation using Insole Pressure SensorsWe propose SolePoser, a real-time 3D pose estimation system that leverages only a single pair of insole sensors. Unlike conventional methods relying on fixed cameras or bulky wearable sensors, our approach offers minimal and natural setup requirements. The proposed system utilizes pressure and IMU sensors embedded in insoles to capture the body weight's pressure distribution at the feet and its 6 DoF acceleration. This information is used to estimate the 3D full-body joint position by a two-stream transformer network. A novel double-cycle consistency loss and a cross-attention module are further introduced to learn the relationship between 3D foot positions and their pressure distributions. We also introduced two different datasets of sports and daily exercises, offering 908k frames across eight different activities. Our experiments show that our method's performance is on par with top-performing approaches, which utilize more IMUs and even outperform third-person-view camera-based methods in certain scenarios.2024EWJason Wu et al.Foot & Wrist InteractionHuman Pose & Activity RecognitionUIST
Cross-Cultural Validation of Partner Models for Voice User Interfaces Recent research has begun to assess people's perceptions of voice user interfaces (VUIs) as dialogue partners, termed partner models. Current self-report measures are only available in English, limiting research to English-speaking users. To improve the diversity of user samples and contexts that inform partner modelling research, we translated, localized, and evaluated the Partner Modelling Questionnaire (PMQ) for non-English speaking Western (German, n=185) and East Asian (Japanese, n=198) cohorts where VUI use is popular. Through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), we find that the scale produces equivalent levels of “goodness-to-fit” for both our German and Japanese translations, confirming its cross-cultural validity. Still, the structure of the communicative flexibility factor did not replicate directly across Western and East Asian cohorts. We discuss how our translations can open up critical research on cultural similarities and differences in partner model use and design, whilst highlighting the challenges for ensuring accurate translation across cultural contexts.2024KSKatie Seaborn et al.Voice User Interface (VUI) DesignMultilingual & Cross-Cultural Voice InteractionCUI
Silver-Tongued and Sundry: Exploring Intersectional Pronouns with ChatGPTChatGPT is a conversational agent built on a large language model. Trained on a significant portion of human output, ChatGPT can mimic people to a degree. As such, we need to consider what social identities ChatGPT simulates (or can be designed to simulate). In this study, we explored the case of identity simulation through Japanese first-person pronouns, which are tightly connected to social identities in intersectional ways, i.e., intersectional pronouns. We conducted a controlled online experiment where people from two regions in Japan (Kanto and Kinki) witnessed interactions with ChatGPT using ten sets of first-person pronouns. We discovered that pronouns alone can evoke perceptions of social identities in ChatGPT at the intersections of gender, age, region, and formality, with caveats. This work highlights the importance of pronoun use for social identity simulation, provides a language-based methodology for culturally-sensitive persona development, and advances the potential of intersectional identities in intelligent agents.2024TFTakao Fujii et al.Tokyo Institute of TechnologyMultilingual & Cross-Cultural Voice InteractionAgent Personality & AnthropomorphismHuman-LLM CollaborationCHI
MOSion: Gaze Guidance with Motion-triggered Visual Cues by Mosaic PatternsWe propose a gaze-guiding method called MOSion to adjust the guiding strength reacted to observers’ motion based on a high-speed projector and the afterimage effect in the human vision system. Our method decomposes the target area into mosaic patterns to embed visual cues in the perceived images. The patterns can only direct the attention of the moving observers to the target area. The stopping observer can see the original image with little distortion because of light integration in the visual perception. The pre computation of the patterns provides the adaptive guiding effect without tracking devices and computational costs depending on the movements. The evaluation and the user study show that the mosaic decomposition enhances the perceived saliency with a few visual artifacts, especially in moving conditions. Our method embedded in white lights works in various situations such as planar posters, advertisements, and curved objects.2024AKArisa Kohtani et al.Tokyo Institute of TechnologyEye Tracking & Gaze InteractionVisualization Perception & CognitionCHI
MR Microsurgical Suture Training System with Level-Appropriate SupportThe integration of advanced technologies in healthcare necessitates the development of systems accommodating the daily routines in medical practices. Neurosurgeons, in particular, require extensive practice in microsurgical suturing in the long term, even in the busy routine of a medical practice. This study collaboratively developed a Mixed Reality system with neurosurgeons to support self-training in microscopic suturing. Based on the neurosurgeons' opinions, we implemented a level-appropriate microsurgical suture training system. For novices, the system offers shadow-matching training to support the practice of precise movements under the high-sensitivity environment of the microscope. For intermediates, it provides a real-time feedback system, which allows users to practice attention to details. Evaluation involved testing the novice system on students with no medical background and the intermediate system on neurosurgery residents. The effectiveness of the system was demonstrated through the experimental results and subsequent discussion.2024YTYuka Tashiro et al.Tokyo Institute of TechnologyMixed Reality WorkspacesVR Medical Training & RehabilitationRobots in Education & HealthcareCHI
Play Across Boundaries: Exploring Cross-Cultural Maldaimonic Game ExperiencesMaldaimonic game experiences occur when people engage in personally fulfilling play through egocentric, destructive, and/or exploitative acts. Initial qualitative work verified this orientation and experiential construct for English-speaking Westerners. In this comparative mixed methods study, we explored whether and how maldaimonic game experiences and orientations play out in Japan, an Eastern gaming capital that may have cultural values incongruous with the Western philosophical basis underlying maldaimonia. We present findings anchored to the initial frameworks on maldaimonia in game experiences that show little divergence between the Japanese and US cohorts. We also extend the qualitative findings with quantitative measures on affect, player experience, and the related constructs of hedonia and eudaimonia. We confirm this novel construct for Japan and set the stage for scale development.2024KSKatie Seaborn et al.Tokyo Institute of TechnologyRole-Playing & Narrative GamesChronic Disease Self-Management (Diabetes, Hypertension, etc.)Inclusive DesignCHI
VabricBeads : Variable Stiffness Structured Fabric using Artificial Muscle in Woven BeadsWoven beads, a structured fabric category, comprises interconnected rows of beads joined by fiber strands. While the stiffness of woven beads can be adjusted by relying on fiber tension during fabrication, the resulting shape and stiffness properties remain fixed. This study explores the potential of tunable shape and stiffness in woven beads, offering adaptability in comfort, functionality, and form factor. By leveraging Pneumatic Artificial Muscles (PAMs), we employ a state-of-the-art technique for dynamically modulating fabric stiffness through mechanical constraints in bead form. This approach enables a modular and scalable fabrication process, fostering programmability in mechanical properties. Our investigation encompasses diverse bead iterations and stitching patterns to broaden their applicability in fabric behavior including degree of freedom, stretchability, permeability, and textures. We evaluate the mechanical properties to differentiate design capabilities, and present techniques for locally adjusting stiffness. We showcase the versatility through applications, including variable stiffness wearables and shape-changing everyday objects.2024JPJefferson Pardomuan et al.Tokyo Institute of TechnologyHaptic WearablesShape-Changing Interfaces & Soft Robotic MaterialsShape-Changing Materials & 4D PrintingCHI
The Impact of Social Norms on Hybrid Workers’ Well-Being: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Japan and the United StatesPrevious research has shown that workplace social norms influence employee well-being. However, such norms vary based on the cultures in which workplaces are embedded, suggesting that cultural differences may influence perceived norms about when and where work should occur. These differences, in turn, could impact employee well-being. Accordingly, through the lenses of cultural tightness-looseness and individualism-collectivism, this paper investigates cultural differences in perceived social norms, and the relationship between those norms and hybrid workers' well-being. We conducted a survey of 1,000 Japanese and 1,000 American hybrid workers. Results indicated that American respondents perceived stronger norms and demonstrated a higher willingness to conform to norms compared to Japanese respondents. Additionally, strong injunctive norms were positively associated with well-being among Americans but not among Japanese. Interviews (N = 24) showed that Japanese perceived injunctive norms negatively, while Americans saw them positively. We discuss implications for future remote-collaboration technologies in hybrid-work settings.2024WAWataru Akahori et al.NTTPrivacy by Design & User ControlRemote Work Tools & ExperienceDistributed Team CollaborationCHI
Efficient Adaptive Beacon Deployment Optimization for Indoor Crowd Monitoring Applications"The indoor crowd density monitoring system using BLE beacons is one of the effective ways to prevent overcrowded indoor situations. The indoor crowd density monitoring system consists of a mobile application at the user's side and the beacon sensor network as the infrastructure. Since the performance of crowd density monitoring highly depends on how BLE beacons are placed, BLE beacon placement optimization is fundamental research work. This research proposes a beacon deployment method EABeD to incrementally place the beacons adaptively to the latest signal propagation status. Also, EABeD reduces most walking and measurement labor costs by applying Bayesian optimization and the walking distance optimization algorithm. We conducted the placement optimization experiment in the wild environment and compared the results with placements derived by the simulation-based method and people. The result shows that our proposed method can achieve 26.4% higher detection coverage than the simulation-based approach, 23.2% and 5.2% higher detection coverage than the inexperienced person's solution and the expert's solution. As for the labor cost reduction, our proposed method can reduce 90.2% of the walking distance and 74.4% of the optimization time compared with optimization by the dense data gathering method. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3569462"2023YZYang Zhen et al.Context-Aware ComputingSmart Cities & Urban SensingUbiComp
Wizundry: A Cooperative Wizard of Oz Platform for Simulating Future Speech-based Interfaces with Multiple WizardsWizard of Oz (WoZ) as a prototyping method has been used to simulate intelligent user interfaces, particularly for speech-based systems. However, as our societies' expectations on artificial intelligence (AI) grows, the question remains whether a single Wizard is sufficient for it to simulate smarter systems and more complex interactions. Optimistic visions of 'what artificial intelligence (AI) can do' places demands on WoZ platforms to simulate smarter systems and more complex interactions. This raises the question of whether the typical approach of employing a single Wizard is sufficient. Moreover, while existing work has employed multiple Wizards in WoZ studies, a Multi-Wizard approach has not been systematically studied in terms of feasibility, effectiveness, and challenges. We offer Wizundry, a real-time, web-based WoZ platform that allows multiple Wizards to collaboratively operate a speech-to-text based system remotely. We outline the design and technical specifications of our open-source platform, which we iterated over two design phases. We report on two studies in which participant-Wizards were tasked with negotiating how to cooperatively simulate an interface that can handle natural speech for dictation and text editing as well as other intelligent text processing tasks. We offer qualitative findings on the Multi-Wizard experience for Dyads and Triads of Wizards. Our findings reveal the promises and challenges of the Multi-Wizard approach and open up new research questions.2023SHSiying Hu et al.MethodsCSCW
Impacts of the Strength and Conformity of Social Norms on Well-Being: A Mixed-Method Study Among Hybrid Workers in JapanPrevious studies have suggested that organizational social norms can positively affect employee well-being. However, such social norms have not been well developed during the post-COVID-19 transition to hybrid work, which combines office and remote work, and it is unclear how employees' perceptions of social norms for hybrid work affect their well-being. In this study, we investigated the impact of social norms for hybrid work on the well-being of hybrid workers living in Japan through a mixed-method approach consisting of an online survey (n = 212) and semi-structured interviews (n = 20). The results indicate that hybrid workers who feel subject to strong social norms have lower well-being. Conversely, those who are more willing to conform to social norms have higher well-being. Given our findings, we discuss implications for the design of systems to help hybrid workers conform to organizational social norms and to improve their well-being.2023WAWataru Akahori et al.NTTRemote Work Tools & ExperienceWorkplace Wellbeing & Work StressCHI
Linguistic Dead-Ends and Alphabet Soup: Finding Dark Patterns in Japanese AppsDark patterns are deceptive and malicious properties of user interfaces that lead the end-user to do something different from intended or expected. While now a key topic in critical computing, most work has been conducted in Western contexts. Japan, with its booming app market, is a relatively uncharted context that offers culturally- and linguistically-sensitive differences in design standards, contexts of use, values, and language, all of which could influence the presence and expression of dark patterns. In this work, we analyzed 200 popular mobile apps in the Japanese market. We found that most apps had dark patterns, with an average of 3.9 per app. We also identified a new class of dark pattern: “Linguistic Dead-Ends” in the forms of “Untranslation” and “Alphabet Soup.” We outline the implications for design and research practice, especially for future cross-cultural research on dark patterns.2023SHShun Hidaka et al.Tokyo Institute of TechnologyDark Patterns RecognitionCHI
Transcending the "Male Code": Implicit Masculine Biases in NLP ContextsCritical scholarship has elevated the problem of gender bias in data sets used to train virtual assistants (VAs). Most work has focused on explicit biases in language, especially against women, girls, femme-identifying people, and genderqueer folk; implicit associations through word embeddings; and limited models of gender and masculinities, especially toxic masculinities, conflation of sex and gender, and a sex/gender binary framing of the masculine as diametric to the feminine. Yet, we must also interrogate how masculinities are “coded” into language and the assumption of “male” as the linguistic default: implicit masculine biases. To this end, we examined two natural language processing (NLP) data sets. We found that when gendered language was present, so were gender biases and especially masculine biases. Moreover, these biases related in nuanced ways to the NLP context. We offer a new dictionary called AVA that covers ambiguous associations between gendered language and the language of VAs.2023KSKatie Seaborn et al.Tokyo Institute of TechnologyAgent Personality & AnthropomorphismAI Ethics, Fairness & AccountabilityCHI
OmniSense: Exploring Novel Input Sensing and Interaction Techniques on Mobile Device with an Omni-Directional CameraAn omni-directional (360°) camera captures the entire viewing sphere surrounding its optical center. Such cameras are growing in use to create highly immersive content and viewing experiences. When such a camera is held by a user, the view includes the user's hand grip, finger, body pose, face, and the surrounding environment, providing a complete understanding of the visual world and context around it. This capability opens up numerous possibilities for rich mobile input sensing. In OmniSense, we explore the broad input design space for mobile devices with a built-in omni-directional camera and broadly categorize them into three sensing pillars: i) near device ii) around device and iii) surrounding device. In addition we explore potential use cases and applications that leverage these sensing capabilities to solve user needs. Following this, we develop a working system to put these concepts into action, by leveraging these sensing capabilities to enable potential use cases and applications. We studied the system in a technical evaluation and a preliminary user study to gain initial feedback and insights. Collectively these techniques illustrate how a single, omni-purpose sensor on a mobile device affords many compelling ways to enable expressive input, while also affording a broad range of novel applications that improve user experience during mobile interaction.2023HYHui-Shyong Yeo et al.HuaweiEye Tracking & Gaze InteractionImmersion & Presence Research360° Video & Panoramic ContentCHI