Teens as Co-Researchers: Advocating for Disruptive Change to Engage Youth Meaningfully in Online Safety Research and the Design of Social MediaAcademic research is largely an adult endeavor that creates systemic power imbalances when studying teen-centered topics, such as adolescent online safety. To rectify this problem, we engaged seven teens as co-researchers through a year-and-a-half-long Youth Advisory Board (YAB) program to critically assess our research processes, lead online safety solutions, and to reflect on their experiences participating in a YAB. Teens pushed back on standard research practices such as parental consent, sought decision-making power in study documentation, design, and execution, and gave more meaningful feedback on research protocols when more deeply involved in the research. For safety interventions, teens proposed both incremental changes for social media platforms (e.g., advanced privacy settings) and more disruptive changes (e.g., decentralized social media platforms) that enhance individual control, digital resilience, and equity. For the YAB, teens highlighted challenges, such as losing momentum over time, lack of collaborative opportunities, and competing interests, fueling frustrations and rifts in engagement. Our research underscores the value of involving teens as co-partners in shaping online safety research. Finally, we provide design implications for social media safety interventions that strengthen teens' agency and actionable guidelines for developing future long-term programs to ensure meaningful contributions to online safety research.2025NANaima Samreen Ali et al.Reflecting on MethodologyCSCW
Conflict in Community-Based Design: A Case Study of a Relationship BreakdownCommunity-based design efforts rightly seek to reduce the power differences between researchers and community participants by aligning with community values and furthering their priorities. However, what should designers do when key community members' practices seem to enact an oppressive and harmful structure? We reflect on our two-year-long engagement with a non-profit organization in southern India that supports women subjected to domestic abuse or facing mental health crises. We highlight the organizational gaps in knowledge management and transfer, which became an avenue for our design intervention. During design, we encountered practices that upheld caste hierarchies. These practices were expected to be incorporated into our technology. Anticipating harms to indirect stakeholders, we resisted this incorporation. It led to a breakdown in the relationship. Reflecting on this experience, we outline pluralistic pathways that community-based designers might inhabit when navigating value conflicts. These include making space for reflection before and during engagements, strategically repositioning through role reframing or appreciative inquiry, and exiting the engagement if necessary.2025AGAlekhya Gandu et al.Reflecting on MethodologyCSCW
Online Safety for All: Sociocultural Insights from a Systematic Review of Youth Online Safety in the Global SouthYouth online safety research in HCI has historically centered on perspectives from the Global North, often overlooking the unique particularities and cultural contexts of regions in the Global South. This paper presents a systematic review of 66 youth online safety studies published between 2014 and 2024, specifically focusing on regions in the Global South. Our findings reveal a concentrated research focus in Asian countries and predominance of quantitative methods. We also found limited research on marginalized youth populations and a primary focus on risks related to cyberbullying. Our analysis underscores the critical role of cultural factors in shaping online safety, highlighting the need for educational approaches that integrate social dynamics and awareness. We propose methodological recommendations and a future research agenda that encourages the adoption of situated, culturally sensitive methodologies and youth-centered approaches to researching youth online safety regions in the Global South. This paper advocates for greater inclusivity in youth online safety research, emphasizing the importance of addressing varied sociocultural contexts to better understand and meet the online safety needs of youth in the Global South.2025OOOzioma Collins Oguine et al.Trust, Safety, and Privacy in Online CommunitiesCSCW
“Let’s Jump into More Creative Avatars and Take this Brainstorm to the Flying Platform:” Playful Prototypes of VR Meeting Support ToolsMost videoconferencing technologies presently struggle to keep people engaged during team meetings. Recent research points to the potential of social virtual and extended reality (VR/XR) technologies to transform remote meetings, offering innovative approaches through the design of novel meeting tools. This pictorial presents the design of five such prototypes of VR meeting support tools: conversation visualization, embodied affinity signaling, tools for avatar and space modulation, and time management. Deployed in a custom-built Mozilla Hubs environment, this toolkit was tested with five expert user teams in a two-fold study: researcher-moderated VR workshops (N=28) and unmoderated VR meetings (N=40). In this pictorial, the focus is on the design of the prototypes, with highlights of select results from participants’ feedback and discussion of the perceived merit of the prototypes’ design in supporting meeting interactions.2025AOAnya Osborne et al.Social & Collaborative VRMixed Reality WorkspacesImmersion & Presence ResearchDIS
Promoting Comprehension and Engagement in Introductory Data and Statistics for Blind and Low-Vision Students: A Co-Design StudyStatistical literacy involves understanding, interpreting, and critically evaluating statistical information in a contextually grounded way. Current instructional practices rely heavily on visual techniques, which renders them inaccessible to students who are blind or have low vision (BLV). To bridge this gap, we formed an extended co-design partnership with a statistics teacher, a teacher for students with visual impairments (TVI), and two BLV students to develop accessibility-first practices for building statistical literacy. Through several months of collaboration that included discussion, exploration, design, and evaluation, we identified specific approaches to promote comprehension and engagement. The enactive approaches we designed, using scaffolding and timely feedback, fostered insights through pattern recognition and analogical reasoning. Additionally, inquiry-based methods promoted contextually situated reasoning and reflection on how statistics can improve students' lives and communities. We present these findings alongside participants’ experiences and discuss their implications for inclusive learning frameworks and tools.2025DFDanyang Fan et al.Stanford University, Mechanical EngineeringVisual Impairment Technologies (Screen Readers, Tactile Graphics, Braille)Special Education TechnologyCHI
CORAL: A Cognitively Assistive Robot for Personalized Neurorehabilitation at HomeCognitively assistive robots (CARs) have great potential to extend the reach of clinical interventions to the home. Due to the wide variety of cognitive abilities and rehabilitation goals, it is critical that these systems are flexible and adaptable in order to support rapid and accurate implementation of intervention content that is grounded in existing clinical practice. To this end, we detail the system architecture of CORAL (COgnitively assistive Robot for Adaptation and Learning), an adaptable robot system we developed in collaboration with our key stakeholders: clinicians and people with mild cognitive impairment (PwMCI). We implemented a well-validated compensatory cognitive training (CCT) intervention on CORAL, which it autonomously delivers to PwMCI. We deployed CORAL in the homes of these stakeholders in order to evaluate and gain initial feedback on the system. Our findings inform how HRI researchers can design more longitudinal and autonomous CARs for cognitive interventions. Furthermore, we will release elements of CORAL as open source to support flexible and adaptable home-deployed robots. Thus, CORAL will enable the HRI community to deploy quality interventions to robots, and ultimately increase the accessibility and extendability of these interventions.2024ABAnya Bouzida et al.Domestic RobotsRobots in Education & HealthcareHRI
Being Social in VR Meetings: A Landscape Analysis of Current Tools In the 21st century workplace (especially in COVID times), much human social interaction occurs during virtual meetings. Unlike traditional screen-based remote meetings, VR meetings promise a more richly embodied form of communication. This paper maps the experiential terrain of seven commercial VR meeting applications, with a particular focus on the range of shared social experiences and collaborative abilities these applications may enable or constrain. We examine a range of applications including Spatial, Glue VR, MeetinVR, Mozilla Hubs, VRChat, AltspaceVR, and Rec Room. We analyze and map avatar system strategies, meeting environments and in-world cues, meeting invitation model, and different models of participation. In addition, we argue that commercial applications for meeting in VR that cater to workplace contexts might benefit from borrowing some of the strategies used in more leisure-focused environments for supporting social interaction.2023AOAnya Osborne et al.Social & Collaborative VRMixed Reality WorkspacesDIS
Intimate Narratives: An Assets-Based Approach To Develop Holistic Perspectives of Student Mothers’ Lives and Their Use of Technology in ParentingThis paper details our collaborative approach in capturing a holistic understanding of parental technology use through an assets-based framework. We steer the focus away from the design of technology as the central force of technological innovation, and instead support participants to reflect and describe intimate details that highlight specific use-contexts of technology in their lives. We leverage a group of foreign graduate student mothers' self-described unique strengths to gain an in-depth account of their lived experiences with technology. As research participants and co-authors, our collaborators elicit intimate narratives about meaningful events in their lives, bringing social and cultural aspects of their lived experience to the forefront, and thus providing broader context of their use of technology. We detail and reflect upon our approach of promoting user agency by creating an affinity group, fostering a safe and intimate space for research engagement, and describe the implications of using our adapted research methodology in intimate settings. We conclude by highlighting the various ways in which technology facilitates foreign student parenting, as well as the ways in which it serves as a temporary band-aid solution, prompting consideration of larger social issues.2022NBNeelma Bhatti et al.Parenting and Families; Parenting and FamiliesCSCW
Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning to Increase Video Accessibility for Visually Impaired and Blind UsersVideo accessibility is crucial for blind and visually impaired individuals for education, employment, and entertainment purposes. However, professional video descriptions are costly and time-consuming. Volunteer-created video descriptions could be a promising alternative, however, they can vary in quality and can be intimidating for novice describers. We developed a Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning (HILML) approach to video description by automating video text generation and scene segmentation and allowing humans to edit the output. The HILML approach facilitates human-machine collaboration to produce high quality video descriptions while keeping a low barrier to entry for volunteer describers. Our HILML system was significantly faster and easier to use for first-time video describers compared to a human-only control condition with no machine learning assistance. The quality of the video descriptions and understanding of the topic created by the HILML system compared to the human-only condition were rated as being significantly higher by blind and visually impaired users.2020BYBeste F Yuksel et al.Generative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)Human-LLM CollaborationVisual Impairment Technologies (Screen Readers, Tactile Graphics, Braille)DIS