A Little Too Personal: Effects of Standardization versus Personalization on Job Acquisition, Work Completion, and Revenue for Online FreelancersAs more individuals consider permanently working from home, the online labor market continues to grow as an alternative working environment. While the flexibility and autonomy of these online gigs attracts many workers, success depends critically upon self-management and workers' efficient allocation of scarce resources. To achieve this, freelancers may develop alternative work strategies, employing highly standardized schedules and communication patterns while taking on large work volumes, or engaging in smaller numbers of jobs whilst tailoring their activities to build relationships with individual employers. In this study, we consider this contrast in relation to worker communication patterns. We demonstrate the heterogeneous effects of standardization versus personalization across different stages of a project and examine the relative impact on job acquisition, project completion, and earnings. Our findings can inform the design of platforms and various worker support tools for the gig economy.2022JHJane Hsieh et al.Carnegie Mellon UniversityPrivacy by Design & User ControlGig Economy PlatformsCHI
A Human-Centered Systematic Literature Review of the Computational Approaches for Online Sexual Risk DetectionIn the era of big data and artificial intelligence, online risk detection has become a popular research topic. From detecting online harassment to the sexual predation of youth, the state-of-the-art in computational risk detection has the potential to protect particularly vulnerable populations from online victimization. Yet, this is a high-risk, high-reward endeavor that requires a systematic and human-centered approach to synthesize disparate bodies of research across different application domains, so that we can identify best practices, potential gaps, and set a strategic research agenda for leveraging these approaches in a way that betters society. Therefore, we conducted a comprehensive literature review to analyze 73 peer-reviewed articles on computational approaches utilizing text or meta-data/multimedia for online sexual risk detection. We identified sexual grooming (75%), sex trafficking (12%), and sexual harassment and/or abuse (12%) as the three types of sexual risk detection present in the extant literature. Furthermore, we found that the majority (93%) of this work has focused on identifying sexual predators after-the-fact, rather than taking more nuanced approaches to identify potential victims and problematic patterns that could be used to prevent victimization before it occurs. Many studies rely on public datasets (82%) and third-party annotators (33%) to establish ground truth and train their algorithms. Finally, the majority of this work (78%) mostly focused on algorithmic performance evaluation of their model and rarely (4%) evaluate these systems with real users. Thus, we urge computational risk detection researchers to integrate more human-centered approaches to both developing and evaluating sexual risk detection algorithms to ensure the broader societal impacts of this important work.2021ARAfsaneh Razi et al.Algorithmic Auditing and Responsible AICSCW
Emotional Footprints of Email InterruptionsWorking in an environment with constant interruptions is known to affect stress, but how do interruptions affect emotional expression? Emotional expression can have significant impact on interactions among coworkers. We analyzed the video of 26 participants who performed an essay task in a laboratory while receiving either continual email interruptions or receiving a single batch of email. Facial videos of the participants were run through a convolutional neural network to determine the emotional mix via decoding of facial expressions. Using a novel co-occurrence matrix analysis, we showed that with batched email, a neutral emotional state is dominant with sadness being a distant second, and with continual interruptions, this pattern is reversed, and sadness is mixed with fear. We discuss the implications of these results for how interruptions can impact employees' well-being and organizational climate.2020CBChristopher Blank et al.University of HoustonNotification & Interruption ManagementWorkplace Wellbeing & Work StressCHI
Progression Maps: Conceptualizing Narrative Structure for Interaction Design SupportInteractive narratives are frequently designed for learning and training applications, such as social training. In these contexts, designers may be inexperienced in storytelling and interaction design, and it may be difficult to quickly build an effective experience, even for experienced designers. Designers often approach this problem through iterative design. To augment and reduce iteration, we argue for the utility of employing models to reason about, evaluate, and improve designs. While there has been much previous work on interactive narrative models, none of them capture aspects of the interaction design necessary for testing and evaluation. In this paper we propose a new computational model called Progression Maps, which abstracts interaction design elements of the narrative's structure and visualizes its interaction properties. We report on the model, its implementation, and two studies evaluating its use. Our results demonstrate Progression Maps' effectiveness in communicating the underlying design through an easily understandable visualization.2020ECElin Carstensdottir et al.Northeastern UniversityInteractive Data VisualizationInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingCHI
Email Makes You Sweat: Examining Email Interruptions and Stress Using Thermal ImagingWorkplace environments are characterized by frequent interruptions that can lead to stress. However, measures of stress due to interruptions are typically obtained through self-reports, which can be affected by memory and emotional biases. In this paper, we use a thermal imaging system to obtain objective measures of stress and investigate personality differences in contexts of high and low interruptions. Since a major source of workplace interruptions is email, we studied 63 participants while multitasking in a controlled office environment with two different email contexts: managing email in batch mode or with frequent interruptions. We discovered that people who score high in Neuroticism are significantly more stressed in batching environments than those low in Neuroticism. People who are more stressed finish emails faster. Last, using Linguistic Inquiry Word Count on the email text, we find that higher stressed people in multitasking environments use more anger in their emails. These findings help to disambiguate prior conflicting results on email batching and stress.2019FAFatema Akbar et al.University of California, IrvineNotification & Interruption ManagementWorkplace Wellbeing & Work StressCHI
Effects of the Source of Advice and Decision Task on Decisions to Request Expert AdviceAutomation has become a deeply integrated aspect of our everyday activities. Many factors affect whether we rely on and comply with recommendations that we receive, from both human and automated experts. In the present study, participants were presented with advice from either a human or automated expert to complete one of two decision tasks: assigning teams to find human survivors or assigning teams to find and repair oil wells. Participants played 1 of 4 modified versions of the Search and Rescue video game and, on each trial, were asked to choose 3 of 12 locations to which to send search teams. Participants could request advice from a drone or human expert (confederate), depending on the condition to which they were assigned. Participants utilized automation more consistently than the human expert regardless of the decision task. We discuss possible explanations of our results and how they affect design considerations for automation.2019RRRobin M. Richter et al.Generative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)AI-Assisted Decision-Making & AutomationIUI
Meditation: A Performance Booster for BCI ApplicationsA key factor that a typical Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) demands of operators is concentration of mind. A focused mind is more effective in controlling a BCI. One way to improve mental concentration is meditation. Past studies have demonstrated the positive effect of long-term meditation (month-long to year-long) on BCI performance. In this study, we examined the impact of short-term meditation (10-15 minutes long). We explored two guided meditation techniques of mindfulness: 1) open monitoring, and 2) mindful breathing. A brain-controlled toy helicopter was used as a testbed. Five participants volunteered in the experiment in which they were exposed to an emotional stressor of a violent video gameplay followed by operating the helicopter through mental concentration. A brief meditation intervention was introduced between the video gameplay and the BCI task. The results reveal that, in comparison to the control trial, participants were able to lift the helicopter for longer time durations after meditation. Furthermore, this performance improvement was significantly greater than the participants achieved by sitting idle.2018LLLin Liang et al.University of Houston - DowntownBrain-Computer Interface (BCI) & NeurofeedbackCHI