A Design Space for Intelligent and Interactive Writing AssistantsIn our era of rapid technological advancement, the research landscape for writing assistants has become increasingly fragmented across various research communities. We seek to address this challenge by proposing a design space as a structured way to examine and explore the multidimensional space of intelligent and interactive writing assistants. Through community collaboration, we explore five aspects of writing assistants: task, user, technology, interaction, and ecosystem. Within each aspect, we define dimensions and codes by systematically reviewing 115 papers while leveraging the expertise of researchers in various disciplines. Our design space aims to offer researchers and designers a practical tool to navigate, comprehend, and compare the various possibilities of writing assistants, and aid in the design of new writing assistants.2024MLMina Lee et al.Microsoft ResearchHuman-LLM CollaborationAI-Assisted Creative WritingCreative Collaboration & Feedback SystemsCHI
SmarCyPad: A Smart Seat Pad for Cycling Fitness Tracking Leveraging Low-cost Conductive Fabric Sensors"Cycling is an efficient and effective way to improve one's overall fitness level, such as cardiovascular fitness, stamina, lower body strength, and body fat percentage. To improve fitness performance, real-time cycling fitness tracking can not only allow cyclists to better control their energy outputs but also help push workout intensity and keep users accountable for their fitness progress. However, existing bike sensors (e.g., the ones mounted to bike's wheel hub or crank arm) are only limited to measuring cycling cadence and speed. Although several recent studies relying on on-body sensors or cameras can provide more fine-grained information (e.g., riding position and knee joint angle), they would either require inconvenient setups or raise serious privacy concerns. To circumvent these limitations, in this paper, we propose SmarCyPad, an innovative smart seat pad that can continuously and unobtrusively track five cycling-specific metrics, including cadence, per-leg stability, leg strength balance, riding position, and knee joint angle of the cyclist. Specifically, we embed conductive fabric sensors in the seat pad to sense the pressure applied to the bike's seat exerted by the cyclist's gluteal muscles. A series of signal processing algorithms are developed to estimate the pedaling period from the sensed pressure signal and further derive the cycling cadence, per-leg stability, and leg strength balance. Additionally, we leverage a deep learning model to detect the cyclist's riding position and reconstruct the cyclist's knee joint angles via linear regression. The sensors and the system prototype are manufactured from scratch leveraging off-the-shelf materials, and the total cost is less than $50. Extensive experiments involving 15 participants demonstrate that SmarCyPad can accurately estimate the cycling cadence with an average error of 1.13 rounds per minute, quantify the cycling stability for each leg, detect cycling imbalance, distinguish five riding positions with an accuracy of 96.60%, and continuously track the knee joint angle with an average mean error as low as 9.58 degrees." https://doi.org/10.1145/36109272023YWYi Wu et al.Micromobility (E-bike, E-scooter) InteractionBiosensors & Physiological MonitoringOn-Skin Display & On-Skin InputUbiComp
Articulation Work and the Management of Intersubjectivity Disjunctures in Offshored ManufacturingSince the move away from integrated value chains in production in the 1980s, the outsourcing and offshoring of various aspects of manufacturing has become commonplace. This has led to global production and marketing relationships between enterprises in numerous different countries, a prominent axis being between Europe and Asia. This paper reports on a study of one such offshoring relationship between a German SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) and their Chinese subsidiary, the trials and tribulations of the collaboration between them, and the implications of this for our understanding of how articulation work might be best supported in the context of global production. We also look at how a separate entity, which we term an ‘articulation hub’, was established to support articulation between the sites. While a number of studies have looked at articulation work in Global Software Development (GSD), there are very few ethnographic studies of offshored manufacturing, despite the unique challenges it presents. We find here that issues arise not only because of differences in technology environments, infrastructures, and cultural expectations, but also because of differing development strategies and business philosophies. The core problem confronting articulation work in offshored production is the difficulty of arriving at a mutually-grounded intersubjectivity, where shared assumptions about working practices and their relative importance and value can be trusted to apply, leading to what we term ‘intersubjectivity disjunctures’. These disjunctures have a number of important implications for accomplishing articulation work. This paper offers a number of contributions to CSCW. First, it adds to a very thin corpus of CSCW-relevant ethnographic studies of global manufacturing. Second, it finds that articulation work in offshored production is less closely-coupled than it is in other distributed settings, making conventionally promoted solutions, such as knowledge sharing and relationship building, less relevant. Third, it reveals how differences in moral reasoning can result in different sites assigning very different priorities to articulation work. Finally, while articulation work is typically seen to be invisible work in CSCW, we argue that, in this context, there are a number of ways in which using a separate hub to actively render articulation work visible may be the best solution.2023JLJingjing Liu et al.CSCW Across BordersCSCW
Learning to Navigate Health Taboos through Online Safe SpacesSocial and cultural taboos frequently prevent meaningful conversation around gendered health and wellbeing, across the globe and to varying degrees. Safe spaces can offer potential avenues to nurture non-judgmental environments for dialogue and opportunities for learning to talk through taboos. To this end, we curated an online safe space on WhatsApp---with 35 participants of Indian origin---to facilitate conversations around diverse topics related to gendered health and wellbeing. We observed participant activity for two weeks, before conducting in-depth interviews with 10 participants to better understand their experiences of engaging within the WhatsApp group. We use the lens of Legitimate Peripheral Participation to examine how peripheral and core members of the community drew on new audiences and support systems as they questioned existing structures upholding taboos. We discuss scaffolding mechanisms that could enhance learning about taboo topics in online safe spaces, and the tensions of anonymity in such learning spaces.2023HTAnuj Gautam et al.Georgia Institute of TechnologyMental Health Apps & Online Support CommunitiesEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsCHI
Motivated to Work or Working to Stay Motivated: A Diary and Interview Study on Working From HomeWorking from home has become common practice for many, especially since the global pandemic has forced many office workers to relocate their work spaces to a home environment. While working from home can have benefits, it requires self-discipline and can be a challenge to stay motivated. Changes in motivation about work may impact people's sense of productivity and well-being. We used a mixed-methods study using diaries and interviews with 25 informants to investigate perceived challenges during remote work from home. A grounded theory analysis revealed that people's work motivation had shifted from being people-centric to being work-centric. In the office, informants were motivated by working and interacting with others and being at their desk signaled work engagement to others. At home, motivation was mainly driven by personal work responsibilities. We identify four clusters of worker strategies to address the shift in work motivation. While some informants' perspectives on motivation made them reflect inward on their work performance and enjoyment, other informants' perspectives were outward-facing and involved performance and enjoyment in relation to others. We conclude that there needs to be better support for sustaining work motivation at home that can be tailored to different individuals, specifically in terms of managing time and detaching from work. We conclude by considering new pathways for supporting remote work.2022JBJudith Willemijn Borghouts et al.Remote Work, Motivation, and Burnout; Remote Work, Motivation, and BurnoutCSCW
“It Basically Started Using Me:” An Observational Study of Password Manager UsageThere is limited information regarding how users employ password managers in the wild and why they use them in that manner. To address this knowledge gap, we conduct observational interviews with 32 password manager users. Using grounded theory, we identify four theories describing the processes and rationale behind participants' usage of password managers. We find that many users simultaneously use both a browser-based and a third-party manager, using each as a backup for the other, with this new paradigm having intriguing usability and security implications. Users also eschew generated passwords because these passwords are challenging to enter and remember when the manager is unavailable, necessitating new generators that create easy-to-enter and remember passwords. Additionally, the credential audits provided by most managers overwhelm users, limiting their utility and indicating a need for more proactive and streamlined notification systems. We also discuss mobile usage, adoption and promotion, and other related topics.2022SOSean Oesch et al.University of TennesseePasswords & AuthenticationNotification & Interruption ManagementCHI
"I Didn't Know I Looked Angry": Characterizing Observed Emotion and Reported Affect at WorkWith the growing prevalence of affective computing applications, Automatic Emotion Recognition (AER) technologies have garnered attention in both research and industry settings. Initially limited to speech-based applications, AER technologies now include analysis of facial landmarks to provide predicted probabilities of a common subset of emotions (e.g., anger, happiness) for faces observed in an image or video frame. In this paper, we study the relationship between AER outputs and self-reports of affect employed by prior work, in the context of information work at a technology company. We compare the continuous observed emotion output from an AER tool to discrete reported affect obtained via a one-day combined tool-use and diary study (N=15). We provide empirical evidence showing that these signals do not completely align, and find that using additional workplace context only improves alignment up to 58.6%. These results suggest affect must be studied in the context it is being expressed, and observed emotion signal should not replace internal reported affect for affective computing applications.2022HKHarmanpreet Kaur et al.University of MichiganHuman Pose & Activity RecognitionExplainable AI (XAI)CHI
Mobilizing Crowdwork: A Systematic Assessment of the Mobile Usability of HITsThere is a growing interest in extending crowdwork beyond traditional desktop-centric design to include mobile devices (e.g., smartphones). However, mobilizing crowdwork remains significantly tedious due to a lack of understanding about the mobile usability requirements of human intelligence tasks (HITs). We present a taxonomy of characteristics that defines the mobile usability of HITs for smartphone devices. The taxonomy is developed based on findings from a study of three consecutive steps. In Step 1, we establish an initial design of our taxonomy through a targeted literature analysis. In Step 2, we verify and extend the taxonomy through an online survey with Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdworkers. Finally, in Step 3 we demonstrate the taxonomy's utility by applying it to analyze the mobile usability of a dataset of scraped HITs. In this paper, we present the iterative development of the taxonomy, highlighting the observed practices and preferences around mobile crowdwork. We conclude with the implications of our taxonomy for accessibly and ethically mobilizing crowdwork not only within the context of smartphone devices, but beyond them.2022SDSenjuti Dutta et al.University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleCrowdsourcing Task Design & Quality ControlAlgorithmic Fairness & BiasComputational Methods in HCICHI
What's Wrong with Computational Notebooks? Pain Points, Needs, and Design OpportunitiesComputational notebooks — such as Azure, Databricks, and Jupyter — are a popular, interactive paradigm for data scientists to author code, analyze data, and interleave visualizations, all within a single document. Nevertheless, as data scientists incorporate more of their activities into notebooks, they encounter unexpected difficulties, or pain points, that impact their productivity and disrupt their workflow. Through a systematic, mixed-methods study using semi-structured interviews (n=20) and survey (n=156) with data scientists, we catalog nine pain points when working with notebooks. Our findings suggest that data scientists face numerous pain points throughout the entire workflow — from setting up notebooks to deploying to production — across many notebook environments. Our data scientists report essential notebook requirements, such as supporting data exploration and visualization. The results of our study inform and inspire the design of computational notebooks.2020SCSouti Chattopadhyay et al.Oregon State UniversityIdentity & Avatars in XRInteractive Data VisualizationComputational Methods in HCICHI
Crafting, Communality, and Computing: Building on Existing Strengths To Support a Vulnerable PopulationIn Nepal, sex-trafficking survivors and the organizations that support them have limited resources to assist the survivors in their on-going journey towards reintegration. We take an asset-based approach wherein we identify and build on the strengths possessed by such groups. In this work, we present reflections from introducing a voice-annotated web application to a group of survivors. The web application tapped into and built upon two elements of pre-existing strengths possessed by the survivors the social bond between them and knowledge of crafting as taught to them by the organization. Our findings provide insight into the array of factors influencing how the survivors act in relation to one another as they created novel use practices and adapted the technology. Experience with the application seemed to open knowledge of computing as a potential source of strength. Finally, we articulate three design desiderata that could help promote communal spaces: make activity perceptible to the group, create appropriable steps, and build in fun choices.2020AGAnuj Gautam et al.Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State UniversityEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsDeveloping Countries & HCI for Development (HCI4D)CHI
Cross-Platform Immersive Web Browsing for Online 3D Neuron Database ExplorationWeb services have become one major way for people to obtain and explore information nowadays. However, web browsers currently only offer limited data analysis capabilities, especially for large-scale 3D datasets. This project presents a method of immersive web browsing (ImWeb) to enable effective exploration of multiple datasets over the web with augmented reality (AR) techniques. The ImWeb system allows inputs from both the web browser and AR and provides a set of immersive analytics methods for enhanced web browsing, exploration, comparison, and summary tasks. We have also integrated 3D neuron mining and abstraction approaches to support efficient analysis functions. The architecture of ImWeb system flexibly separates the tasks on web browser and AR and supports smooth networking among the system, so that ImWeb can be adopted by different platforms, such as desktops, large displays, and tablets. We use an online 3D neuron database to demonstrate that ImWeb enables new experiences of exploring 3D datasets over the web. We expect that our approach can be applied to various other online databases and become one useful addition to future web services.2019WFWillis Fulmer et al.AR Navigation & Context AwarenessInteractive Data VisualizationIUI