Publications
Our teams aspire to make discoveries that impact everyone, and core to our approach is sharing our research and tools to fuel progress in the field.
Our teams aspire to make discoveries that impact everyone, and core to our approach is sharing our research and tools to fuel progress in the field.
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1 - 15 of 854 publications
InstructPipe: Generating Visual Blocks Pipelines with Human Instructions and LLMs
Jing Jin
Xiuxiu Yuan
Jun Jiang
Jingtao Zhou
Yiyi Huang
Zheng Xu
Kristen Wright
Jason Mayes
Mark Sherwood
Johnny Lee
Alex Olwal
Ram Iyengar
Na Li
Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), ACM, pp. 23
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Visual programming has the potential of providing novice programmers with a low-code experience to build customized processing pipelines. Existing systems typically require users to build pipelines from scratch, implying that novice users are expected to set up and link appropriate nodes from a blank workspace. In this paper, we introduce InstructPipe, an AI assistant for prototyping machine learning (ML) pipelines with text instructions. We contribute two large language model (LLM) modules and a code interpreter as part of our framework. The LLM modules generate pseudocode for a target pipeline, and the interpreter renders the pipeline in the node-graph editor for further human-AI collaboration. Both technical and user evaluation (N=16) shows that InstructPipe empowers users to streamline their ML pipeline workflow, reduce their learning curve, and leverage open-ended commands to spark innovative ideas.
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Beyond Touchscreens: Dynamic and Multimodal Interaction Needs
Melissa Barnhart Wantland
Mai Kobori
Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction, Springer-Verlag (2025)
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Today’s smartphone interactions are typically designed with one primary preset, accompanied by customization settings that can be manually adjusted. To promote the creation of contextually aware experiences, researchers have highlighted the factors that influence mobile device usage in the ability-based design framework. This paper expands upon existing frameworks and contributes to an empirical understanding of smartphone accessibility. Through a 10-day longitudinal diary study and video interview with 24 individuals who do and do not identify as having a disability, the research also illustrates the reactions of reattempt, adaptation, and avoidance, which were used in response to a lack of smartphone accessibility. Despite experiencing scenarios where accessibility settings could be leveraged, 20 out of 24 participants did not use accessibility settings on their smartphone. A total of 12 out of 24 participants tried accessibility settings on their smartphones, however identifying accessibility was not for them. This work highlights the need to shift current design practices to better serve the accessibility community.
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H2E: Hand, Head, Eye: A Multimodal Cascade of Natural Inputs
Khushman Patel
Hans Gellersen
Ken Pfeuffer
IEEE VR (2025)
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Eye-based interaction techniques for extended reality, such as gaze and pinch, are simple to use however suffer from input precision issues. We present H2E, a fine and coarse-grained pointing technique that cascades Hand, Head, and Eye inputs. As users initiate a pinch gesture, a cursor appears at the gaze point that can be dragged by head pointing before pinch confirmation. This has the potential advantage that it can add a precision component without changing the semantics of the technique. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of the technique. Furthermore, we present an evaluation of our method in a Fitts-based user study, exploring the speed-accuracy trade-offs against a gaze and pinch interaction baseline.
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Improving simulation-based origin-destination demand calibration using sample segment counts data
Arwa Alanqary
Yechen Li
The 12th Triennial Symposium on Transportation Analysis conference (TRISTAN XII), Okinawa, Japan (2025)
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This paper introduces a novel approach to demand estimation that utilizes partial observations of segment-level track counts. Building on established simulation-based demand estimation methods, we present a modified formulation that integrates sample track counts as a regularization term. This approach effectively addresses the underdetermination challenge in demand estimation, moving beyond the conventional reliance on a prior OD matrix. The proposed formulation aims to preserve the distribution of the observed track counts while optimizing the demand to align with observed path-level travel times. We tested this approach on Seattle's highway network with various congestion levels. Our findings reveal significant enhancements in the solution quality, particularly in accurately recovering ground truth demand patterns at both the OD and segment levels.
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Online-EYE: Multimodal Implicit Eye Tracking Calibration for XR
Baosheng James Hou
Lucy Abramyan
Prasanthi Gurumurthy
Khushman Patel
Haley Adams
Andrea Colaco
Ken Pfeuffer
Hans Gellersen
Karan Ahuja
2025
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Unlike other inputs for VR that work out of the box, eye tracking typically requires custom calibration per user or session. We present a multimodal inputs approach for implicit calibration of eye tracker in VR, leveraging UI interaction for continuous, background calibration. Our method analyzes gaze data alongside controller interaction with UI elements, and employing ML techniques it continuously refines the calibration matrix without interrupting users from their current tasks. Potentially eliminating the need for explicit calibration. We demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of this implicit approach across various tasks and real time applications achieving comparable eye tracking accuracy to native, explicit calibration.
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Participatory AI Considerations for Advancing Racial Health Equity
Andrea G. Parker
Jatin Alla
Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) (2025) (to appear)
PAIGE: Examining Student Learning Outcomes and Experiences with Personalized AI-Generated Podcasts
Tiffany Do
Usama Bin Shafqat
Elsie Ling
Νikhil Sarda
2025
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Generative AI is revolutionizing content creation and holds promise for real-time, personalized educational experiences. We investigated the effectiveness of converting textbook chapters into AI-generated podcasts and explored the impact of personalizing these podcasts
for individual learner profiles. We conducted a 3x3 user study with 180 college students in the United States, comparing traditional textbook reading with both generalized and personalized AI-generated podcasts across three textbook subjects. The personalized podcasts were tailored to students’ majors, interests, and learning styles. Our findings show that students found the AI-generated podcast format to be more enjoyable than textbooks and that personalized podcasts led to significantly improved learning outcomes, although this was subject-specific. These results highlight that AI-generated podcasts can offer an engaging and effective modality
transformation of textbook material, with personalization enhancing content relevance. We conclude with design recommendations for leveraging AI in education, informed by student feedback.
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Zoom in, Zoom out, Reframe: Domain Experts’ Strategies for Addressing Non-Experts’ Complex Questions
Beverly Freeman
Roma Ruparel
Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) (2025)
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Consumers rely on the Internet for expert information in domains such as healthcare and law. Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to increase access to expert knowledge. However, past research has not addressed how to handle certain aspects of complex questions that commonly occur in expert-layperson interactions. We conducted in-depth interviews with 26 experts across multiple domains to understand how they experience and respond to challenges associated with non-experts’ questions. Results from a thematic analysis reveal three recurring strategies that experts across domains employ when fielding complex questions. Experts zoom in to clarify details of a broad information request, zoom out to address overly narrow questions or assumptions, and reframe when the underlying need is unstated or poorly represented. We discuss implications for the design of LLM-based experiences that facilitate access to expert information.
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As large language models (LLMs) improve in their capacity to serve as personal AI assistants, their ability to output uniquely tailored, personalized responses that align with the soft preferences of their users is imperative for maximizing user satisfaction and retention. However, lay users are notoriously bad at prompt specification and often struggle with conveying their latent preferences to AI assistants. To resolve this, we demonstrate that activation steering, an inference-time method, can effectively control the response of the LLMs towards expressing different preferences. In contrast to memory-based personalization methods that require long user history, steering is extremely lightweight and easily-controllable via an interpretable linear strength factor. We further conduct a within-subjects user study (n=14) to investigate how end users personalize their conversations through three different steerable chatbot interfaces. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of preference-based steering for aligning real-world conversations with user preferences, and we discuss qualitative findings on how diverse values around control, transparency, and usability of personalization lead users to prefer different interfaces.
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StreetViewAI: Making Street View Accessible Using Context-Aware Multimodal AI
Alex Fiannaca
Nimer Jaber
Victor Tsaran
Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST'25) (to appear)
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Interactive streetscape mapping tools such as Google Street View (GSV) and Meta Mapillary enable users to virtually navigate and experience real-world environments via immersive 360° imagery but remain fundamentally inaccessible to blind users. We introduce StreetViewAI, the first-ever accessible street view tool, which combines context-aware, multimodal AI, accessible navigation controls, and conversational speech. With StreetViewAI, blind users can virtually examine destinations, engage in open-world exploration, or virtually tour any of the over 220 billion images and 100+ countries where GSV is deployed. We iteratively designed StreetViewAI with a mixed-visual ability team and performed an evaluation with eleven blind users. Our findings demonstrate the value of an accessible street view in supporting POI investigations and remote route planning. We close by enumerating key guidelines for future work.
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"Accessibility people, you go work on that thing of yours over there": Addressing Disability Inclusion in AI Product Organizations
Sanika Moharana
Erin Buehler
Michael Madaio
Vinita Tibdewal
Proceedings of AIES 2025 (2025) (to appear)
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The rapid emergence of generative AI models and AI powered systems has surfaced a variety of concerns around responsibility, safety, and inclusion. Some of these concerns address specific vulnerable communities, including people with disabilities. At the same time, these systems may introduce harms upon disabled users that do not fit neatly into existing accessibility classifications, and may not be addressed by current accessibility practices. In this paper, we investigate how stakeholders across a variety of job types are encountering and addressing potentially negative impacts of AI on users with disabilities. Through interviews with 25 practitioners, we identify emerging challenges related to AI’s impact on disabled users, systemic obstacles that contribute to problems, and effective strategies for impacting change. Based on these findings, we offer suggestions for improving existing processes for creating AI-powered systems and supporting practitioners in developing skills to address these emerging challenges.
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Generative AI in Creative Practice: ML-Artist Folk Theories of T2I Use, Harm, and Harm-Reduction
Shalaleh Rismani
Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24), Association for Computing Machinery (2024), pp. 1-17 (to appear)
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Understanding how communities experience algorithms is necessary to mitigate potential harmful impacts. This paper presents folk theories of text-to-image (T2I) models to enrich understanding of how artist communities experience creative machine learning (ML) systems. This research draws on data collected from a workshop with 15 artists from 10 countries who incorporate T2I models in their creative practice. Through reflexive thematic analysis of workshop data, we highlight theorization of T2I use, harm, and harm-reduction. Folk theories of use envision T2I models as an artistic medium, a mundane tool, and locate true creativity as rising above model affordances. Theories of harm articulate T2I models as harmed by engineering efforts to eliminate glitches and product policy efforts to limit functionality. Theories of harm-reduction orient towards protecting T2I models for creative practice through transparency and distributed governance. We examine how these theories relate, and conclude by discussing how folk theorization informs responsible AI efforts.
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Solidarity not Charity! Empowering Local Communities for Disaster Relief during COVID-19 through Grassroots Support
Tiffany Knearem
Jeongwon Jo
Oluwafunke Alliyu
John M. Carroll
Computer Supported Cooperative Work (2024) (2024)
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The COVID-19 pandemic brought wide-ranging, unanticipated societal changes as communities rushed to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. In response, mutual aid groups bloomed online across the United States to fill in the gaps in social services and help local communities cope with infrastructural breakdowns. Unlike many previous disasters, the long-haul nature of COVID-19 necessitates sustained disaster relief efforts. In this paper, we conducted an interview study with online mutual aid group administrators to understand how groups facilitated disaster relief, and how disaster relief initiatives developed and maintained over the course of the first year of COVID-19. Our findings suggest that the groups were crucial sources of community-based support for immediate needs, innovated long-term solutions for chronic community issues and grew into a vehicle for justice-centered work. Our insights shed light on the strength of mutual aid as a community capacity that can support communities to collectively be more prepared for future long-haul disasters than they were with COVID-19.
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Situationally Induced Impairments and Disabilities (SIIDs) can significantly hinder user experience in everyday activities. Despite their prevalence, existing adaptive systems predominantly cater to specific tasks or environments and fail to accommodate the diverse and dynamic nature of SIIDs. We introduce Human I/O, a real-time system that detects SIIDs by gauging the availability of human input/output channels. Leveraging egocentric vision, multimodal sensing and reasoning with large language models, Human I/O achieves good performance in availability prediction across 60 in-the-wild egocentric videos in 32 different scenarios. Further, while the core focus of our work is on the detection of SIIDs rather than the creation of adaptive user interfaces, we showcase the utility of our prototype via a user study with 10 participants. Findings suggest that Human I/O significantly reduces effort and improves user experience in the presence of SIIDs, paving the way for more adaptive and accessible interactive systems in the future.
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As AI systems quickly improve in both breadth and depth of performance, they lend themselves to creating increasingly powerful and realistic agents, including the possibility of agents modeled on specific people. We anticipate that within our lifetimes it may become common practice for people to create a custom AI agent to interact with loved ones and/or the broader world after death. We call these generative ghosts, since such agents will be capable of generating novel content rather than merely parroting content produced by their creator while living. In this paper, we first discuss the design space of potential implementations of generative ghosts. We then discuss the practical and ethical implications of generative ghosts, including potential positive and negative impacts on individuals and society. Based on these considerations, we lay out a research agenda for the AI and HCI research communities to empower people to create and interact with AI afterlives in a safe and beneficial manner.
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