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 11355 publications
Tech Worker Challenges Managing Humanlike GenAI
Eric Corbett
Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM (2026), pp. 1-18
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Organizations are adopting or exploring anthropomorphic genAI — meaning XYZ. Anthropomorphic AI is often held up for its potential to improve the productivity and efficiency of workers and technologies; however, there are not yet accepted industry-wide standards for the responsible development of anthropomorphic technologies. Given their roles as central figures responsible for implementing anthropomorphic genAI into technologies that are served to the broader public, we must understand workers’ reasoning about anthropomorphic genAI to understand its impacts. However, there is a dearth of empirical knowledge about technology workers’ perspectives on anthropomorphic technologies, including their perspectives on potential risks and benefits. To address this gap, we conducted focus groups with 31 technology workers across 6 job roles (UX, software engineers, product managers, designers, marketing, and trust and safety) regarding how they define anthropomorphic genAI, their perceptions of anthropomorphic genAI, and their experiences working with anthropomorphic genAI. We find that workers’ have expansive definitions of what constitutes “humanlike” AI, which at times sit in tension with each other. They draw on their personal and professional standpoints to sensemake about real and possible anthropomorphic genAI hazards to people, knowledge work fields, and society at-large. Importantly, we find that these social hazards map to different facets of anthropomorphic genAI, suggesting that effective mitigation of personal and social risks requires developer attention to specific dimensions of anthropomorphism. We mapped the relationships between dimensions of anthropomorphism and hazards, to support technology workers. We argue that effective mitigation of the risks of anthropomorphism requires attention to the multiple facets of anthropomorphism.
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In Search of "Weird Corners": Diagnosing the Limits of Convergent AI in Professional Creative Practice
Mark Williams
2026
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Generative AI assistants typically embody a convergent "Coach" paradigm designed to resolve ambiguity. While effective for technical tasks, this risks premature convergence in creative domains, constraining output variance. To diagnose this, we conducted a qualitative study (N=9) where expert creatives interacted with a deliberately convergent AI "Coach." Findings reveal an interactional paradox: while the AI’s linear framework provides "ignition" utility by unblocking conceptualization, its strict linearity clashes with organic workflows. Furthermore, this structural convergence often induces "aesthetic sanitization," yielding generic outputs that limit individualized nuance. Rejecting subservient agreement, experts desire active collaborators capable of productive tension. We subsequently reframe output convergence as a "full-stack" design challenge, identifying prescriptive interfaces as an unmet opportunity for optimization. To empower authentic expression's "weird corners," we call for Generative frameworks operationalizing the Double Diamond, utilizing fluid role-shifting and contextual memory to balance additive improvisation with rigorous critique.
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Generative AI’s humanlike qualities are driving its rapid adoption in professional domains. However, this anthropomorphic appeal raises concerns from HCI and responsible AI scholars about potential hazards and harms, such as overtrust in system outputs. To investigate how technology workers navigate these humanlike qualities and anticipate emergent harms, we conducted focus groups with 30 professionals across six job functions (ML engineering, product policy, UX research and design, product management, technology writing, and communications). Our findings reveal an unsettled knowledge environment surrounding humanlike generative AI, where workers’ varying perspectives illuminate a range of potential risks for individuals, knowledge work fields, and society. We argue that workers require comprehensive support, including clearer conceptions of “humanlikeness” to effectively mitigate these risks. To aid in mitigation strategies, we provide a conceptual map articulating the identified hazards and their connection to conflated notions of “humanlikeness.”
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Responsive user interfaces enable dynamically adjusting user interfaces based on device-specific aspects such as screen size, aspect ratio, display resolution, etc. However, traditional responsive design fails to account for different types of constraints of a user and task criticality of the task being performed via the UI. Misalignment between the UI design, user context and task criticality can lead to user error. This disclosure describes techniques, implemented with user permission, for dynamically modifying the layout, information density, and/or interactive physics of a user interface based on a dual-factor analysis of user cognitive state and task criticality. The user's cognitive state can be inferred from behavioral telematics. Task criticality can be inferred from semantic analysis. The information density and other parameters of a user interface are automatically adjusted based on such analyses. Such adjustments include applying or relaxing restrictions on interactivity and adjusting visual prominence of various UI elements to adjust the information density of the user interface. The adjustments can also include adjusting friction as appropriate, hiding certain aspects of the user interface, or other types of adjustments.
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Optical health sensing algorithms, such as SpO2, sleep monitoring, and metabolic health sensing, critically depend on the accurate measurement of optical emission from Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) transmitted through user tissue and detected by a photodiode (PD). A significant challenge to the reliability of these measurements is the inherent degradation of LED optical emission intensity over time due to device aging. This degradation can confound the physiological changes being monitored. Our work quantifies the impact of LED aging on sensor signal integrity, specifically examining the Current Transfer Ratio (CTR), which is a key metric defining the ratio of received photocurrent to the LED drive current used for transmission in various health sensing algorithms. We investigate the degradation characteristics across LEDs of different wavelengths. Our findings indicate a relative CTR change due to degradation ranging from 1% to 8% within 100 hours of continuous operation which translates to approximately 3.5 to 7 years of device lifetime. Furthermore, we explore the non-linearity of this degradation and the observed initial ”overshoot” phenomenon in the CTR during aging. We discuss how understanding these dynamics could inform the development of robust specifications for different physiological sensing algorithms. Finally, we present several potential solutions to mitigate the effects of LED aging. During the product design phase, integrating a calibrating photodiode or compensating circuitry around the LED can help preemptively address degradation. In the application space, run-time calibration strategies employing two differently degraded optical paths offer a promising approach to maintain measurement accuracy.
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MoGen: Detailed Neuronal Morphology Generation via Point Cloud Flow Matching
Franz Rieger
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) (2026)
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Biological neurons come in many shapes. High-fidelity generative modeling of their varied morphologies is challenging yet underexplored in neuroscience, and crucial for the subfield of connectomics. We introduce MoGen (Neuronal Morphology Generation), a flow matching model to generate high-resolution 3D point clouds of mouse cortex axon and dendrite fragments. This is enabled by an adaptation that injects local geometric context into a scalable latent transformer backbone, allowing for the generation of high-fidelity, realistic samples. To assess MoGen's generation quality, we propose a dedicated evaluation suite with interpretable geometric and topological features tailored to neuronal structures that we validate in a user study. MoGen's practical utility is showcased through controllable generation for visualization via smooth interpolation and a direct downstream application: we augment the training set of a shape plausibility classifier from a production connectomics neuron reconstruction pipeline with millions of generated samples, thereby improving classifier accuracy and reducing the number of remaining split and merge errors by 4.4%. We estimate this can reduce manual proofreading labor by over 157 person-years for reconstruction of a full mouse brain.
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Generative AI is reshaping software development, yet its psychological impact remains under-researched. During May and August 2025 we conducted reflexive thematic analysis of interviews with 12 senior engineers (≥5 years experience) recruited from Western technology hubs to explore shifts in professional identity. We identify a central transition from "coder to conductor," where AI acts as a cognitive partner. Key findings include: (1) a re-architecting of focus from implementation to strategy; (2) a shift in productivity metrics from output to impact; and (3) a dual-impact on agency, where AI empowers autonomy but threatens competence through de-skilling anxieties. These findings suggest that as implementation becomes commoditised, organisational training and career progression must prioritise architectural mastery and metacognitive oversight to ensure sustained developer motivation and system integrity.
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MoXaRt: Audio-Visual Object-Guided Sound Interaction for XR
Sieun Kim
Qianhui Zheng
Ruoyu Xu
Ravi Tejasvi
Anuva Kulkarni
Junyi Zhu
2026
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In Extended Reality (XR), complex acoustic environments often overwhelm users, compromising both scene awareness and social engagement due to entangled sound sources. We introduce MoXaRt, a real-time XR system that uses audio-visual cues to separate these sources and enable fine-grained sound interaction. MoXaRt's core is a cascaded architecture that performs coarse, audio-only separation in parallel with visual detection of sources (e.g. faces, instruments). These visual anchors then guide refinement networks to isolate individual sources, separating complex mixes of up to five concurrent sources (e.g. two voices + three instruments) with ca. 2 second processing latency. We validate MoXaRt through a technical evaluation on a new, complex dataset we collected, and a 22-participant user study. Our results demonstrate that MoXaRt significantly improves communication clarity—boosting listening comprehension in noisy conditions by 33.2% (p=0.0058)—and significantly reduces cognitive load (M=7.50 vs. M=3.36, p<0.001), paving the way for more perceptive and socially adept XR experiences.
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We introduce a new context-enriched time series forecasting benchmark TimesX. TimesX contains a wide selection of high-quality real-world time series and diverse textual contexts from an automated generating pipeline, which helps address three main issues of existing benchmarks: (1) poor generalization due to low data volume and data being synthetic, (2) restricted forms of context, and (3) an inability to mitigate data leakage. We conduct a thorough empirical study of current multimodal solutions on TimesX. Our results suggest that most multimodal solutions that work well on existing benchmarks may fail on TimesX. In contrast, simple ensemble methods that leverage the rich textual context can outperform strong unimodal baselines and other multimodal baselines.
** Below this is what was submitted to ITP. **
We create a real world multimodal time-series forecasting benchmark that encompasses diverse domains and regions. Each time-series is annotated by various kinds of contexts like metadata, date and holiday information, dynamic events related to the time-series. This is sufficiently more advanced than other available benchmarks which rely wither on static metadata alone or synthetic examples. This forms a test bed for multimodal forecasting. We also present some baseline results showing that ensembles of publicly available LLMs and time-series foundation models can demonstrate non-trivial performance on this bechmark.
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DeduBB: Binary Code Size Reduction via Post-Link Basic Block De-duplication
Chaitanya Mamatha Ananda
Rajiv Gupta
Mahbod Afarin
Han Shen
LCTES (Languages, Compilers, Tools and Theory of Embedded Systems) (2026) (to appear)
Preview abstract
Binary sizes of newer versions of software applications tend to be larger, primarily due to feature bloat. This poses various challenges, particularly for mobile applications. It affects
upgrade rates directly impacting revenues, increases maintenance costs of supporting multiple versions, and prevents some users from getting critical security fixes. Code bloat also poses a problem for large warehouse-scale applications. Such applications experience performance degradation when their code size exceeds what smaller and more efficient code
models can handle.
In this paper, we introduce a post-link optimization tech nique called DeduBB, which deduplicates basic blocks of an application across procedure boundaries. While prior tech-
niques used function outlining to de-duplicate redundant code sequences, it missed out on many opportunities as it cannot handle code that manipulates the program stack. In addition, previous techniques were either limited to the scope of a module or lacked scalable implementations required to handle large warehouse-scale applications. Our technique,
DeduBB, handles all types of code duplication as we use a novel save-and-jump code pattern to execute de-duplicated code blocks. In addition, DeduBB has been designed to work on scalable post-link optimizers and can even be applied to large warehouse-scale datacenter applications. Finally, DeduBB is profile-guided and can be applied selectively to infrequently executed cold basic blocks to not affect application performance. In fact, in several cases, the performance
of the smaller application binary improves due to reductions in its hot working set size. We have implemented our technique on the state-of-the-art post link optimizers, BOLT and Propeller. Experiments show that we can significantly reduce the code size of several benchmarks by 1.55% to 18.63%, on both Arm and x86 platforms, and on binaries that have already been heavily optimized for size using existing code size reduction features. Furthermore, aided by profiles, our technique can retain more than 80% of the maximal code size savings without affecting performance.
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FreshBrew: A Benchmark for Evaluating AI Agents on Java Code Migration
Victor May
Diganta Misra
Yanqi Luo
Anjali Sridhar
Justine Gehring
Silvio Soares Ribeiro Junior
2026
Preview abstract
AI coding assistants are rapidly becoming integral to modern software development. A key challenge in this space is the continual need to migrate and modernize codebases in response to evolving software ecosystems. Traditionally, such migrations have relied on rule-based systems and human intervention. With the advent of powerful large language models (LLMs), AI-driven agentic frameworks offer a promising alternative—but their effectiveness remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce FreshBrew, a novel benchmark for evaluating AI-based agentic frameworks on project-level Java migrations. We benchmark several such frameworks, powered by state-of-the-art LLMs, and compare their performance against established rule-based tools. Our evaluation of AI agents on this benchmark of 228 repositories shows that the top-performing model, Gemini 2.5 Flash, can successfully migrate 56.5% of projects to JDK 17. Our empirical analysis reveals novel insights into the critical strengths and limitations of current agentic approaches, offering actionable insights into their real-world applicability. By releasing FreshBrew publicly upon acceptance, we aim to facilitate rigorous, reproducible evaluation and catalyze progress in AI-driven codebase modernization.
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System for a Secure, Outcome-Based Synthetic Labor Market Using Trusted Execution Environments
Patent (2026)
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Some artificial intelligence provisioning models that function as tools for human users or rely on labor arbitrage can present challenges for organizations, such as managing personnel rather than task outcomes and introducing data security risks. An architecture is described for an outcome-based synthetic labor market in which autonomous computational agents can be compensated based on verified task completion. The framework can leverage trusted execution environments to create secure hardware enclaves for processing sensitive data, which can render the data cryptographically inaccessible to a host system or agent provider. This approach can facilitate a secure, transactional market for autonomous professional execution, which may enable a shift from managing labor resources to procuring verified outcomes from a pool of specialized agents.
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Here’s a thought experiment. Say I wave a magic wand across a codebase and an entire class of technical debt, poof, goes away and immediately evaporates if introduced in the future. For example, maybe I make it so that dead feature flags are simply no longer a problem: they just delete themselves as soon as the engineer wills it. Or maybe large-scale migrations just migrate themselves. Maybe we magically have 100% test coverage, without an engineer lifting a finger.
What will happen to developer productivity?
Surely, developer productivity increases overall.
But will the productivity metrics that we all use as a proxy for “developer productivity” move up and to the right. Let’s explore this idea.
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As artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly integrated into healthcare, ensuring that this innovation helps to combat health inequities requires engaging marginalized communities in health AI futuring. However, little research has examined Black populations’ perspectives on the use of AI in health contexts, despite the widespread health inequities they experience–inequities that are already perpetuated by AI. Addressing this research gap, through qualitative workshops with 18 Black adults, we characterize participants’ cautious optimism for health AI addressing structural well-being barriers (e.g., by providing second opinions that introduce fairness into an unjust healthcare system), and their concerns that AI will worsen health inequities (e.g., through health AI biases they deemed inevitable and the problematic reality of having to trust healthcare providers to use AI equitably). We advance health AI research by articulating previously-unreported health AI perspectives from a population experiencing significant health inequities, and presenting key considerations for future work.
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Securing Multi-Agent Systems: An Empirical Analysis of Security Prompt Hardening and Residual Risks
Mithil Roshan
Shashank Nagesh
(2026)
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The rapid adoption of agentic systems powered by
large language models (LLMs) introduces significant
security challenges distinct from plain conversational
models, particularly concerning prompt injection and
tool misuse due to their dynamic personas and real-
world tool interactions. This paper investigates the
effectiveness of hardened security prompting in a
task-oriented multi-agent framework, using a coding
assistant as a representative case study. We com-
pare a baseline ”unhardened” agent against a ”hard-
ened” version equipped with explicit security guide-
lines applied across all sub-agents. Our evaluation
across 150+ single-turn and 32 multi-turn attack sce-
narios demonstrates that prompt hardening dramat-
ically improves resilience. With a simple, approxi-
mately 500-token security hardener, single-turn fail-
ure rates dropped from 19.48% to 2.60%, while multi-
turn failure rates decreased from 75.00% to 46.88%.
Furthermore, we show that successfully bypassing the
hardened agent requires significantly more adversar-
ial effort and a greater number of chat turns. How-
ever, the analysis also reveals a critical shift in vul-
nerability taxonomy: as direct attacks fail, adver-
saries exploit the agent’s core functionality via ”Func-
tional Wrappers” (Intent Obfuscation), highlighting
a residual risk that necessitates a shift in the defen-
sive paradigm from static filters to dynamic runtime
state and intent analysis.
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