When emerging adults move out of their parents’ homes for the first time, their needs for togetherness and connection evolve, as do their parents’. In co-located homes, people often experience togetherness passively by sensing one another’s presence in their environment. However, when no longer living together, methods of experiencing togetherness change. Thus, we conducted an interview and co-design study with 16 pairs of parents and emerging adults that explores this concept across distance. The study uncovered differences in the connection needs of emerging adults and their parents, including their goals in connecting, the amount of communication they needed, and their needs for privacy and transparency. We additionally found that passive connecting factors included ambient sounds of the home, visual shared experiences and traces of one another in the home, ambient home smellscapes and smell memories, touching left-behind objects or gifted objects, and the taste of family recipes and the ambience of family mealtimes. We discuss suggestions for designing for passive co-presence based on this new knowledge.

Smart speakers are increasingly being adopted by families in the U.S. In many cases, a smart speaker is shared by family members, which might make the sense of ownership uncertain. Through a diary and interview-based study with 20 Asian Indian parents and teenagers living in the U.S., this study through thematic analysis highlights various aspects of smart speakers that support or hinder the fulfilment of the psychological needs – self-efficacy, self-identity, territoriality, autonomy, and accountability and responsibility – that foster a sense of ownership. The paper also discusses the experiences of a cultural group that is not well represented in prior HCI work, and thus, it will add useful nuances and knowledge about inclusivity to the study of smart-speaker technology in HCI. Finally, it contributes six actionable design guidelines, including guidelines that relate to maintaining conversational context across different interactions and fostering a sense of ownership among users who share smart speakers, through the use of territorial markers.

Voice-based Conversational Agents (CAs) are increasingly being used by children. Through a review of 38 research papers, this work maps trends, themes, and methods of empirical research on children and CAs in HCI research over the last decade. A thematic analysis of the research found that work in this domain focuses on seven key topics: ascribing human-like qualities to CAs, CAs? support of children?s learning, the use and role of CAs in the home and family context, CAs? support of children?s play, children?s storytelling with CA, issues concerning the collection of information revealed by CAs, and CAs designed for children with differing abilities. Based on our findings, we identify the needs to account for children’s intersectional identities and linguistic and cultural diversity and theories from multiple disciples in the design of CAs, develop heuristics for child-centric interaction with CAs, to investigate implications of CAs on social cognition and interpersonal relationships, and to examine and design for multi-party interactions with CAs for different domains and contexts.

Black older adults from lower socioeconomic environments are often neglected in health technology interventions. Voice assistants have a potential to make healthcare more accessible to older adults, yet, little is known about their experiences with this type of health information seeking, especially Black older adults. Through a three-phase exploratory study, we explored health information seeking with 30 Black older adults in lower-income environments to understand how they ask health-related questions, and their perceptions of the Google Home being used for that purpose. Through our analysis, we identified the health information needs and common search topics, and discussed the communication breakdowns and types of repair performed. We contribute an understanding of cultural code-switching that has to be done by these older adults when interacting with voice assistants, and the importance of such phenomenon when designing for historically excluded groups.

Smart devices are increasingly being designed for, and adopted in, the home environment. Prior scholarship has investigated the challenges that users face as they take up these devices in their homes. However, little is known about when and how users or potential users would prefer future domestic Internet of Things (IoT) to support their activities in home settings. To fill this gap, we conducted two co-design workshops, an in-home activity between the two sessions, and pre- and post-study interviews with 18 adult participants, who had diverse levels of prior experience of IoT use. Our findings contribute new insights into how smart home devices could adapt their behavior based on social contexts; how to re-imagine agency and support useful intelligibility; and how to resolve user-driven conflict by providing appropriate information about those with whom devices are shared. Finally, based on these findings, we discuss the implications of our work and provide a set of design considerations from which designers of future smart home technologies can benefit.

Voice agents are becoming deeply integrated into the daily lives of millions of people, yet adults and children perceive and use them differently. Therefore, it is important to understand how parents and children envision the future of these agents. We enrolled 22 parent-teen dyads in an asynchronous remote community-based (ARC) method study. Each dyad consisting of a parent and a teen, participated in nine weekly activities over a period of eight weeks, followed by an exit interview. The participants discussed their desires and fears, such as those regarding agency, emotion recognition, voice characteristics and forms, the timing of their interactions, and voice agents’ acting on behalf of others. The dyads appreciated the flexibility in participation, their ability to send responses privately to the researchers, their access to a channel for socializing with other participants, and the opportunity to build on ideas through sequential interactions during ARC activities. In the end, we discuss how our findings might inform the design of future voice agents and present recommendations for adapting ARC method while designing with parent-teen dyads.

Parents' use of mobile devices (tablets and mobile phones) while caring for children is considered to be beneficial, but also problematic. In this study, we aimed to understand parents' technology non-/use practices around infants and toddlers in the domestic setting and to survey parents' opinions about their partners' practices. To this end, we collected data from parents from seventeen families, using diaries and interviews. We found that as parents grapple with multiple and often conflicting motivations and needs, they adopt or shift among four non-/use positions. Our findings also show that adult family members believe that their partner's use is more problematic than theirs and that the other person does not abide by mutually decided norms. Furthermore, parents often have conflicting opinions about how one should shape one's technological practices around children. Based on our findings, we propose new design directions for technology that can support caregivers in the domestic setting.

Over the past few years, in-home smart technologies have dramatically increased and changed. This paper aims to investigate how families of different socioeconomic status use or forgo the use of smart devices, specifically smart speakers and smart interactive toys. To this end, we interviewed 14 parents with low socioeconomic status and 16 parents with high socioeconomic status from varied races and different levels of education, lifestyles, and occupations. Our findings reveal how socioeconomic differences reflect and impact use of these devices in terms of parenting aids, parents' regulation of children's use, and the non-use practices of families. In the end, we discuss the implications of our findings and provide design recommendations for smart speakers and smart toys that address the diverse values and preferences of families from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

Families with teenagers are known to experience various challenges, as parents and teens often have conflicting opinions in regard to technology use. To understand how the disruption caused by SARS-CoV2-2 impacted dynamics around technology use within Asian Indian families with teens in the U.S., we conducted a mixed-methods study with 22 Asian Indian parent-teen dyads of different socioeconomic status (SES). Based on our empirical data, we present the complex picture of technology use in Asian Indian families during a period of disruption. We discuss the differences and similarities in (a) tensions that emerged in regard to technology use and mediation as participants from different SESs adjusted their daily life routines and (b) the ways technology helped them to develop practices that contributed to family resilience. Finally, we offer recommendations for the designers of technologies that can support parents and teens not only in times of crisis, but also under normal circumstances.

Since smart speakers were introduced to the Indian markets at the end of 2017, they have been adopted by hundreds of thousands households in India. While the scholarship has examined the long-term use of voice-based devices in western contexts, little is known about user behavior in India -- one of the fastest-growing smart speaker markets in the Asian Pacific region. Therefore, this study aims to explore how members families in India integrate Google Home into their daily lives. To this end, we collected long-term Google Home activity logs from 20 households and conducted interviews with one member from each generation in every household. Our findings shed light on the unique daily use patterns of adults and children, the users' approaches to, and challenges in learning to use, the devices, and factors that impact users' continued use or abandonment of the devices. We conclude the paper by discussing the implications of our findings and by proposing relevant design recommendations.

Unemployed individuals experience emotional upheaval and financial constraints, and they struggle to share their challenges and obtain support from their family members and social circles. While prior work has shown that social media platforms enable their users to safely share their turmoil, hardships, and emotional upheavals and seek support, little is known about how the unemployed use such platforms. Based on a mixed-methods analysis of data retrieved from unemployment communities on Reddit, our study reveals that redditors in these communities engage in exchanges that range from queries seeking information about job searching to discussions about sensitive topics such as the health and social implications of unemployment. Also, while redditors use mostly negative emotional tonality in their texts when initiating a new post, the comments in response provide considerable social support in the form of esteem, emotional, informational, network, and instrumental support. Based on these findings, we share the theoretical implications of our work and offer design

Today, Conversational Agents (CA) are deeply integrated into the daily lives of millions of families, which has led children to extensively interact with such devices. Studies have suggested that the social nature of CA makes them a good learning companion for children. Therefore, to understand children's preferences for the use of CAs for the purpose of in-home learning, we conducted three participatory design sessions. In order to identify parents' requirements in this regard, we also included them in the third session. We found that children expect such devices to possess a personality and an advanced level of intelligence, and support multiple content domains and learning modes and human-like conversations. Parents desire such devices to include them in their children's learning activities, foster social engagement, and to allow them to monitor their children's use. This understanding will inform the design of future CAs for the purpose of in-home learning.

The Internet of Things is the latest paradigm that encompasses the potential of connecting a physical object to the Internet, and then utilizes cloud services to collect, store and process data generated by these connected devices. In order to reduce the service latency of computations, processes, and storage at further situated Cloud nodes, the Fog paradigm was born, which brings data management closer to the end user or to the edge of the network of a provider. Fog nodes can not only be geographically distributed, but also more dynamic in nature than cloud nodes, therefore it is even more difficult to ensure data protection. The operation of such complex systems, thus, raises legal issues such as who owns or processes the data, who is liable in terms of a possible security breach. In this paper we aim to discuss the latest advances of corresponding legislation in the European Union and in the United States of America that affect these technology developments. First, we investigate IoT and Fog characteristics and identify different use cases of loT-Fog-Cloud environments that will be then used to discuss possible legal issues. We conclude the paper with role mappings for the identified cases, and by proposing recommendations on how to govern data management in these complex systems to ensure data protection as mandated by current legislations across these two regions. Our investigations imply that as we broaden the scope and complexity of the managed systems, the user control of the sensed private data weakens, and the responsibility of data protection are shifting towards fog, cloud and service providers.

There is racial diversity as well as economic inequality in the United States (U.S.). To gain a nuanced understanding of how households from different socio economic and racial backgrounds integrate technology into their lives, we conducted a diary study with 22 parents who were Asian Indian (the fastest-growing immigrant population in U.S.) and 18 who were White American (the largest racial group in U.S.) parents from the working and middle classes. The participants logged in-situ instances of using smart phones and speaker use by, with, and around children for 8 weeks, and were interviewed once every four weeks (two times in total). Our findings reveal differences and similarities in parents' attitudes and practices of using or not using these devices around and with children, in parental restrictions of children's use of technology, and children's daily use patterns. The paper concludes with a discussions of the implications of our findings and suggestions for future design improvements in smart phones and speakers.

Adoption of any new technology in an organization is a crucial decision as it can have its impact at technical, economical, and organizational level. One of such decisions is related to adoption of Cloud-based services in an organization. Cloud Computing provides elastic resources as per the demand and provides the facility to pay as per the use. Thus, it is changing the way IT infrastructure is used today with huge benefit of cost savings. However, if the solution adopted by an organization is not fulfilling the requirements, it can have tremendous negative consequences at technical, economical, and organizational level. Therefore, the decision to adopt Cloud-based services should be based on a methodology that supports a wide array of criteria for evaluating the available alternatives. Also, as these criteria or factors can be mutually interdependent and conflicting, a trade-offs-based methodology is needed to make such decisions. This paper, therefore, discusses the design, implementation, and evaluation of the prototype developed for automating the theoretical methodology of Trade-offs based Methodology for Adoption of Cloud-based Services (TrAdeCIS) developed in (Garg and Stiller, 2014). This system is based on Multi-attribute Decision Algorithms (MADA), which selects the best alternative, based on the priorities of criteria of decision maker. In addition the applicability of this methodology to the adoption of cloud-based services in an organization is validated with several use-cases towards the end of the paper. Furthermore, the extendibility of this system to other domains is being evaluated with respect to Train Operating Companies, who wish to find out the best alternative of providing Internet connectivity and voice calls on-board trains.

Technical advancements in virtualization and Service-oriented Architectures, the technology backbone of Cloud Computing (CC), along with the availability of high speed Internet has escalated the performance of CC in terms of elasticity, throughput, agility, or response time. However, according to the Gartner's Hype cycle of 2014, CC is at the "Trough of Disillusionment", which hints at "waning of interest as the implementations fail to deliver" [7]. The reason for this situation is the lack of a methodological impact analysis for adopting cloud-based services in an organization. In the context of CC an impact analysis is complicated due to the complex architecture of services and presence of influencing factors from multiple dimensions (technical, economical, and organizational). This paper, therefore, extends and evaluates the methodology "Impact Analysis Methodology for Cloud-based Services (IAMCIS)" that quantifies the impact of cloud-based services before they are adopted in an organization [6]. The methodology is illustrated in combination with a use-case obtained from a survey conducted with 17 organizations (with varied domain of expertise, size, and geographical scope), who plan to adopt or have adopted cloud-based services for fulfilling their IT requirements.

Cloud Computing has emerged as a paradigm that relies on sharing resources over the network and, therefore, potentially has cost advantages in terms of lower variable and capital cost. However, the adoption of cloud-based technology for a given IT (Information Technology) setting is a complex decision as it is influenced by multiple interdependent factors. To successfully adopt cloud-based services and evaluate their consequential impact, relevant factors, which denote the performance of such services, have to be identified. This paper, therefore, analyzes and identifies relevant technical, economical, and organizational factors. This is performed as exploratory research consisting of performing (a) a literature review and (b) multiple case-studies with 17 organizations, who have adopted or plan to adopt cloud-based services. Also, as these factors are not mutually exclusive, this paper discusses interrelations of these factors and its complexity.