With artificial intelligence (AI) becoming more present in ed- ucation globally, it is essential to consider how cultural con- texts shape teachers’ perspectives, an understanding that sup- ports more inclusive and sustainable learning systems. This study draws on the African philosophy of Ubuntu to frame our cross-cultural investigation of how children conceptu- alize AI through the lens of their teachers. We conducted semi-structured interviews with twelve middle school teach- ers in Nigeria and the United States, asking them to interpret AI-themed essays written by students. These teacher reflec- tions revealed differing educational priorities, cultural val- ues, and infrastructural realities: U.S. educators’ interpreta- tions centered on personal development and future careers, while Nigerian teachers highlighted students’ focus on fam- ily, community well-being, and practical societal challenges. Nigerian participants also pointed to the need for improved infrastructure (e.g., electricity, internet), broader AI literacy, and education policies that reflect local needs. Our findings il- lustrate how culturally grounded worldviews, such as Ubuntu, shape interpretations of AI and its role in society, and sug- gest that AI education is never culturally neutral. We argue that AI literacy initiatives must be designed not only to teach technical skills but also to support educational sustainability, defined here as inclusive, resilient, and culturally responsive learning systems capable of evolving within diverse contexts. We offer actionable recommendations for the HCI commu- nity to co-design AI education tools that foreground collec- tive well-being, foster global digital citizenship, and reduce epistemic exclusion in the development of future technolo- gies.

Cybersecurity leaders who are also parents represent an extreme case population whose professional experience facing digital risk intersects with their lived digital parenting practices, offering a distinctive lens on children's digital safety that complements prior research in Human-Computer Interaction. Drawing on 21 interviews with such parents, we explore factors shaping how they support and protect their children in a digital world, and the implications for design and support frameworks. Participants demonstrated detailed awareness of the benefits and, at times, the necessity of technical protection systems, but also their limitations: they can restrict access or surface concerning behaviors, yet still be bypassed by children. Even digital-risk experts routinely complemented technical safeguards with relational strategies grounded in trust, open communication, and sensitivity to children's maturity. These insights highlight the need for design and support approaches that pair technical safeguards with relational trust and communication, while acknowledging persistent tensions between control and autonomy.

Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) is widely used to study adolescents’ experiences; yet, how the design of EMA platforms shapes engagement, research practices, and power dynamics in youth studies remains under-examined. We developed a youth-centered EMA platform prioritizing youth engagement and researcher support, and evaluated it through a case study on a longitudinal investigation with adolescent twins focused on mental health and sleep behavior. Interviews with the research team examined how the platform design choices shaped participant onboarding, sustained engagement, risk monitoring, and data interpretation. The app’s teen-centered design and gamified features sustained teen engagement, while the web portal streamlined administrative oversight through a centralized dashboard. However, technical instability and rigid data structures created significant hurdles, leading to privacy concerns among parents and complicating the researchers’ ability to analyze raw usage metadata. We provide actionable interaction design guidelines for developing EMA platforms that prioritize youth agency, ethical practice, and research goals.

Recently, red teaming, with roots in security, has become a key evaluative approach to ensure the safety and reliability of Generative Artificial Intelligence. However, most existing work emphasizes technical benchmarks and attack success rates, leaving the socio-technical practices of how red teaming datasets are defined, created, and evaluated under-examined. Drawing on 22 interviews with practitioners who design and evaluate red teaming datasets, we examine the data practices and standards that underpin this work. Because adversarial datasets determine the scope and accuracy of model evaluations, they are critical artifacts for assessing potential harms from large language models. Our contributions are first, empirical evidence of practitioners conceptualizing red teaming and developing and evaluating red teaming datasets. Second, we reflect on how practitioners’ conceptualization of risk leads to overlooking the context, interaction type, and user specificity. We conclude with three opportunities for HCI researchers to expand the conceptualization and data practices for red-teaming.

Generative AI is rapidly reshaping young people’s digital experiences, from providing emotional support to introducing new dimensions of risks. Yet, existing safety frameworks are not equipped to handle the unique risks posed by GenAI. To investigate how youth safety is being addressed in this new landscape, we conducted a systematic review of (N=30) GenAI-youth studies from 2014-2025. We found that GenAI-youth-related research was primarily led by AI experts with minimal involvement from youth development experts or young people themselves. Safety was typically framed as a technical system feature, optimized through filters, benchmarks, or guardrails, rather than a relational, contextual, and developmentally grounded concern. We call on the HCI community to re-evaluate its approach to participation in AI. We must move beyond reactive, system-driven GenAI approaches to youth safety towards a more holistic, proactive model where multistakeholder inclusion is a core aspect throughout the AI-lifecycle, leading to safer and equitable systems.

The Hispanic in Computing group is an informal online community comprising students, faculty, and industry representatives dedicated to providing support to Hispanic students in computing. Established over a decade ago, the group organizes gatherings at national conferences to strengthen the social bonds that connect this small community. This Birds of a Feather seeks to bring together Hispanics and other members of the Computing Education Community interested in supporting Hispanic students.

Current online safety technologies overly rely on parental mediation and often fail to address the unique challenges faced by youth in the Child Welfare System (CWS). These youth depend on a complex ecosystem of support, including families, caseworkers, and advocates, to safeguard their wellbeing. Within this network, Guardians ad Litem (GALs) play a unique role as court-appointed advocates tasked with ensuring the best interests of youth. Yet little is known about how GALs perceive and support youths' online safety. To address this gap, we conducted a two-part workshop with 10 GALs to explore their perspectives on online safety and collaboratively envision technology-based solutions tailored to the needs of youth in the CWS. Our findings revealed that GALs struggle to support youth with online safety challenges due to limited digital literacy, inconsistency of institutional support, lack of collaboration among stakeholders, and complexity of family dynamics. While GALs recognized the need for some oversight of youth online activities, they emphasized designing systems that support online safety beyond control or restriction by fostering stability, trust, and meaningful interactions, both online and offline. GALs emphasized the importance of developing tools that enable ongoing communication, therapeutic support, and coordination across stakeholders. Proposed design concepts focused on strengthening youth agency and cross-stakeholder collaboration through virtual avatars and mobile apps. This work provides actionable design concepts for strengthening relationships and communication across care network. It also redefines traditional approaches to online safety, advocating for a holistic, multi-stakeholder online safety paradigm for youth in the CWS.

Navigating the complexities of knowledge management (KM) and Knowledge Transfer (KT) in community social services is a challenging task, as workers must handle a fast-paced, resource-constrained environment while supporting the urgent and multifaceted needs of vulnerable populations. Despite research into the use of technology in non-profit and community settings, little attention has been given to how community service workers (CSWs) capture, share, and manage knowledge in practice. This study addresses this gap by conducting a three-month ethnographic study of two community organizations in South Bend, Indiana, complemented by semi-structured interviews, revealing the informal, ad-hoc KM methods CSWs use to manage information flows. Using a human-socio-technical KM framework, we compare these practices with the more structured KM systems found in large corporations, identifying key differences in formality and technological integration. Our findings highlight the need for accessible, sustainable KM solutions that fit the informal knowledge-sharing practices of CSWs while enhancing knowledge retention, knowledge transfer, and collaboration. This work contributes to HCI and CSCW by providing design considerations for developing technology that better supports KM in community social services.

Youth online safety research in HCI has historically centered on perspectives from the Global North, often overlooking the unique particularities and cultural contexts of regions in the Global South. This paper presents a systematic review of 66 youth online safety studies published between 2014 and 2024, specifically focusing on regions in the Global South. Our findings reveal a concentrated research focus in Asian countries and predominance of quantitative methods. We also found limited research on marginalized youth populations and a primary focus on risks related to cyberbullying. Our analysis underscores the critical role of cultural factors in shaping online safety, highlighting the need for educational approaches that integrate social dynamics and awareness. We propose methodological recommendations and a future research agenda that encourages the adoption of situated, culturally sensitive methodologies and youth-centered approaches to researching youth online safety regions in the Global South. This paper advocates for greater inclusivity in youth online safety research, emphasizing the importance of addressing varied sociocultural contexts to better understand and meet the online safety needs of youth in the Global South.

Youth implicated in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, as well as those with an incarcerated parent, are considered the most vulnerable Children in Need of Services (CHINS). We identified 1,160 of these at-risk youth (ages 13-17) who sought support via an online peer support platform to understand their adverse childhood experiences and explore how the internet played a role in providing an outlet for support, as well as potentially facilitating risks. We first analyzed posts from 1,160 youth who self-identified as CHINS while sharing about their adverse experiences. Then, we retrieved all 239,929 posts by these users to identify salient topics within their support-seeking posts: 1) Urges to self-harm due to social drama, 2) desire for social connection, 3) struggles with family, and 4) substance use and sexual risks. We found that the internet often helped facilitate these problems; for example, the desperation for social connection often led to meeting unsafe people online, causing additional trauma. Family members and other unsafe people used the internet to perpetrate cyberabuse, while CHINS themselves leveraged online channels to engage in illegal and risky behavior. Our study calls for tailored support systems that address the unique needs of CHINS to promote safe online spaces and foster resilience to break the cycle of adversity. Empowering CHINS requires amplifying their voices and acknowledging the challenges they face as a result of their adverse childhood experiences.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in employing intelligent agents in writing. Previous work emphasizes the evaluation of the quality of end product—whether it was coherent and polished, overlooking the journey that led to the product, which is an invaluable dimension of the creative process. To understand how to recognize human efforts in co-writing with intelligent writing systems, we adapt Flower and Hayes’ cognitive process theory of writing and propose CoCo Matrix, a two-dimensional taxonomy of entropy and information gain, to depict the new human-agent co-writing model. We define four quadrants and situate thirty-four published systems within the taxonomy. Our research found that low entropy and high information gain systems are under-explored, yet offer promising future directions in writing tasks that benefit from the agent’s divergent planning and the human’s focused translation. CoCo Matrix, not only categorizes different writing systems but also deepens our understanding of the cognitive processes in human-agent co-writing. By analyzing minimal changes in the writing process, CoCo Matrix serves as a proxy for the writer’s mental model, allowing writers to reflect on their contributions. This reflection is facilitated through the measured metrics of information gain and entropy, which provide insights irrespective of the writing system used.

HCI research has been at the forefront of designing interventions for protecting teens online; yet, how can we test and evaluate these solutions without endangering the youth we aim to protect? Towards this goal, we conducted focus groups with 20 teens to inform the design of a social media simulation platform and study for evaluating online safety nudges co-designed with teens. Participants evaluated risk scenarios, personas, platform features, and our research design to provide insight regarding the ecological validity of these artifacts. Teens expected risk scenarios to be subtle and tricky, while also higher in risk to be believable. The teens iterated on the nudges to prioritize risk prevention without reducing autonomy, risk coping, and community accountability. For the simulation, teens recommended using transparency with some deceit to balance realism and respect for participants. Our meta-level research provides a teen-centered action plan to evaluate online safety interventions safely and effectively.

This research examines how caseworkers collaborate with foster families to address adolescent online safety. We interviewed 32 caseworkers who worked with teens (ages 13-17) in foster care within the past 5 years. Using thematic analysis, we found that case managers are most concerned about sexual-related risks that result in physical abuse (e.g., sex trafficking) or online interactions that facilitated offline risks (e.g., runaway, illegal drug activity), rather than risks that only manifested in virtual spaces. Yet, inadequate training and insufficient support left caseworkers at a loss for how to address these challenges on top of their already heavy caseloads, often making online safety an afterthought. We call on the foster care system to place a higher priority in providing collaborative and socio-technical ecological support for caseworkers, foster parents, and children, so that early risk prevention in online spaces can support the safety and well-being of foster youth offline.

We conducted a co-design study with 26 users in dyadic groups who were assigned to the opposing roles of "Streamers'' and "Viewers'' to design interactive, wearable telepresence prototypes for interpersonal use. The goal was to elicit values, identify value tensions, and resolve these tensions in the design of a system that allows Streamers to share their live experiences with a remote Viewer. Leveraging the lens of value-sensitive design (VSD), we found that these different stakeholders prioritized different values in design, but possibly due to our prompt to design for someone they cared about/knew, often accounted for one another's needs in their solutions to arrive at designs that were affordable, unobtrusive, and socially acceptable for the Streamer, while giving the Viewer a sense of autonomy. Our work highlights the strengths of co-design when eliciting important human values in the design of sociotechnical systems for wearable telepresence, reconciling value tensions, and conceptualizing novel hardware- and software-based solutions for enhancing the interpersonal telepresence experience of both viewers and streamers. A key insight from our study is that no single system will meet all users' needs; therefore, we should move towards building customizable toolkits to account for differing values and needs.

We developed and deployed an interpersonal telepresence prototype aimed at providing a positive one-to-one interaction between a Streamer and a Viewer. Our prototype uses four distributed, wearable cameras hidden from the public eye. It was designed to reduce the risk of Streamer self-consciousness while providing the Viewer with a greater sense of autonomy. We deployed our prototype with sixteen participants in dyads, who worked together to complete a scavenger hunt, and compared it the baseline of Skype. We found how our prototype better supported Streamer social well-being and physical comfort, and it also better supported Viewer autonomy. However, almost all participants desired a change to the design of the prototype, hinting that we need to provide better customization for future iterations of interpersonal telepresence devices.

While various frameworks and heuristics exist within the HCI community to guide research and design for vulnerable populations, most are centered on the researcher’s involvement. In this work, we developed a conceptual framework for supporting the participation of vulnerable populations in the research and design of technologies. Building upon Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we synthesized 84 research articles that focus on vulnerable populations and technology to develop our framework. This framework conceptualizes both the barriers, such as lack of technology access and digital literacy, and assets, like social relationships, that impact effective participation in research and design. Using our framework can guide researchers in identifying and fulfilling the technology-related needs of vulnerable populations, leading to more empowering research participation for these groups. The framework’s guiding questions offer researchers the opportunity to reflect on their approach prior to and during their collaboration with vulnerable populations in technology research and design.

The Human-computer Interaction (HCI) community has the opportunity to foster the integration of research practices across the Global South and North to begin overcoming colonial relationships. In this paper, we focus on the case of Latin America (LATAM), where initiatives to increase the representation of HCI practitioners lack a consolidated understanding of the practices they employ, the factors that influence them, and the challenges that practitioners face. To address this knowledge gap, we employ a mixed-methods approach, comprising a survey (66 respondents) and in-depth interviews (19 interviewees). Our analyses characterize a set of research perspectives on how HCI is practiced in/about LATAM; a set of driving forces and tensions with a heavy reliance on diasporic dynamics; and a set of professional demands and associated structural limitations. We also offer a roadmap towards building connections across HCI communities, in an attempt to rebuild HCI as a pluriverse.

By virtue of being underrepresented in computing, Hispanic women completing a Ph.D. face additional challenges starting their new careers. Completing the dissertation, applying for jobs, interviewing, and negotiating job offers are made more difficult by the lack of a community of mentors that fully understands their intersectional identities. This panel presents the challenges faced and the accomplishments of three recent Hispanic women Ph.D. recipients as they navigated the last stages of the dissertation, applied for jobs, considered job offers, and started their professional careers in computing.

Adolescent online safety researchers have emphasized the importance of moving beyond restrictive and privacy invasive approaches to online safety, towards resilience-based approaches for empowering teens to deal with online risks independently. Unfortunately, many of the existing online safety interventions are focused on parental mediation and not contextualized to teens' personal experiences online; thus, they do not effectively cater to the unique needs of teens. To better understand how we might design online safety interventions that help teens deal with online risks, as well as when and how to intervene, we must include teens as partners in the design process and equip them with the skills needed to contribute equally to the design process. As such, we conducted User Experience (UX) bootcamps with 21 teens (ages 13-17) to first teach them important UX design skills using industry standard tools, so they could create storyboards for unsafe online interactions commonly experienced by teens and high-fidelity, interactive prototypes for dealing with these situations. Based on their storyboards, teens often encountered information breaches and sexual risks with strangers, as well as cyberbullying from acquaintances or friends. While teens often blocked or reported strangers, they struggled with responding to risks from friends or acquaintances, seeking advice from others on the best action to take. Importantly, teens did not find any of the existing ways for responding to these risks to be effective in keeping them safe. When asked to create their own design-based interventions, teens frequently envisioned "nudges" that occurred in real-time. Interestingly, teens more often designed for risk prevention (rather than risk coping) by focusing on nudging the risk perpetrator (rather than the victim) to rethink their actions, block harmful actions from occurring, or penalizing perpetrators for inappropriate behavior to prevent it from happening again in the future. Teens also designed personalized sensitivity filters to provide teens the ability to manage content they wanted to see online. Some teens also designed personalized nudges, so that teens could receive intelligent, guided advice from the platform that would help them know how to handle online risks themselves without intervention from their parents. Our findings highlight how teens want to address online risks "at the root" by putting the onus of risk prevention on those who perpetrate them - rather than on the victim. Our work is the first to leverage co-design with teens to develop novel online safety interventions that advocate for a paradigm shift from youth risk protection to promoting good digital citizenship.

Social service providers play a vital role in the developmental outcomes of underprivileged youth as they transition into adulthood. Educators, mental health professionals, juvenile justice officers, and child welfare caseworkers often have first-hand knowledge of the trials uniquely faced by these vulnerable youth and are charged with mitigating harmful risks, such as mental health challenges, child abuse, drug use, and sex trafficking. Yet, less is known about whether or how social service providers assess and mitigate the online risk experiences of youth under their care. Therefore, as part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) I-Corps program, we conducted interviews with 37 social service providers (SSPs) who work with underprivileged youth to determine what (if any) online risks are most concerning to them given their role in youth protection, how they assess or become aware of these online risk experiences, and whether they see value in the possibility of using artificial intelligence (AI) as a potential solution for online risk detection. Overall, online sexual risks (e.g., sexual grooming and abuse) and cyberbullying were the most salient concern across all social service domains, especially when these experiences crossed the boundary between the digital and the physical worlds. Yet, SSPs had to rely heavily on youth self-reports to know whether and when online risks occurred, which required building a trusting relationship with youth; otherwise, SSPs became aware only after a formal investigation had been launched. Therefore, most SSPs found value in the potential for using AI as an early detection system and to monitor youth, but they were concerned that such a solution would not be feasible due to a lack of resources to adequately respond to online incidences, access to the necessary digital trace data (e.g., social media), context, and concerns about violating the trust relationships they built with youth. Thus, such automated risk detection systems should be designed and deployed with caution, as their implementation could cause youth to mistrust adults, thereby limiting the receipt of necessary guidance and support. We add to the bodies of research on adolescent online safety and the benefits and challenges of leveraging algorithmic systems in the public sector.

We perpetuate, reinforce, and have the opportunity to disrupt systemic injustices through the actions we take as individuals. As an IDC community, we have a responsibility to reflect upon our behaviors and the commitments we make to ensure our engagements with youth, especially those that identify as Black or brown, are justice-centered. In this workshop, we invite researchers and practitioners to reflect on what is at stake if the IDC community does not intentionally take a justice-centered approach throughout our methods, our research questions, and our everyday interactions with youth. The goals of our workshop are two-fold: (1) To share stories about the actions we take as researchers with power to influence change in our interactions with youth, and (2) To establish the commitments the IDC community can make for more equitable design and research engagements with youth.

Algorithms have permeated throughout civil government and society, where they are being used to make high-stakes decisions about human lives. In this paper, we first develop a cohesive framework of algorithmic decision-making adapted for the public sector (ADMAPS) that reflects the complex socio-technical interactions between human discretion, bureaucratic processes, and algorithmic decision-making by synthesizing disparate bodies of work in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Science and Technology Studies (STS), and Public Administration (PA). We then applied the ADMAPS framework to conduct a qualitative analysis of an in-depth, eight-month ethnographic case study of algorithms in daily use within a child-welfare agency that serves approximately 900 families and 1300 children in the mid-western United States. Overall, we found that there is a need to focus on strength-based algorithmic outcomes centered in social ecological frameworks. In addition, algorithmic systems need to support existing bureaucratic processes and augment human discretion, rather than replace it. Finally, collective buy-in in algorithmic systems requires trust in the target outcomes at both the practitioner and bureaucratic levels. As a result of our study, we propose guidelines for the design of high-stakes algorithmic decision-making tools in the child-welfare system, and more generally, in the public sector. We empirically validate the theoretically derived ADMAPS framework to demonstrate how it can be useful for systematically making pragmatic decisions about the design of algorithms for the public sector.

We conducted a thematic content analysis of 4,180 posts by adolescents (ages 12-17) on an online peer support mental health forum to understand what and how adolescents talk about their online sexual interactions. Youth used the platform to seek support (83%), connect with others (15%), and give advice (5%) about sexting, their sexual orientation, sexual abuse, and explicit content. Females often received unwanted nudes from strangers and struggled with how to turn down sexting requests from people they knew. Meanwhile, others who sought support complained that they received unwanted sexual solicitations while doing so-to the point that adolescents gave advice to one another on which users to stay away from. Our research provides insight into the online sexual experiences of adolescents and how they seek support around these issues. We discuss how to design peer-based social media platforms to support the well-being and safety of youth.

The U.S. Child Welfare System (CWS) is charged with improving outcomes for foster youth; yet, they are overburdened and underfunded. To overcome this limitation, several states have turned towards algorithmic decision-making systems to reduce costs and determine better processes for improving CWS outcomes. Using a human-centered algorithmic design approach, we synthesize 50 peer-reviewed publications on computational systems used in CWS to assess how they were being developed, common characteristics of predictors used, as well as the target outcomes. We found that most of the literature has focused on risk assessment models but does not consider theoretical approaches (e.g., child-foster parent matching) nor the perspectives of caseworkers (e.g., case notes). Therefore, future algorithms should strive to be context-aware and theoretically robust by incorporating salient factors identified by past research. We provide the HCI community with research avenues for developing human-centered algorithms that redirect attention towards more equitable outcomes for CWS.

The methods in which we study the online experiences of adolescents should be evidence-based and informed by youth. This is especially true when studying sensitive topics, such as the online risk behaviors of minors. We directly engaged 20 adolescents (ages 12-18) in the co-design of two different research methodologies (i.e., diary studies and analyzing social media trace data) for conducting adolescent online safety research. We also interviewed 13 of their parents to understand their perspectives. Overall, teens wanted to share their personal experiences and benefit society, while parents wanted researchers to tackle a topic that they felt was a prevalent problem for teens. Yet, they both had significant concerns regarding data privacy of the sensitive disclosures made by teens during such studies. Teens' feared getting in trouble. Participants emphasized the importance of developing a trusting relationship with the researcher to overcome these concerns. Participants also saw the potential for using the research study as a tool for risk-reporting and mitigation, where researchers could act as liaisons between the teens and other parties (e.g., counselors, law enforcement, parents) to share pertinent risk details and facilitate resources or even help teens directly by giving them strategies for mitigating online risks they encountered during the study. Our research delves into important ethical considerations for conducting risk-focused research with adolescents and uncovers the critical need for designing risk-based research for youth protection. We provide researchers with heuristic guidelines for conducting ethical research with vulnerable populations (i.e., adolescents) and keeping participants safe while doing so.

Mobile social media applications ("apps"), such as TikTok (previously Musical.ly), have recently surfaced in news media due to harmful incidents involving young children engaging with strangers through these mobile apps. To better understand children's awareness of online stranger danger and explore their visions for technologies that can help them manage related online risks (e.g., sexual solicitations and cyberbullying), we held two participatory design sessions with 12 children (ages 8-11 years old). We found that children desired varying levels of agency, depending on the severity of the risk. In most cases, they wanted help resolving the issue themselves instead of relying on their parents to do it for them. Children also believed that social media apps should take on more responsibility in promoting online safety for children. We discuss the children's desires for agency, privacy, and automated intelligent assistance and provide novel design recommendations inspired by children.

Foster youth are particularly vulnerable to offline risks; yet, little is known about their online risk experiences or how foster parents mediate technology use in the home. We conducted 29 interviews with foster parents of 42 teens (ages 13-17) who were part of the child welfare system. Foster parents faced significant challenges relating to technology mediation in the home. Based on parental accounts, over half of the foster teens encountered high-risk situations that involved interacting with unsafe people online, resulting in rape, sex trafficking, and/or psychological harm. Overall, foster parents were at a loss for how to balance online safety with technology access in a way that engendered positive relationships with their foster teens. Instead, parents often resorted to outright restriction. Our research highlights the importance of considering the unique needs of foster families and designing technologies to address the challenges faced by this vulnerable population of teens and parents.

Mobile applications ("apps") developed to promote online safety for children are underutilized and rely heavily on parental control features that monitor and restrict their child's mobile activities. This asymmetry in parental surveillance initiates an interesting research question -- how do children themselves feel about such parental control apps? We conducted a qualitative analysis of 736 reviews of 37 mobile online safety apps from Google Play that were publicly posted and written by children (ages 8-19). Our results indicate that child ratings were significantly lower than that of parents with 76% of the child reviews giving apps a single star. Children felt that the apps were overly restrictive and invasive of their personal privacy, negatively impacting their relationships with their parents. We relate these findings with HCI literature on mobile online safety, including broader literature around privacy and surveillance, and outline design opportunities for online safety apps.

Adoption rates of parental control applications ("apps") for teens' mobile devices are low, but little is known about the characteristics of parents (or teens) who use these apps. We conducted a web-based survey of 215 parents and their teens (ages 13-17) using two separate logistic regression models (parent and teen) to examine the factors that predicted parental use of technical monitoring apps on their teens' mobile devices. Both parent and teen models confirmed that low autonomy granting (e.g., authoritarian) parents were the most likely to use parental control apps. The teen model revealed additional nuance, indicating that teens who were victimized online and had peer problems were more likely to be monitored by their parents. Overall, increased parental control was associated with more (not fewer) online risks. We discuss the implications of these findings and provide design recommendations for mobile apps that promote online safety through engaged, instead of restrictive, parenting.

This paper focuses on understanding how the key stakeholders of the foster care system work together, as well as the systems that facilitate collaboration. We conducted 20 interviews with foster parents, 2 with non-profit agencies, and 1 case worker interview. Our findings suggest that each stakeholder faces their own unique challenges and sociotechnical systems put in place to assist stakeholders are not sufficient for addressing these concerns. This poster identifies the major stakeholders, their goals and needs, as well as the systems used. Our work helps identify gaps in order to design more effective systems that can better support the foster care system.

Several tele-monitoring systems have been developed for in-home patient use. Unfortunately, many of these systems are cost prohibitive and privacy invasive to the patient. To overcome this problem, we designed a more affordable and lightweight solution called Carebit, an Android application that leverages the Fitbit API. We conducted two user studies to understand ways to improve our design. Overall, we found that the notifications feature is the most useful feature for users, and no concerns about privacy were mentioned. The goal of Carebit is improve informal caregiving.

Past research has focused on investigating parenting styles in the context of various positive and negative outcomes. We examined the relationship between parenting styles and offline and online adolescent peer problems. We found that parental involvement was associated with fewer peer problems, and strictness/supervision was associated with less frequent online victimization. Higher levels of autonomy granting parenting were associated with less peer problems and online victimization. Further, teens who experienced high levels of peer problems experienced less online victimization when their parents granting them more autonomy, than parents who restricted their autonomy. The findings of this paper set a foundation for parents to consider taking more authoritative approaches to dealing with their teens' offline peer problems as to not exacerbate teens' online risk experiences.

An individual's language and culture play an important part in their learning process [9]. In this paper, we develop a mobile application called "Mnemorizer" to help international students learn English vocabulary for standardized tests. We use mnemonics and gamification to aid learning and present results that indicate that native tongue mnemonics are more effective than mnemonics in English. Initial results of this ongoing project provide motivation for our future work, which will leverage crowdsourcing techniques to build a database of mnemonic devices to support a broader subset of languages and cultures.

Teens in the foster care system often have histories that involve severe trauma, such as physical and sexual abuse, substance use, incarceration, and early pregnancy. While studies have investigated foster teens' engagement with high-risk behaviors offline, there is a dearth of information regarding foster teens and their engagement in online activities that may facilitate increased risk behaviors. Moreover, the extent to which technology acts as a positive versus negative influence on foster youth is unclear. We synthesize the current literature on foster youth and online safety to illustrate: 1) the tensions between providing access to networked technologies versus keeping foster youth safe from risks, 2) the lack of empirical research or technology-based interventions to ensure the online safety of foster youth, and 3) the importance of pursuing future research to design solutions that can alleviate some of these tensions. Our goal is to inform researchers, designers, and educators on the importance of keeping in mind the needs of particularly vulnerable populations, such as teens within the foster care system, when designing interactive systems.