Online communities are increasingly important in forming and maintaining relationships but have also faced criticism for toxic or depression-inducing content. Motivated by research showing that grateful reflection can lead to enhanced well-being, this paper explores how we might design online communities centered on gratitude through a qualitative study with 15 participants. To elicit insights on how people view expressing gratitude in online communities, we built a simple gratitude-centered online community, Gratitude, designed to be similar in nature to many online communities, where users create short posts (notes of gratitude in response to prompts) that other members can browse, react to, and comment on. Participants were first interviewed and then used the Gratitude platform for three weeks, during which they filled out surveys after each prompt. We found that while participants had concerns or questions about the value of expressing gratitude publicly and the risks associated with doing so, they also described experiencing many benefits, such as providing one with a platform for sharing; inspiring reflection and positivity; fostering connection and empathy; and contributing to a cycle of gratitude and vulnerability. Participants raised several areas for design related to better support for interaction and connection, privacy and authenticity, and motivation and engagement. We conclude by discussing implications for future research on the design of prosocial online communities centering cycles of positivity and authentic individual reflection in communal interactions.

This paper reports on a summative analysis of Exploratory Reading Groups (ERGs), a low time-commitment, relational, student-led reading group program designed to provide students from any background and year with a broad exploration of computing research. Since prior work, the program was institutionalized as a 1-credit course with a greater emphasis on strengthening pipelines into research labs. In analyzing 3 quarters of data from 136 participants, we found diverse indicators of impact. Surprisingly, despite the lightweight nature of the program (∼ 2 hours/week), we observed a statistically significant increase in satisfaction with their intellectual development at the university; confidence in reading, presenting, and communicating about their field; sense of belonging for women and minoritized ethnic groups; alignment with faculty goals in joining research labs (greater desire to make a research contribution and publish, decreased desire to join for the purpose of exploration); and engagement in the ‘reconsideration’ dimension of career identity formation. Over 70% of the participants continued on into group research projects for undergraduate students. The effectiveness of this scalable, lightweight initiative shows the promise of ERGs as a tool to support students in computing when connected to group research projects and points to future research directions on designing other lightweight, relational, scalable learning experiences.

Abstract Smartphones have become an integral part of people’s everyday lives. Smartphones are used across all household locations, including in the bed at night. Smartphone screens and other displays emit blue light, and exposure to blue light can affect one’s sleep quality. Thus, smartphone use prior to bedtime could disrupt the quality of one’s sleep, but research lacks quantitative studies on how smartphone use can influence sleep. This study combines smartphone application use data from 75 participants with sleep data collected by a wearable ring. On average, the participants used their smartphones in bed for 322.8 s (5 min and 22.8 s), with an IQR of 43.7–456. Participants spent an average of 42% of their time in bed using their smartphones (IQR of 5.87–55.5%). Our findings indicate that smartphone use in bed has significant adverse effects on sleep latency, awake time, average heart rate, and HR variability. We also find that smartphone use does not decrease sleep quality when used outside of bed. Our results indicate that intense smartphone use alone does not negatively affect well-being. Since all smartphone users do not use their phones in the same way, extending the investigation to different smartphone use types might yield more information than general smartphone use. In conclusion, this paper presents the first investigation of the association between smartphone application use logs and detailed sleep metrics. Our work also validates previous research results and highlights emerging future work.

A new generation of wearable devices now enable end-users to keep track of their sleep patterns. This paper reports on a longitudinal study of 82 participants who used a state-of-the-art sleep tracking ring for an average of 65 days. We conducted interviews and questionnaires to understand changes to their lifestyle, their perceptions of the tracked information and sleep, and the overall experience of using an unobtrusive sleep tracking device. Our results indicate that such a device is suitable for long-term sleep tracking and helpful in identifying detrimental lifestyle elements that hinder sleep quality. However, tracking one's sleep can also introduce stress or physical discomfort, potentially leading to adverse outcomes. We discuss these findings in light of related work and highlight the near-term research directions that the rapid commoditisation of sleep tracking technology enables.

Public controversies around the unethical use of personal data are increasing, spotlighting data ethics as an increasingly important field of study. MyData is a related emerging vision that emphasizes individuals’ control of their personal data. In this paper, we investigate people’s perceptions of various data management scenarios by measuring the perceived ethicality and level of felt concern concerning the scenarios. We deployed a set of 96 unique scenarios to an online crowdsourcing platform for assessment and invited a representative sample of the participants to a second-stage questionnaire about the MyData vision and its potential in the field of healthcare. Our results provide a timely investigation into how topical data-related practices affect the perceived ethicality and the felt concern. The questionnaire analysis reveals great potential in the MyData vision. Through the combined quantitative and qualitative results, we contribute to the field of data ethics.