With stress-tracking technologies becoming pervasive, a range of feedback displays has been explored to support engagement with stress data. However, most displays are studied in isolation, leaving limited understanding of how different forms of feedback shape engagement differently. This study compares three real-time stress feedback displays: screen-based quantitative, screen-based expressive, and physical expressive. Twenty-one participants took part in stress induction and recovery tasks to gain direct experience with each display, with data collected through surveys and semi-structured interviews. We found that different displays became associated with different modes of engagement: quantitative displays supported mobile, analytical use; screen-based expressive displays encouraged active monitoring; and physical expressive displays enabled peripheral awareness. We highlight the importance of balancing awareness with emotional experience, shaped by data representation and materiality. We challenge the assumption in personal informatics that more information or a more intuitive understanding is always beneficial, and offer a design framework for experiencing sensitive bio-signal feedback.

Online video watching has become prevalent, so are technologies to promote a sense of co-watching across distances. However, most co-watching technologies require active input from users (e.g. through text-based interactions) or rely on special devices. This paper presents EmotiV, a prototype designed to bring the co-watching experience to users without additional effort or devices, by automatically capturing and sharing viewers’ emotions through Facial Expression Recognition (FER). A user study with 20 participants using a comedy movie-watching scenario shows that EmotiV helped bring a sense of togetherness, aliveness and fun, and was appreciated to be more timely and authentic although with less control in comparison to traditional text-based interaction. Meanwhile, it also helped promote self-awareness and reflections, with privacy concerns to be addressed. These findings suggest that FER can serve as a lightweight and non-intrusive mechanism for augmenting remote co-watching, offering design insights for affect-aware computing to support everyday media consumption.

Pre-sleep digital consumption is widespread. While it is a common concern for bedtime procrastination, recent research also highlights its importance in fulfilling various pre-sleep needs, such as claiming "me time". However, these benefits and underlying needs have largely been overlooked in the design of digital sleep interventions. In this paper, we present a co-design workshop with 16 participants, exploring a smart pillow that allows audio-based digital consumption through non-distracting interactions. We illustrate the smart pillow’s potential in resolving the tension between digital consumption and sleep transition to support sleep onset — the transition from wakefulness to sleep. Our work highlights how the pillow’s physical form affords audio consumption control with minimal effort, and positions sleep onset as a distinct design context that demands careful attention when designing for sleep. We offer design implications that leverage tangible and bodily interactions to accommodate the sensitive transitioning state during sleep onset.

The HCI community has been actively developing and studying the use of Personal Informatics (PI) systems.While celebrating the headways, researchers have uncovered many unintended consequences of using PI systems, such as data-induced stress and obsessive tracking, but there has been a lack of systematic analysis of these consequences and their underlying causes.In this work, we reviewed 172 PI research articles, highlighting that tracking and interacting with personal data can adversely affect individuals' cognitive load, emotional well-being, social acts, and behaviors, while bringing practical challenges.By synthesizing the pathways through which these consequences occur, we recognized issues in the data-centric design ideology, variations across tracking needs and literacy, the evolving social dynamics, and individuals' intention-behavior gap.Reflecting on the findings, we discuss how to best leverage personal data in our lives and propose a practice-oriented research agenda to mitigate these unintended consequences.

Emotion tracking is commonly practiced for mental wellbeing.In recent years, increasing attention is turned to automatic emotion tracking, including technologies based on Facial Expression Recognition (FER).However, work on FER based tracking so far has mainly focused on accuracy improvement, and little is on how it works in everyday lives.In this paper, we developed an FER-based emotion tracking web application, EmoAction, and used it as a technology probe to explore participants' experiences and perceptions of using FER-based emotion tracking in daily life.A field study with 9 participants trying it over 14 days reveals how such an emotion tracking tool enables people to gain new awareness and new perspectives of their emotions, and identifies several potential usages of such an automatic tracking tool.We then discuss the implications for future design, including providing real-time non-judgmental feedback, prioritizing triggering reflection over seeking maximum precision, and enabling social sharing with respect for privacy.

Abstract Self-management has become increasingly important with the growing population living with chronic conditions. Self-Management Support (SMS) provided in healthcare systems is essential for its success. While prior research mainly focuses on Western countries, this paper presents a study of SMS practices for osteoporosis management as part of a Whole Course Management (WCM) program recently implemented in the healthcare system in China, which features a new role called case manager in the hospital dedicated to SMS and related coordination. Based on interviews with 22 participants, including one case manager, two physicians, three nurses, seven patients, and nine caregivers, we highlight the importance of the role of case manager in promoting awareness of osteoporosis and self-management, integrated care coordination, and emotional support. At the same time, it also reveals challenges and promising directions to make SMS more effective, mainly in terms of self-management education, active patient involvement, and coordination among the care network. We ended by reflecting on our findings and discussing implications for SMS and the design of ICTs.

Abstract Video-sharing platforms such as YouTube are popular today, not only for entertainment but also for learning, e.g., for understanding lecture content or acquiring everyday skills. Some platforms, like Bilibili, a popular video-sharing platform in China, even introduced note-taking and sharing features to further foster such learning practices. While note-taking and sharing have been extensively explored in environments specifically for learning, their use around these social media platforms such as YouTube and Bilibili remains under-studied. In this paper, we present a qualitative study with 15 participants who have used the note-taking and sharing feature called BNote launched on Bilibili. Our study reveals how note-taking and sharing are used as a way to cultivate a space for learning on such a general video-sharing platform by structuring, supplementing, and substituting user-generated videos and by leveraging social forces for motivation, self-discipline, and organization for learning. We end by discussing our findings and providing design recommendations to better support a learning space on social media platforms.

Danmu (or “bullet screen”), a popular feature on video sharing platforms, plays a crucial role in facilitating knowledge sharing and learning. In recent years, danmu has drawn attention to automatic generation methods. However, existing methods mostly utilize limited content sources, such as the video itself (e.g., subtitles) and neighboring danmus, while other valuable sources remain underexplored. To this end, this article proposes a Category-Guided Note-to-Danmu conversion model (CG-NTD) by leveraging user-generated notes. The model is designed to identify unique contents within the notes and convert them into danmus while also showing the source note categories. CG-NTD classifies the notes by fusing them with subtitle and neighboring danmu features. Then, it uses a cross-attention mechanism to integrate the note’s category feature with note, subtitle, and danmu contexts to identify three keywords from the notes as the generated danmus. Using Bilibili as the research site, we implement a plugin prototype named BNoteToDanmu. Automatic and human evaluations reveal that CG-NTD outperforms BiLSTM, mT5, and BERT baselines in Precision, Recall, and F1-score metrics and generates more understandable and relevant danmus than ChatGPT. Moreover, the plugin demonstrates promising applications, such as assisting users in viewing videos, posting danmus, and recognizing high-quality notes. These findings offer insights into leveraging user creations to generate danmu to enhance its learning value on video sharing platforms.

We are extremely happy to be able to present the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) community with this issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, containing very interesting and relevant scholarship from its members. This issue includes 209 papers, of which 175 were accepted from the Jan 2023 cycle, and 34 were accepted from the Jul 2023 cycle. It reflects great efforts and contributions from external reviewers, Associate Chairs and Editors, who together have conducted a rigorous review process to select contributions of the highest quality advancing the CSCW field. As Track Chairs, we are grateful for the community's collective efforts to continue shaping and sharing CSCW's tradition of high-quality scholarship across the years.

Usually generated by ordinary users and often not particularly designed for learning, the videos on video-sharing platforms are mostly not structured enough to support learning purposes, although they are increasingly leveraged for that. Most existing studies attempt to structure the video using video summarization techniques. However, these methods focus on extracting information from within the video and aiming to consume the video itself. In this article, we design and implement BNoteHelper, a note-based video outline prototype that generates outline titles by extracting user-generated notes on Bilibili, using the BART model fine-tuned on a built dataset. As a browser plugin, BNoteHelper provides users with video overview and navigation as well as note-taking template, via two main features: outline table and navigation marker. The model and prototype are evaluated through automatic and human evaluations. The automatic evaluation reveals that, both before and after fine-tuning, the BART model outperforms T5-Pegasus in BLEU and Perplexity metrics. Also, the results from user feedback reveal that the generation outline sourced from notes is preferred by users over that sourced from video captions due to its more concise, clear, and accurate characteristics but also too general with less details and diversities sometimes. Two features of the video outline are also found to have respective advantages, especially in holistic and fine-grained aspects. Based on these results, we propose insights into designing a video summary from the user-generated creation perspective, customizing it based on video types, and strengthening the advantages of its different visual styles on video-sharing platforms.

Health data user engagement, particularly with stress data, remains a challenge despite the widespread use of self-tracking products, like smartwatches and smart bracelets. Stress data engagement is crucial to the early detection and intervention of long-term stress which could cause harmful health effects. This paper explores the design of tangible displays to enhance engagement with self-tracked stress data. We conducted two co-design workshops in which participants were invited to design and draw sketches of stress displays for three different contexts. The workshops revealed many innovative ideas for using everyday spaces and materials as an interface to structure user interactions with the data, aimed at increasing awareness of stress data and management strategies while addressing various concerns associated with how the data is displayed. By focusing on stress data, this study highlights important opportunities to use everyday spaces as an interface for health data engagement.

Peer-support has long been recognized as valuable for mental health, and has been commonly practiced online over the Internet. However, it is often reported that peer exchange online can have harmful effects, and there has been limited research on how to ensure its effectiveness and safety. Our ethnographic study of formalized mental health peer-support practices in Scotland uncovers the infrastructural work involved when setting up and managing conditions upon which peer-support can take place in an effective and safe way. We illustrate that peer-support for mental health is not only about bringing peers together to interact with each other, but also about ensuring availability, timeliness, proactive care, positivity and safety of peer-support as a service, by weaving various social, spatial and technical elements together and managing groups and their boundaries. Our findings illuminate the work behind these peer-support practices, and suggest design implications.

Automatic stress tracking has become increasingly available on wearable devices. Research has investigated its use for individual stress management, largely within the traditional data-as-care framing. However, its use for stress sharing in social relationships, particularly close relationships, is still under explored. Inspired by the idea of “caring-through-data”, which focuses on mediating the social and emotional experiences of the collective “us” with data, this paper presents a design study with a prototype called IntimaSea, a display featuring illustrative stress data in collective forms to be shared among close relationships. The field trials with nine groups of intimately-connected users (N=19) highlight its potential on stress awareness, interpretation and management, as well as intimacy promotion. We end by discussing sharing stress for social ways of stress management, stress data as a meaningful social cue mediating relationships, as well as design implications for caring-through-data.

Digital technologies can conduct an important role in preserving intangible cultural heritage (ICH). Nonetheless, existing work tends to be limited to digital storage, presentation, dissemination, and education, with comparatively little concentrating on production and reproduction of the craft, the key to revitalizing ICH. In this paper, we explore digital making as an approach for both the inheritance and innovation of ICH handicrafts. Taking Hairy Monkey craftsmanship as an instance, we conducted a workshop with 15 groups of makers, teaching them the traditional Hairy Monkey craft and subsequently enabling them to create innovative works with digital technologies in their own time. As revealed by our interviews with these participants, ICH brings cultural inspiration to digital making, and digital making rejuvenates ICH through innovative art forms and its positive influence on participants. As demonstrated in this paper, digital technologies can be deeply integrated with ICH through making to revitalize ICH from the core through living transmission.

Nowadays, using the online whiteboard to share knowledge in distributed meetings has become a common practice. Existing studies and practices have attempted to visualize attendees’ interactive activities in whiteboard tools to support the virtual team’s workspace awareness (WA). However, the impact of such visual cues on meeting success remains unclear. For this purpose, we primarily explore whether and to what extent WA cues are conducive to meeting outcome. This study applies activity theory to guide our prototype design and research analysis. A customized web-based whiteboard interface is implemented under two conditions. We conduct a study with 42 subjects in a distributed meeting scenario via a controlled experiment. Also, we analyze the system affordance via user experience. The results demonstrate that the benefits of WA cues to meeting outcome are especially embodied in goal attainment and quality of contributions, but not effectively supported in productivity and user satisfaction. Moreover, subjects report that they do not feel distracted by the system’s visual cues because they do not notice those cues most of the time and use them only when needed. Drawing upon findings from our trial work, we provide several implications for designing a collaborative knowledge-sharing environment to assist the visual support of WA in distributed meetings.

We are again thrilled to be able to present the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) community with an issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, containing very interesting and relevant scholarship from its members. This issue includes 138 papers, of which 82 were accepted from the July 2022 cycle, and 56 were accepted from the January 2023 cycle. It reflects great efforts and contributions from external reviewers, Associate Chairs and Editors, who together have conducted a rigorous review process to select contributions of the highest quality advancing the CSCW field. As Track Chairs, we are grateful for the community's collective efforts to continue shaping and sharing CSCW's tradition of high-quality scholarship across the years.

Short-form video sharing platforms (SVSPs) have seen a significant surge in older adult content creators in recent years. This emerging trend adds evidence to challenge the conventional perception of older adults as later technology adopters and passive online recipients. To investigate the reason behind the trend, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 older adult content creators on two of the most popular SVSPs in China, DouYin and KuaiShou. We found that our participants were initially attracted to SVSPs because of perceived ease of participation and the enjoyment they found. However, what kept them engaged was the attention and support they received there. SVSPs offered a low-barrier and equitable platform through their near-automatic use and relatively equal opportunities for recommendations, allowing everyone to reach audiences. Motivated by their passion for performance and the viewers' support, our participants actively acquired new skills for better performance and became more deeply involved on the platforms. Based on the findings, we reflect on how SVSPs' technical affordances support older adults in the transition from lurkers to contributors. We advocate for participation equity and supportive environments to promote more inclusive social media platforms.

The prevalence of social media blurs the boundaries between consumer and producer, work and play, and leads to new social roles, professions, and identities (e.g. blogger, YouTuber, micro-celebrity). However, we still lack a clear understanding of how people come to identify with these new roles and how individual professional development is digitally mediated. This paper presents a study based on Bilibili, a popular Chinese social media platform featuring user-generated videos, and highlights a professionalization process through which individuals consciously distinguish between the roles of uploaders and consumers, develop a shared work ethos around the role of the uploader, and, as uploaders, improve their technical-professional expertise. We conclude by discussing individualized professionalization as a concept that describes the bottom-up and community-based process of professional development for User Generated Content (UGC) taking place in contemporary digital media environments.

Fluid fiber, with fluid flowing in a tube, is an attractive material to flexibly and dynamically display digital information. While it has recently attracted attention from the HCI field, there is currently little knowledge about this material, limited to controlling the position of the droplets to present representational information like letters and numbers. To develop a broader and deepened understanding of this material and its potential for display design, we conducted a study based on a design workshop where art and design practitioners engaged in creation practice with a toolkit we designed and developed. The toolkit includes hardware components for controlling bubbles and droplets and a GUI design tool for arranging the fluid layout. Our research reveals the structural and expressive affordance of such a fluid fiber for displaying information, highlighting the unique value of fluidity as an intuitive form to express life, emotion, movement and changes.

Background information is very important for news reading and understanding, especially with today’s rapid new media development for news production and consumption. When researchers actively develop tools to automatically provide back-ground information for people, we still have little understanding of how people, from readers’ perspective, engage with news and what background information is needed. To address such a gap, we conducted a study with a news reading platform, observed participants’ news reading behaviors using the platform and interviewed them over the process. Our study highlighted that news reading is a learning activity between leisure and study, and their background information searching behavior is part of Gestalt knowing – to make their existing knowledge more complete, by deepening their prior understandings, broadening their horizons, filling the gaps, clearing their confusion, as well as tracking the progress of an event as a whole, so a more holistic understanding could be achieved. We end by discussing implications of our findings.

Abstract The development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Web 2.0 promotes the emergence of diverse social ecosystems like social Internet of Things (IoT), social media and online communities. User-generated textual content (UGTC), which consists of unstructured texts, is the most important and common type of user-generated content in social ecosystems. UGTC in social ecosystems is generated according to two types of context information—global context (topics) and local context (semantic regularities). For UGTC modeling, topic models just consider global context but ignore semantic regularities, while semantic embedding models are on the opposite. So only utilizing topic models or semantic embedding models to model UGTC suffers from some drawbacks. For this problem, we propose a semantic embedding enhanced topic model named SEE-Twitter-LDA for accurately modeling UGTC in social ecosystems. The core of SEE-Twitter-LDA is that words are generated according to mutual semantic information of topics and semantic regularities. So global context and local context are jointly considered for UGTC modeling. By utilizing 553 098 tweets sampled from Twitter and 211 233 posts sampled from Weibo, we validate SEE-Twitter-LDA’s better performance on perplexity, topic divergence and topic coherence versus existing related models.

Mobility is the key for people with disabilities to have full participation in life. To support their mobility, previous work primarily focused on accessibility as an attribute of the external environment to be evaluated, labeled, visualized, and improved. Relatively less work has looked at how people with disabilities go out and move around in practice and work to achieve mobility. This paper presents a qualitative study of 14 wheelchair users' travel practices in everyday life in China, highlighting urban accessibility as alignment work -- the use of an awareness of the conditions along the journey to continuously align and re-align various resources to ensure accessibility and mobility across contexts and moments. By highlighting alignment work, we present another side of the story of urban accessibility, and broaden design considerations to support mobility for wheelchair users.

Machine Translation (MT) has been a very useful tool to assist multilingual communication and collaboration. In recent years, by taking advantage of the exciting developments of neural networks and deep learning, the accuracy and speed of machine translation have been continuously improved. However, most machine translation methods and systems are data-driven. They tend to select a consensus response represented in training data, while a user's preferred linguistic style, which is important for translation comprehension and user experience, is ignored. For this problem, we aim to build a user-oriented personalized machine translation model in this paper. The model aims to learn each user's linguistic style from the textual content that is generated by her/him (User-Generated Textual Content, UGTC) in social media context and generate personalized translation results utilizing several state-of-the-art deep learning techniques like Transformer and pre-training. We also implemented a user-oriented personalized machine translator using Weibo as a case of the source of UGTC to provide a systematical implementation scheme of a user-oriented personalized machine translation system based on our model. The translator was evaluated by automatic evaluation in combination with human evaluation. The results suggest that our model can generate more personalized, natural and lively translation results and enhance the comprehensibility of translation results, which makes its generations more preferred by users versus general translation results.

User-generated contents (UGC) in social media are the direct expression of users’ interests, preferences, and opinions. User behavior prediction based on UGC has increasingly been investigated in recent years. Compared to learning a person’s behavioral patterns in each social media site separately, jointly predicting user behavior in multiple social media sites and complementing each other (cross-site user behavior prediction) can be more accurate. However, cross-site user behavior prediction based on UGC is a challenging task due to the difficulty of cross-site data sampling, the complexity of UGC modeling, and uncertainty of knowledge sharing among different sites. For these problems, we propose a Cross-Site Multi-Task (CSMT) learning method to jointly predict user behavior in multiple social media sites. CSMT mainly derives from the hierarchical attention network and multi-task learning. Using this method, the UGC in each social media site can obtain fine-grained representations in terms of words, topics, posts, hashtags, and time slices as well as the relevances among them, and prediction tasks in different social media sites can be jointly implemented and complement each other. By utilizing two cross-site datasets sampled from Weibo, Douban, Facebook, and Twitter, we validate our method’s superiority on several classification metrics compared with existing related methods.

In today’s fast-paced world, stress has become a growing health concern. While more automatic stress tracking technologies have recently become available on wearable or mobile devices, there is still a limited understanding of how they are actually used in everyday life. This paper presents an empirical study of automatic stress-tracking technologies in use in China, based on semi-structured interviews with 17 users. The study highlights three challenges of stress-tracking data engagement that prevent effective technology usage: the lack of immediate awareness, the lack of pre-required knowledge, and the lack of corresponding communal support. Drawing on the stress-tracking practices uncovered in the study, we bring these issues to the fore, and unpack assumptions embedded in related works on self-tracking and how data engagement is approached. We end by calling for a reconsideration of data engagement as part of self-tracking practices with technologies rather than simply looking at the user interface.

Recently, consumer-facing health technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based symptom checkers (AISCs) have sprung up in everyday healthcare practice. AISCs solicit symptom information from users and provide medical suggestions and possible diagnoses, a responsibility that people usually entrust with real-person authorities such as physicians and expert patients. Thus, the advent of AISCs begs a question of whether and how they transform the notion of medical authority in people's everyday healthcare practice. To answer this question, we conducted an interview study with thirty AISC users. We found that users assess the medical authority of AISCs using various factors including AISCs’ automated decisions and interaction design patterns, associations with established medical authorities like hospitals, and comparisons with other health technologies. We reveal how AISCs are used in healthcare delivery, discuss how AI transforms conventional understandings of medical authority, and derive implications for designing AI-enabled health technology.

Many popular social network sites (SNSs) provide the post-syncing functionality, which allows users to synchronize posts automatically among different SNSs. Nowadays there exists divergence on this functionality from the view of sink SNS. The key to solving this problem is to understand the characteristics of users’ post-syncing practice and goals and evaluate whether they are consistent with an SNS’s norms, cultures, and goals. However, studying and understanding the characteristics of post-syncing practice and goal are challenging tasks as a result of the difficulty of data sampling and the complexity of post-syncing behavior. In this article, we focus on investigating this question by quantitative analysis in combination with qualitative analysis. In the quantitative study, by utilizing 211,233 synced-posts sampled from Weibo, we aim to investigate characteristics of post-syncing from three perspectives: user, content, and goal. The results suggest that post-syncing plays an important role in exhibiting one’s current activities, creations, and skills as well as advertisements but involves a risk of exhibiting personal sensitive profiles. To understand the results, we present an interview-based qualitative study based on thematic analysis. It indicates that the publicity, urgency, and remarkableness of contents and differences of social affordances and social circles between sink SNS and source SNS as well as the one-time consent of post-syncing authentication jointly account for the major role of post-syncing. Based on these results, we propose insights for post-syncing functionality’s adoption, design, and promotion.

Online Ask the Doctor (AtD) services allow access to health professionals anytime anywhere beyond existing patient-provider relationships. Recently, many free-market AtD platforms have emerged and been adopted by a large scale of users. However, it is still unclear how people make use of these AtD platforms in practice. In this paper, we present an interview study with 12 patients/caregivers who had experience using AtD in China, highlighting patient agency in seeking more reliable and cost-effective healthcare beyond clinic settings. Specifically, we illustrate how they make strategic choices online on AtD platforms, and how they strategically integrate online and offline services together for healthcare. This paper contributes an empirical study of the use of large-scale AtD platforms in practice, demonstrates patient agency for healthcare beyond clinic settings, and recommends design implications for online healthcare services.

With the recent advancement in computer vision, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and mobile technologies, it has become technically feasible for computerized Face Reading Technologies (FRTs) to learn about one's health in everyday settings. However, how to design FRT-based applications for everyday health practices remains unexplored. This paper presents a design study with a technology probe called Faced, a mobile health checkup application based on the facial diagnosis method from Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). A field trial of Faced with 10 participants suggests potential usage modes and highlights a number of critical design issues in the use of FRTs for everyday health, including adaptability, practicality, sensitivity, and trustworthiness. We end by discussing design implications to address the unique challenges of fully integrating FRTs into everyday health practices.

Online shopping, by reducing the needs for traveling, has become an essential part of lives for people with visual impairments. However, in HCI, research on online shopping for them has only been limited to the analysis of accessibility and usability issues. To develop a broader and better understanding of how visually impaired people shop online and design accordingly, we conducted a qualitative study with twenty blind people. Our study highlighted that blind people's desire of being treated as ordinary had significantly shaped their online shopping practices: very attentive to the visual appearance of the goods even they themselves could not see and taking great pain to find and learn what commodities are visually appropriate for them. This paper reports how their trying to appear ordinary is manifested in online shopping and suggests design implications to support these practices.

Patient-Provider Communication (PPC) is crucial to the quality and outcome of healthcare practices. With the development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), ICT mediated PPC has become increasingly commonplace, and has been extensively studied. However, prior research has primarily focused on the institutional use of ICTs for PPC, with institutional support and regulation, while the personal use of ICTs for this purpose has been mostly under-explored. This paper presents a qualitative study of the use of WeChat, a general mobile social application, that has been personally appropriated for PPC in China. Sixteen patients and seven physicians, who had experience using WeChat for PPC, were recruited and interviewed to gain an understanding from both perspectives on how WeChat was utilized for the communication purposes between them. We found that the use of WeChat helped to strengthen the relationship between patients and providers, and provided a psychological reassurance that the structure of the current Chinese health system doesn't provide. Most importantly, we found that the use of WeChat was dependent on the negotiation and management of boundaries that address various concerns associated with the use of ICTs for PPC, such as workload and safety. In this paper, we will highlight the boundary negotiation practices and discuss implications based on the findings.

Crowdsourcing has been widely considered as a rapid and cost-effective way to complete tasks by harnessing human intelligence over the Internet. In recent years, increasing attention has been drawn to the issues of crowdsourcing fatigue and worker engagement, in a hope to enhance output quality by improving worker experience. However, while crowdsourcing fatigue issue is commonly recognized, there is still lack of systematic study to understand how exactly fatigue occurs and how it affects crowdsourcing. This paper presents an experimental study to investigate these issues by employing quantitative and qualitative means with an image-tagging project on a crowdsourcing platform. Our study confirms that feeling of fatigue is common and significant after a batch of tasks, however, work efficiency is still increased even after workers feel fatigue, largely due to factors such as increased familiarity, skill, etc. Based on our quantitative and qualitative results, we also suggest implications for design to address issues of fatigue, and improve crowdsourcing work experience and output.

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) affords new opportunities for people with disabilities to participate in the workforce. However, little research has investigated how people with disabilities access and perform work through ICT. This paper presents a study of how people with disabilities, particularly those who are wheelchair users, perform online crowd work in China. We highlight an online crowd work practice that is highly embedded in social relationships that are developed through ICT over time. We call this socially embedded work to distinguish it from previous studies describing online crowd work as being devoid of social relationships. Our study uncovers the unique developmental dynamics of the online crowd work community self-organized by wheelchair users in China. Findings suggest that an ecosystem that focuses on fostering social relationships among the stakeholders can potentially address the wide range of issues of online crowd work reported in current crowd work literature.

This paper presents a qualitative study of people with disabilities, focusing on issues of their social interaction and integration. Through interviews and participatory observations with a group of people with motor disabilities in China, we found that their perceived limited capabilities to reciprocate, or feelings of indebtedness, were among the main reasons that kept them from interacting with others. The study shows that ICT and communities of people with disabilities are valuable in relieving these issues, in that they provide means and opportunities for them to give help and in turn develop self-esteem, crucial for their social interaction and integration. Our study suggests providing ways for them to give and not simply receive help as an important means to support their social interaction and integration-in particular, by focusing on their abilities and communities, instead of disabilities and independence.

Crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), oDesk, InnoCentive, Science Exchange and others are on rapid rise in recent years. By outsourcing work to a network of people, they provide a more economical and efficient means of production. But essentially, crowdsourcing platforms are not the only means to outsource work to a crowd through the Internet. Studies in China, for example, have shown that quite some crowd works are accomplished through QQ (an Chinese instant messaging software) or other communication tools. So what are the advantages and disadvantages of using current crowdsourcing platforms, and how can they better designed? With these questions, and to better inform the design of future crowdsourcing platforms, we conducted a comparative study of crowd work with and without crowdsourcing platforms. In this paper, we present the study, and discuss advantages and disadvantages of using current crowdsourcing platforms in comparison to using QQ and other means for crowd work. We then end by suggesting implications for design for future crowdsourcing platforms.

User appropriation can be immensely helpful to bootstrap emerging technologies; but how do new and lesser known technologies attract these earliest adopters? This paper investigates user appropriation of emerging computing technologies, by focusing on Bitcoin, a digital monetary system supported by a peer-to-peer network of computing devices. We conducted in-depth interviews with sixteen Bitcoin community participants in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Baltimore. We describe user appropriation in this case of Bitcoin as a sociocultural journey-from encounter, research and learning, to socialization. We contribute the concept of cultural affinities, including conceptual, contextual and social dimensions, as important mediators leading to early-stage user appropriation.

Online question and answer (Q&A) sites, which are platforms for users to post and answer questions on a wide range of topics, are becoming large repositories of valuable knowledge and important to societies. In order to sustain success, Q&A sites face the challenges of ensuring content quality and encouraging user contributions. This paper examines a particular design decision in Q&A sites-allowing Wikipedia-like collaborative editing on questions and answers, and explores its beneficial effects on content quality and potential detrimental effects on users' contributions. By examining five years' archival data of Stack Overflow, we found that the benefits of collaborative editing outweigh its risks. For example, each substantive edit from other users can increase the number of positive votes by 181% for the questions and 119% for the answers. On the other hand, each edit only decreases askers and answerers' subsequent contributions by no more than 5%. This work has implications for understanding and designing large-scale social computing systems.

This paper tells a story of DIY (do it yourself) making that does not neatly fit more familiar narratives of making: as individual empowerment, as a democratizing force, and as technoscientific innovation. Drawing on ethnographic research with a collective of elderly electronic hackers in China, we provide insights into the socio-technical and politico-economic processes of hacking and making. This paper examines how the activity of making functioned for elderly DIY enthusiasts as way of remaking and reliving the past and as a means for expressing class belonging and citizenship. We show that making and hacking is not practiced in a void independent of social, political or economic forces. Rather, making unfolds in relation to, and is contingent on, societal norms and specific techno-cultural histories. As much as hacking empowers certain people, it excludes others and functions as a site for the exercise of power and social distinction making.

Scientific research has become collaborative activities among scientists. Many scientists share data and scientific workflows with each other to facilitate scientific research. However, during using shared scientific workflows, it's hard for scientists to figure out suspicious data and processes, i.e., scientific workflow diagnosis. In this paper, we propose an approach for diagnosing scientific workflows based on the data provenance technology and reusing of diagnosis information. The main innovation of this paper is twofold: 1) By using data provenance technology, we deduce integrated diagnosis information of scientific workflows with the help of scientists' understanding of data; 2) We propose a novel model to preserve diagnosis information, and design a method to reuse the diagnosis information. We implement a prototype system based on the Kepler scientific workflow management system.

As Sina Weibo is becoming one of the most popular online social networking platforms in China, there is growing need in extracting knowledge and analyzing user behavior out of it. Influential user discovery has been quickly identified as an important application for better marketing and advertising purposes. In order to analyze user influence, we construct a user influence actor-network based on Actor-Network Theory, in which both users and users' microblogs are seen as actors and their interactions are treated as networks. User influence is then evolved into network effects caused by both microblogs and interactions, which are characterized as the Quality Index and Popularity Index of microblog respectively that can be well evaluated through models proposed in this paper. Furthermore, by observing that one user may show distinctive influence in different domains, we build our model domain specifically. With full consideration to quality, popularity and domain categories of users' microblogs, we propose a novel domain-specific user influence measurement, ANTRank, in Sina Weibo based on Actor-Network Theory. Experimental results show that the ANTRank performs well with the user influence evaluation.

With the development of web 2.0, online community websites have become one of the most interactive ways for disabilities to communicate with others and understand the world. However, new disabled users may sometimes find it difficult to learn about existing communities and the topics they feel interested in are drastically different from normal users. On the other hand, influential users have already developed their impact in different topics within communities and are hence able to help disabilities quickly adapt to the communities. As the result, a method that can recommend influential users in diverse topics is necessary. However, traditional approaches to identify influential users are not very comprehensive and accurate without the consideration of topic diversity. In this paper, we present an evaluation index system and a SVD based influence model which can evaluate influence comprehensively. The discussions in online communities are then classified by the topics that attract disabilities most. Finally, a combined influential users recommendation with diverse topics is proposed. We conduct experiments on an online disability community dataset and results show that our approach significantly outperforms other traditional methods.

System design for seniors often focuses on the decline of their biological capabilities and social connectedness. This approach has been challenged as too simplistic to capture what it really means to be senior. This paper presents a qualitative study of 17 seniors in urban China (age ranging from 50s to 70s), who have adopted and incorporated ICT into their daily lives. Findings from this study show that the ways in which seniors attend to ICT are not simply shaped by changes in health or other wellbeing, but also by their life attitudes, value systems, relationships to younger generations as well as historical specifics during their coming of age. This paper contributes by showing that 1) what it means to be senior is shaped from within a whole social ecology of past and current experiences, values and interactions; 2) senior identities are not fixed, but continuously negotiated, articulated and enacted through ICT; 3) social interaction and access of technologies are highly intertwined.

Commenting systems play increasingly important roles in the interactive web applications. Meanwhile, more and more web applications are visited on mobile devices. However, the intermittent connection of mobile networks and resource limitation of mobile devices pose great challenges, mainly in terms of interactive responsiveness and data consistency. In this paper, we present the first work of partial replication solution based on collaborative editing techniques, which can address the issues of local responsiveness and resource limitation on mobile commenting systems. We report how we address the consistency maintenance challenges that come with the partial replication approach. With this approach, users are allowed to smoothly comment anywhere anytime. The comment thread can be incrementally updated and automatically synchronized with strong data consistency guarantees. We implemented a system prototype called Hydra and evaluated it on a real data set.

Microblogging services, such as Sina Weibo and Twitter, provide a platform on which everyone can easily and quickly get and spread information. While the side effect is that not only valuable information spreads on the platform but also rumors. Rumors, as unconfirmed or false information, spread even faster through social networks and do much more harm to both online and offline society. Traditional technical approaches, like censorship, deleting posts and accounts cannot effectively reduce the impact caused by rumors on microblogging platforms. In this paper, we applied social translucence, a sociotechnical approach to design Sina Weibo Analysis Plug-in (SWAP), which includes a series of strategies to help users check the essential social evidences that would influence users' perceptions on microblog credibility. Our contribution is that we provide a simple and practical approach to support coherent and accountable behaviors on Sina Weibo.

With the prevalence of cloud services, more and more editing tools are moving from client to cloud for collaboration. Google Docs, Microsoft Office Web Apps, Zoho Office Suite are such representative cloud backed co-editing services. People from different organizations may choose different service providers, which implies the needs of cross-cloud document collaboration. However, it is hard to make different collaborative editing services interoperate with each other. On the one hand, it is not realistic to let all service providers comply to a unified standard and provide interoperation interfaces. On the other hand, the challenge of consistency maintenance in real-time document synchronization still exists. These make interoperability one of the most significant collaboration barriers in online collaborative editing. This paper presents a transparent approach called Hermes to interoperating between heterogeneous collaborative editing services in the cloud. Users are allowed to use their familiar services to participate in the cross-cloud document collaboration. Service providers do not need to put any effort to interoperate with other services. Our approach is validated by a system prototype.

In theory, software, like other digital artifacts, can be freely copied and distributed. In practice, however, its effective flow is conditioned on various technical and social factors. In this paper, drawing on ethnographic work primarily with a bio-informatics research team in China, we report on meanings of scientific software sharing as embedded in social practices of learning, apprenticeship, membership, publication, and reputation. We illustrate that while free flow is important, boundary management is equally important for the effective travel of software to its appropriate destinations. Our study highlights a number of issues that are important to consider for effectively supporting sharing and collaboration in science.

Content consuming and sharing are two most important user activities in social networking sites (SNSs). Lots of studies have been conducted on content recommendation using users' common interests. However, little has been done to help users to select friends and share content within their social networks. In this paper, we contribute a recommendation framework AOPUT to recommend both content and friend list for sharing to users leveraging content and social information in SNSs. It consists of two recommendation components: Recder and ShareAider. Recder generates content recommendations by connecting users with common interests. An improved Jaccard similarity is proposed to improve the Collaborative Filtering (CF) recommendation quality. ShareAider recommends a friend list to users when they want to share content with their friends. CF method and a social-based method are compared and the combination of them are explored to achieve better results. AOPUT is evaluated on a real world social network. The experimental results show that (1) Recder can provide better recommendation quality than the traditional CF method thanks to the improved Jaccard similarity; (2) social-based method performs better than CF since the sharing behavior in SNSs are highly dominated by users' social preferences, and the combination of these two methods performs better than each of them individually.

As a form of collaborative work, sharing plays an important role in scientific research. Scientists share their discoveries with others by the ways of publishing paper, data and software. It promotes the development of research. With the increasing number of scientific software and more and more open source communities springing up, software selection becomes an urgent issue in sharing. In this paper, from the users' perspectives, we first propose a collaborative provenance model, which is designed to record the collaborative information between users and software. Then, drawing on ethnographic method, we explore the elements influencing the choice of users, and quantify them. On that basis, an algorithm is introduced to select the software for each process in workflow. For the whole workflow, a composition selection algorithm is presented.

Feedback on resource consumption is often explored as a way to raise awareness and saving resources. This paper reports findings from a user study of a feedback system deployed in a Chinese university dormitory with a prepaid electricity system, a context different from the more common domestic setting in the West explored in prior research. With this work, we move beyond resource conservation and draw attention to an often-neglected aspect of infrastructural work -- the work to ensure the smooth and continuous supply of resources from end users. This paper examines the ways in which people attend to electricity through what we term collective infrastructural work, i.e. people perceive electricity as a marginal concern, and yet invest time to maintain it collectively. We draw out a number of implications for design and evaluation from this work.

This paper examines issues of digitality and materiality of new media, grounded in a study of online TV watching in China. Particularly, by looking at how people make choices and decisions regarding TV watching in everyday life, we highlight material and digital properties of new media TV, and how they support and condition actions and interactions around them. The study illustrates that materiality and digitality are complementary, instead of one substituting the other, and are highly intertwined in the hybrid media environment around which meaningful experiences are conditioned and produced. It also suggests that an analytic distinction between materiality and digitality is fruitful in unpacking the complex relations between media technologies and social experiences.

This paper discusses issues of infrastructure and user experiences based on an empirical study of the online gaming platform ArcOnline in China. ArcOnline has allowed millions of users to play and watch arcade games over the Internet. What the study of ArcOnline helps bring to the fore are the infrastructural aspects of user experiences, mainly because the high demand for responsiveness and resources of arcade gaming has made infrastructures visible. In this paper, we present our findings of how the experience of playing arcade games changes with different socio-technical infrastructures, the arcade room and the online environment, highlighting how the form of the infrastructure shapes experience and collaboration, as well as how new social infrastructures are emerging through the interplay between the game, the platform, the community and the media ecology. We end by discussing the importance of considering infrastructure in understanding and designing new media experiences.

Provenance plays a fundamental role in e-science to keep track of the data processing execution, evaluate the data quality, reproduce the analysis results, and especially share and re-use workflows. How to take full advantage of provenance to help scientists discover, match and select scientific workflows is a challenging work. Although some studies have been done to model, store, and query scientific workflows, little is done to build practical systems to support workflow matching and discovery. In this paper, we devise and implement a Provenance-Based Workflow Matching and Discovery System (PWMDS) for task-based pipelines in a proteomics data analysis platform called CoPExplorer to address the above challenge. With the proposed novel provenance model and workflow matching & discovery algorithms, PWMDS can provide scientists a ranked list of suitable service candidates for their specified workflows, and initial experiments demonstrate its effectiveness.

Nowadays it has become increasingly common for family members to be distributed in different time zones. These time differences pose specific challenges for communication within the family and result in different communication practices to cope with them. To gain an understanding of current challenges and practices, we interviewed people who regularly communicate with immediate family members living in other time zones. We report primary findings from the interviews, and identify design opportunities for improving the experience of cross time zone family communication.

The convergence of the Internet and ubiquitous technologies offers an unprecedented level of convenience for information collection, accessing, and sharing through mobile devices and Web services. Mobile devices have become increasingly context aware and connected to the Internet, which lowers the barriers for capturing and sharing contextual information (e.g. location and time). Web applications are increasingly taking advantage of the so-called 'long tail', offering specialized services to a small number of users and allowing them to annotate, produce and consume relevant information. This paper presents travel scrapbooks, an online service that automatically stitches information together from various online sources based on geotagged photos from social networks, and visually presents the information to the user in the form of a scrapbook metaphor.

In this paper we report on the results of a large scale user survey investigating the status setting and interruption management behavior of mobile instant messaging (IM) users with existing systems. The motivation for this study was to inform the design of interface tools that support users by setting contextually appropriate awareness messages. Our results demonstrate that many desktop IM practices have been appropriated by mobile laptop users, but in the face of increasingly situated computer usage and an "always online" culture, several frictions are emerging between desktop and mobile practices. We find that common assumptions about IM users and the established awareness cues are failing and users are frequently embarrassed and interrupted with negative and sometimes threatening consequences.

IBM Enhanced Audio Conferencing (IEAC) is a VoIP-based audio conferencing system that, like several other systems, provides a visualization showing who is present and their states (e.g., speaking, muted). This paper presents the first study of the use of such a system. Drawing on log files collected over six weeks of use by over 1300 corporate employees, and interviews with 10 of them, we look at how and why various features of the system are used and what sorts of practices are supported. Our findings shed light on the factors that drive the use of visual enhancements to audio conferencing, and suggest further research topics.

In our research, we have been concerned with the question of how to make relevant features of security situations visible to users in order to allow them to make informed decisions regarding potential privacy and security problems, as well as regarding potential implications of their actions. To this end, we have designed technical infrastructures that make visible the configurations, activities, and implications of available security mechanisms. This thus allows users to make informed choices and take coordinated and appropriate actions when necessary. This work differs from the more traditional security usability work in that our focus is not only on the usability of security mechanism (e.g., the ease-of-use of an access control interface), but how security can manifest itself as part of people's interactions with and through information systems (i.e., how people experience and interpret privacy and security situations, and are enabled or constrained by existing technological mechanisms to act appropriately). In this paper, we report our experiences designing, developing, and testing two technical infrastructures for supporting this approach for usable security.