Gender stereotypes are strongly internalized during middle childhood (ages 9–12), yet interventions targeting this critical developmental period are limited in the Global South. This paper presents Tasawur, (meaning: “imagination” in Urdu), a bilingual, web-based intervention aimed at addressing implicit gender biases among Pakistani pre-teens. Tasawur combines role-playing tasks with LLM-mediated dialogue to help children reflect on and challenge traditional gender norms. Our formative research with children and parents reveals how rigid occupational aspirations, linguistic patterns, and parental influence reinforce an inter-generational cycle of gendered expectations. Based on these insights, we developed a culturally grounded system that encourages children to assign roles to characters in everyday scenarios and engage in reflective conversations with an AI-powered agent. A preliminary evaluation demonstrated the intervention’s potential to support critical reflection on gender stereotypes. This work contributes a culturally relevant tool that empowers pre-teens to question and reshape the gender norms that influence their aspirations and self-perception.

As generative AI (genAI) rapidly enters classrooms, accompanied by district-level policy rollouts and industry-led teacher trainings, it is important to rethink the canonical “adopt and train” playbook. Decades of educational technology research show that tools promising personalization and access often deepen inequities due to uneven resources, training, and institutional support. Against this backdrop, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 22 teachers from a large U.S. school district that was an early adopter of genAI. Our findings reveal the motivations driving adoption, the factors underlying resistance, and the boundaries teachers negotiate to align genAI use with their values. We further contribute by unpacking the sociotechnical dynamics—including district policies, professional norms, and relational commitments—that shape how teachers navigate the promises and risks of these tools.

In Pakistan, sex education is a highly stigmatized topic due to strong religious and cultural influences. The lack of dialogue on sex education in the country has left the children exposed to some of the worst consequences. The paper explores the unique challenges, perspectives, and potential solutions for facilitating comprehensive sex education in Pakistan. In response to our findings, we designed an educational application called Shaoor, which equips parents with the knowledge and resources to effectively guide their children (aged 6-12) on sex education during their developmental years. Our research reflects on Pakistani society's cultural and religious values and introduces a novel approach to overcoming the present culture of silence. With this intervention, we aim to educate and prepare parents to help them assist their children in navigating the challenges presented in today's society.

In this paper, we explore the various mental health concerns among high school students, particularly those transitioning to university, within the context of the Global South. The study addresses the carry-over effects of social and emotional concerns, recognizing that unresolved issues from high school can compound the challenges faced by students in adapting to university life. In response to our findings, we developed a wellness application named WellConn, which is tailored to provide more effective and efficient care to students aged 14-18 who are struggling with mental health issues. The primary goal of WellConn is to mitigate uncertainties surrounding mental health concerns among students and address the delayed care-giving process that often occurs during the transition to university. This intervention aims to support students in navigating the new university environment while addressing both pre-existing concerns from high school and emerging issues during the transitional period.

This paper seeks to understand the extent of AI chatbot usage amongst Pakistani primary and middle school children. Through a mixed-method approach involving quantitative survey and qualitative interviews with students and teachers, we discover the most common ways in which children use AI assistance for their education. Our findings reveal that students from grade 6 onwards start using ChatGPT regularly for their coursework, primarily for subjects like English, Science, Social Studies, and Math. Based on our findings, we recommend guidelines on how to prepare children to critically and effectively use AI assistance to their advantage. The findings of this study lay the foundations of how to integrate AI tools in children's learning and development.

This paper describes a two-tier health-tech intervention - T1D Buddy - created to empower pediatric type 1 diabetic (T1D) patients in managing and learning about T1D via a mobile application, along with a physical toy for further user engagement. We explore the use of gamification and personalization to support better disease management and encourage patient education, in a Pakistani context. This work's final design is telling of the role that age-appropriate engagement mechanisms, gamified learning and simple-to-use interfaces play in making lives of children battling T1D easier. With an extensive user study, design conception and preliminary usability analysis, this paper discusses the potential efficacy of a hybrid solution, and the role that user centered design can play in improving T1D care. We hope that through this research, we have taken the first step towards providing a multi-level technological solution for children tackling T1D in the global South.

Depression and anxiety among college students have been on the rise globally. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy has emerged as an empirically reinforced and effective treatment. However, factors like cost, lack of resources, misguided prioritization and stigmatization of mental health issues in the Global South limit students’ access to psychotherapy. While technology can bridge this gap, research shows current self-guided mHealth apps for CBT are not always evidence-based and have limited efficacy compared to therapist-guided alternatives. In this paper, we explore whether interactive storytelling and other gamification mechanisms can increase the efficacy of a self-guided mHealth app, while drawing from empirically supported CBT protocols. We designed an mHealth application with contextualised storylines to help students learn psychological concepts and better identify the negative patterns in their thoughts. We present the results of a 3-arm randomized controlled trial conducted to assess the effect of this application compared to active and inactive control conditions.

In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL) mechanism for social robots to select an action based on users’ learning performance and social engagement. We applied this behavior selection mechanism to extend the emotion and memory model, which allows a robot to create a memory account of the user’s emotional events and adapt its behavior based on the developed memory. We evaluated the model in a vocabulary-learning task at a school during a children’s game involving robot interaction to see if the model results in maintaining engagement and improving vocabulary learning across the four different interaction sessions. Generally, we observed positive findings based on child vocabulary learning and sustaining social engagement during all sessions. Compared to the trends of a previous study, we observed a higher level of social engagement across sessions in terms of the duration of the user gaze toward the robot. For vocabulary retention, we saw similar trends in general but also showing high vocabulary retention across some sessions. The findings indicate the benefits of applying RL techniques that have a reward system based on multi-modal user signals or cues.

The alteration of an individual's lifestyle and the adoption of healthy behaviours have been shown to be effective in combating a majority of the major symptoms of depression. While there are several mHealth applications that use behaviour change to reduce depressive symptoms, they are often not grounded in behaviour change theory and display a lack of understanding regarding the specific factors that lead to behaviour change. Therefore, there is a need to test innovative strategies to tackle the issue. One such strategy is the use of behaviour change theories to design mHealth applications that use persuasive prompts to assist in ‘prompting’ the user to adopt healthier behaviours. In this paper, we present the design of persuasive prompts and an mHealth application to induce behavioural change, followed by the results of two studies: (i) an acceptability study that tested the acceptability of the persuasive prompts and (ii) a usability study of the mHealth application. The results show that there is a significant difference in which behaviour change theories users prefer based on their level of depression and that overall, users have a positive perception of the application.

The Global South is a reference to the underdeveloped regions of the world and though it is often synonymous with the marginalisation of people through living standards and access to resources, not everyone falls under this margin. The children in the margins in the Global South encompasses those with little or no access to modern communication, technologies and academic resources. This spectrum also includes children with learning and developmental disabilities, mental and physical health issues and hostile home or school environments. Marginalization in the Global South places a significant portion of the children at an elevated risks of inequality from lack of access, knowledge and training of ICTs to digital exclusion. Moreover, the recent global pandemic has exacerbated these challenges. This workshop aims at tracing research lines and questions around methodological and technological in designing tools to support children on the margins in the Global South.

In recent years, web-based platforms have become popular for LaTeX document authoring and presentation due to their hassle-free environments and collaboration features. Unfortunately, currently available platforms are not accessible to persons with vision impairments (PVIs) due to poor screen reader and keyboard support. In this paper, we present Web-Accessible LaTeX-based Authoring and Presentation (Web-ALAP), a web version of ALAP that makes creating mathematical documents accessible to PVIs. Web-ALAP provides assistive features like speech-based prompts, automatic narration of the error message along with the line number for debugging, and essential keyboard shortcuts. More importantly, the integrated “Math Mode” library offers a natural language description of the mathematical content within a document, which is not done by other screen readers. This feature enables PVIs to find and fix semantic errors in equations as well. We discuss the design choices in Web-ALAP and evaluate its features with 10 visually impaired participants. The results show that users perform better while working with Web-ALAP as opposed to another web-based LaTeX editor (Overleaf).

Since the prevalence of aphasia is one of the major problems faced by older individuals today, there is an increasing amount of research aimed towards developing technology based interventions for persons with aphasia (PwA). In developing countries such as Pakistan, aphasia patients face multiple problems and challenges due to a weak healthcare system and a severe lack of facilities and available resources. This work is an effort to understand the needs, problems and challenges of PwA in order to provide more effective support. In recent years, Virtual Reality (VR) has been the focus of a lot of research, due to its deep immersive environments, and has shown great promise in improving language production and speech comprehension among aphasia patients. This study aims to evaluate the impact of VR enrichment activities on language production and speech comprehension of PwA. It will also explore the opportunities and challenges of using VR experiences with PwA through a thematic analysis of the recorded observations made during the system evaluation.

LaTeX is widely used in STEM fields for creating high-quality documents that are converted to the Portable Document Format (PDF) for dissemination. Currently, available LaTeX systems do not guarantee that the generated PDFs are compliant with international accessibility standards. In this work, we present AGAP (Automated Generation of Accessible PDF) that automates and makes accessible the process of generating accessible PDFs from LaTeX. AGAP flags accessibility violations and provides guidance on how to fix them at compile time. AGAP allows interaction through speech synthesis and keyboard shortcuts thus making it fully accessible to persons with vision impairments (PVIs). Evaluating the accessible PDF generated using AGAP with a standard accessibility checker resulted in a much smaller number of violations as opposed to the PDF generated using another desktop LaTeX editor.

We describe the iterative co-design process and evaluation of an early autism screening tool (EAST). EAST is an intermediary interactive tablet based app that assists in the early-detection of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) by screening preschoolers in Pakistan through play-based activities in a home, school or clinical setting. Medical professionals, parents of autistic children and teachers were surveyed through focus groups to understand the reasons that contribute to the increasing number of missed early detections, and late- or misdiagnoses. We also evaluate the acceptability, usability and validity of our tool. We tested EAST with both typically developed and autistic children on how they relate to people, imitation, motor skills, visual and intellectual response. They were scored via time taken, the number of wrong attempts, or incorrect answers and audiovisual feedback. This paper contributes towards a digital autism screening tool that delivers insights into the child's behaviour and enables collaboration among parents, teachers and medical professionals.

Over the years, researchers have found an increase in learning problem among young children especially related to writing. Among these is a drop in dexterity or developmental dysgraphia due to a lack of fine motor skills. Also discovered is that handwritten activities on paper help work out these problems and with the advancement in technology in today's day and age, better combative measures can be taken against these problems. With Peppy, a mobile application using augmented reality (AR), our aim is to fight these problems using technology as well as paper by augmenting it into something that is both interactive and useful for child development. Although educational AR applications already exist, they don't focus on improving children's fine motor skills using paper-based exercises. Peppy brings enjoyable, thought-provoking and intriguing paper prototypes consisting of colouring, games, and puzzles to life through AR.

Assistive technologies such as screen readers and text editors have been used in past to improve the accessibility and authoring of scientific and mathematical documents. However, most screens readers fail to narrate complex mathematical notations and expressions as they skip symbols and necessary information required for the accurate narration of mathematical content. This study aims at evaluating a new Accessible LaTeX Based Mathematical Document Authoring and Presentation (ALAP) tool, which assist people with visual impairments in reading and writing mathematical documents. ALAP includes features like, assistive debugging, Math Mode for reading and writing mathematical notations, and automatic generation of an accessible PDF document. These features aim to improve the LaTeX debugging experience and make it simple for blind users to author mathematical content by narrating it in natural language through the use of integrated text to speech (TTS) engine. We evaluated ALAP by conducting a study with 18 visually impaired LaTeX users. The results showed that users preferred ALAP over another comparable LaTeX based authoring tool and were relatively more comfortable in completing the tasks while using ALAP.

Social capital and privilege, along with the constrictions of social stereotypes, can adversely impact a child's perception of the world. This paper describes the development and implementation of an interactive tangible tool for children aged 7--9, to be played with in schools across Pakistan to assess levels of socioeconomic and gender biases among them, as well as to gauge its comparative benefits over traditional detection methods. In order to obtain more concrete results, the tool has been developed as a theme-based game board for obfuscation, to divert the users' attention from the attributes being evaluated so that the investigative nature of the tool does not significantly hinder users from responding naturally.

In this paper, we investigated how variations in the level of gaze (no-gaze, semi-ideal mutual gaze, and ideal mutual gaze) in a video mediated communication system affect children's feeling of social presence and socio-emotional response during a remote collaborative gameplay. Our results showed that the absence of gaze badly effects the overall interaction because children seem to despise playing games with no-gaze condition. However, their appreciation for semi-ideal mutual gaze and ideal mutual gaze conditions were comparable. Although, children preferred the ideal mutual gaze condition, their appreciation for the semi-ideal mutual gaze condition was remarkably high.

This software usability study aims towards evaluating our LaTeX based extension, created to assist blind researchers and writers, in terms of authoring both continuous and non-continuous text [2]. Our extension includes features like speech based error prompts and navigation to the error location which are expected to improve the LaTeX code debugging experience and increase writing productivity. Upon testing our extension, it is observed that a majority of both LaTeX novice and expert users preferred using MS Word for writing continuous text, while the LaTeX experts preferred our extension for writing mathematical content.

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.

Braille literacy is one of the core pillars of education for visually impaired children. Previous studies have highlighted the importance of Braille for Visually impaired children by suggesting that students who read Braille outside of the classroom have higher reading speed and fluency. In resource constrained countries, such as Pakistan, the visually impaired students may acquire the knowledge of Urdu Braille at special education schools. However, there is a dearth of resources for the parents of such children, when it comes to learning Urdu Braille. Therefore, we designed a web-based Urdu Braille Translator and interactive Braille learning tool to enhance the Urdu Braille learning experience for parents of visually impaired. The usability study of this tool was conducted with 15 parents of the visually impaired students.

In developing countries like Pakistan, a large number of women die while giving birth or after delivery. These deaths usually result from lack of medical services, late arrival at the hospital, poor prenatal and postnatal care, early marriages, and malnutrition and less gap between two pregnancies. We have aimed to help the pregnant women in rural areas of Pakistan by making an application based on their needs. Keeping in my mind the literacy rates and the availability of services we have made an IVR application which gives information related to expenses, diet, medicines, and suggestions to solve commonly occurring problems. Our Results show that such a system can be helpful in providing essential information and recommendations to pregnant women in the rural areas of Developing countries like Pakistan and also help in improving routine visits with the Doctors.

Half of the world's malnourished children are found in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. However, documenting malnourishment cases in Pakistan remains a slow paper based process that is ineffective in recording and hence curbing the malady. This paper aims to highlight the challenges faced due to the inefficiencies in the status quo system and test a digital solution that was designed in collaboration with lady health workers and iteratively improved according to their needs. The project entails duo-staged process of design of an interactive weight and height measuring device for infants and then its evaluation by lady health workers. A web-based dashboard aggregates the data collected through digital means and makes nutrient recommendations to parents based on recorded data.

This paper highlights some of the difficulties experienced by volunteers and members of the general public when coordinating a response to an emergency in Pakistan, and discusses a participatory approach to investigating the requirements of an online emergency response platform that links volunteers with donors. The approach builds upon the use of a prototype platform in a simulated emergency situation with real users to test assumptions and learn about the design requirements for such a platform. The paper details the design process and the features of the prototype, and the feedback it received from users.

This paper presents results of a field study of an interactive voice response (IVR) system developed for the agricultural community of Punjab, Pakistan. We studied the information requirements and the user demographics to develop a basic IVR system which disseminates agro-information such as weather forecast, pesticide and fertilizer information etc. In terms of usability and information extraction, simple menu-based navigation was, relatively, easily understood and used. The usage was evaluated and results show that such a system is a viable option to deliver agro-information.

The present study focused on the facial expressions that children exhibit while they try to deceive a virtual agent. An interactive lie elicitation game was developed to record children's facial expressions during deceptive and truthful utterances, when doing the task alone or in the presence of peers. Based on manual annotations of their facial expressions, we found that children, while communicating with a virtual agent, produce different facial expressions in deceptive and truthful contexts. It seems that deceptive children try to cover their lie as they smile significantly more than truthful children. Moreover, co-presence enhances children's facial expressive behaviour and the amount of cues to deceit. Deceivers, especially when being together with a friend, more often press their lips, smile, blink and avert their gaze than truth-tellers.

In Pakistan, workingwomen often become victims of harassment during traveling which exacerbates uncertainty and hesitance among other workingwomen regarding their security. This paper discusses the android application, MehfoozAurat (safe woman), which we developed to support the lower socio-economic income bracket of working women who use public transport. The key features include safe routes, emergency alerts and audio recording with a unique self-defense section. The app has text based output in the national language, Urdu, which makes it accessible to the majority who are unfamiliar with the English language. Our usability tests reveal that the system is perceived to be useful and easy to learn; with brief learning, even the uneducated workingwomen were able to benefit from the application.

Children are using computer technology at increasingly younger ages and have become a potential enduser group for tablet applications. The possibilities for incorporating this user group in the early design evaluation with prototyping are still being explored. We compared three lowfidelity prototyping approaches and concluded that one approach to lowfi prototyping was particularly more suitable for early design evaluation of tablet apps with 78 year olds.

We describe and evaluate a new interface to induce positive emotions in users: a digital, interactive adaptive mirror. We study whether the induced affect is repeatable after a fixed interval (Study 1) and how copresence influences the emotion induction (Study 2). Results show that participants systematically feel more positive after an affective mirror session, that this effect is repeatable, and stronger when a friend is copresent.

We study how pairs of children interact socially and express their emotions while playing games in different communicative settings. In particular, we study how such interactions can vary for environments that differ regarding the level of mediation and the associated feelings of social presence. Overall, the study compared three conditions (one face-to-face gameplay condition, and two video-mediated gameplay conditions; one allowing for mutual gaze, the other not) and focused on the social presence and non-verbal behavior of children in three conditions. The results show that the presence of mutual eye-gaze enriches the feelings of social presence, fun and game experience; conversely, the absence of mutual eye-gaze dramatically effects the quality of interaction in the video-mediated environment. The results of this study stress the importance of mutual gaze, and we therefore argue that it should become an integral component of future VMC systems, particularly in those designed for playful settings and children.

In this study we have tried to determine if the cultural background of children has an influence on how they interact with robots. Children of different age groups and cultures played a card guessing game with a robot (iCat). By using perception tests to evaluate the children's emotional response it was revealed that children from South Asia (Pakistani) were much more expressive than European children (Dutch) and younger children were more expressive than the older ones in the context of child robot interaction.

In this paper we present an application that assists autistic teenagers in organizing their lives and enhances the communication between autistic teenagers and their caregivers. This application was designed in a participatory manner where autistics teenagers and caregivers participated in all phases of the application development. The early results show that the application has a potential to improve the lives of autistic teenagers by not only bringing structure in their lives but also by improving the communication channel between teenagers and their caregivers.

Most people suffering from autism have a desperate need for clarity and structure in their lives. There are various applications (agendas, daily planners, pictograms, etc.) that support autistic individuals in their living. However, not many applications out there make it possible for a person with autism to live a structured life on his own, in a variety of contexts, with minimum human guidance. Day Pad is an application that helps individuals, especially children and early teenagers, to organize their lives independently. This application can support the lives of individuals in a variety of contexts (home, daycare, market, school, etc.) and run on variety of mobile devices (PDA, tablet PC, etc.) depending on the context.

The possibility of improving speech recognition accuracy within human computer and robot interaction by having users interact in a constrained natural language or an artificial language has been explored. However, what has not been evaluated yet is the user acceptance of such forms of interaction. In this paper we discuss two separate but similar studies which were aimed at assessing the usability of constrained and artificial languages in contrast to natural languages. The interaction context was implemented in a game played between children and the iCat robot. We subjectively measured various variables related to gaming experience and interacting in the new languages. Our results reveal that there were no significant differences in the user experience across the two interaction mediums in comparison to natural languages.

This paper outlines the design requirements of a GPS car navigation system for the elderly and the young by proposing a set of new guidelines for designing such systems. Our study revealed that younger drivers had a more positive user experience as compared to the elderly drivers. This paper also identifies a number of advanced features that a routing system should have for satisfying both the elderly and younger drivers on road. In conclusion, we will discuss the key design recommendations that were derived from the study.

In this paper we present an application that helps to motivate the elderly in maintaining an independent healthy life style. With this application elderly people don't need to memorize the details --- they will be informed round the clock about their diet and exercise schedules-freeing their memory for something else. The application was designed and implemented in a participatory manner. The early results from the evaluation show that the application has potential in enabling the elderly to maintain a healthy life style.

This paper discusses a design case, which explores the potential of psychophysiological measures as an input technique for social gaming applications intended for children. aMAZEd is an example of a tabletop mixed reality game that supports social interaction between players through and around the game. It is clear that sensing technology used to obtain psychophysiological measures needs to be improved and there is still a range of solutions that need to be explored. However, our experience shows that psychophysiological input appeals to children and can be a fun element of games supporting social interaction among players.

In this paper we study how children of different age groups (8 and 12 years old) and with different cultural backgrounds (Dutch and Pakistani) signal positive and negative emotions in audiovisual speech. Data was collected in an ethical way using a simple but surprisingly effective game in which pairs of participants have to guess whether an upcoming card will contain a higher or lower number than a reference card. The data thus collected was used in a series of cross-cultural perception studies, in which Dutch and Pakistani observers classified emotional expressions of Dutch and Pakistani speakers. Results show that classification accuracy is uniformly high for Pakistani children, but drops for older and for winning Dutch children 1.