Fitness tracking platforms increasingly integrate generative AI to interpret activity data, such as Strava’s Athlete Intelligence. These integrations raise questions about how athletes engage with AI-supported fitness self-tracking. We analyzed 297 Reddit threads and 5,692 comments from r/Strava following the company’s launch of AI features to examine user reactions to AI-generated fitness feedback. Our findings revealed four recurring tensions: (1) numerical evaluation versus contextual understanding; (2) isolated session summaries versus ongoing training narratives; (3) a fixed AI tone versus diverse emotional states; and (4) a single AI voice versus different athletic types. Across these tensions, users resisted AI feedback that constrained interpretations of their own lived experiences. These findings shed light on the implicit challenges of integrating AI into self-tracking platforms. We conclude with implications for the design of AI-supported self-tracking systems that preserve interpretive openness and user agency.

Reflection and metacognition are central to the creative user experience. However, most HCI research on reflection focuses on clear, task-oriented goals such as to reflect on personal data or pedagogical outcomes. This contrasts with the open-ended and challenging to articulate goals of creative user experiences. For the first time, this workshop brings together interdisciplinary researchers, designers, educators, and artists across HCI, Cognitive Science, Design, AI, Learning Sciences, and Digital Art to examine reflection in creative interaction. The workshop will discuss themes, drawn from earlier discussions with HCI researchers and artists, on: how best to capture reflection in creative contexts, how to leverage the arts to support reflection for ethical change, and how to design creative AI that enhances – not hinders – critical thinking. By bringing interdisciplinary perspectives on reflection into discussion, the workshop will develop a guiding taxonomy for reflection in creative interaction to inform future creative practice and tool development.

As conversational agents become increasingly common in behaviour change interventions, understanding optimal feedback delivery mechanisms becomes increasingly important. However, choosing a style that both lessens psychological reactance (perceived threats to freedom) while simultaneously eliciting feelings of surprise and engagement represents a complex design problem. We explored how three different feedback styles: Direct, Politeness, and Verbal Leakage (slips or disfluencies to reveal a desired behaviour) affect user perceptions and behavioural intentions. Matching expectations from literature, the Direct chatbot led to lower behavioural intentions and higher reactance, while the Politeness chatbot evoked higher behavioural intentions and lower reactance. However, Politeness was also seen as unsurprising and unengaging by participants. In contrast, Verbal Leakage evoked reactance, yet also elicited higher feelings of surprise, engagement, and humour. These findings highlight that effective feedback requires navigating trade-offs between user reactance and engagement, with novel approaches such as Verbal Leakage offering promising alternative design opportunities.

Despite growing recognition that responsible AI requires domain knowledge, current work on conversational AI primarily draws on clinical expertise that prioritises diagnosis and intervention. However, much of everyday emotional support needs occur in non-clinical contexts, and therefore requires different conversational approaches. We examine how chaplains, who guide individuals through personal crises, grief, and reflection, perceive and engage with conversational AI. We recruited eighteen chaplains to build AI chatbots. While some chaplains viewed chatbots with cautious optimism, the majority expressed limitations of chatbots’ ability to support everyday well-being. Our analysis reveals how chaplains perceive their pastoral care duties and areas where AI chatbots fall short, along the themes of Listening, Connecting, Carrying, and Wanting. These themes resonate with the idea of attunement, recently highlighted as a relational lens for understanding the delicate experiences care technologies provide. This perspective informs chatbot design aimed at supporting well-being in non-clinical contexts.

Figure 1: Measures used in (n=173) empirical studies of CSTs from a survey of 10 years of ACM DL literature.Measures of User Experience with CSTs were most prevalent (90%), followed by measures of Creative Artefact Quality (54%), and measures of User-Centric Benefits were least prevalent (15%).

Surveys are a widespread method for collecting data at scale, but their rigid structure often limits the depth of qualitative insights obtained. While interviews naturally yield richer responses, they are challenging to conduct across diverse locations and large participant pools. To partially bridge this gap, we investigate the potential of using LLM-based chatbots to support qualitative data collection through interview probes embedded in surveys. We assess four theory-based interview probes: descriptive, idiographic, clarifying, and explanatory. Through a split-plot study design (N=64), we compare the probes' impact on response quality and user experience across three key stages of HCI research: exploration, requirements gathering, and evaluation. Our results show that probes facilitate the collection of high-quality survey data, with specific probes proving effective at different research stages. We contribute practical and methodological implications for using chatbots as research tools to enrich qualitative data collection.

Health self-examination, such as checking for changes to skin moles, is key to identifying potential negative changes to one's body. A major barrier to initiating a self-examination is a perceived lack of confidence or knowledge. In this study, we use a 2 × 2 between-subjects design to evaluate the effect of an AI conversational agent (CA) on participant self-efficacy and trust. We manipulated both participants' perceived skill in self-examination (based on prior perceived Success vs. Failure) and the CA's verbal persuasions (Encouraging vs. Neutral), with participants asked to complete a series of skin self-assessment tasks. Our findings show that participants' self-efficacy increased when exposed to encouraging CA persuasion. Additionally, we observed that an encouraging CA significantly increased participants' trust scores in perceived benevolence compared to a neutral-sounding CA. Our results inform the design of CAs to support users' independent self-examination.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly capable and prevalent, and can be used to produce creative content. The quality of content is influenced by the prompt used, with more specific prompts that incorporate examples generally producing better results. On from this, it could be seen that using instructions written for crowdsourcing tasks (that are specific and include examples to guide workers) could prove effective LLM prompts. To explore this, we used a previous crowdsourcing pipeline that gave examples to people to help them generate a collectively diverse corpus of motivational messages. We then used this same pipeline to generate messages using GPT-4, and compared the collective diversity of messages from: (1) crowd-writers, (2) GPT-4 using the pipeline, and (3 & 4) two baseline GPT-4 prompts. We found that the LLM prompts using the crowdsourcing pipeline caused GPT-4 to produce more diverse messages than the two baseline prompts. We also discuss implications from messages generated by both human writers and LLMs.

With projections of ageing populations and increasing rates of dementia, there is need for professional caregivers. Assistive robots have been proposed as a solution to this, as they can assist people both physically and socially. However, caregivers often need to use acts of deception (such as misdirection or white lies) in order to ensure necessary care is provided while limiting negative impacts on the cared-for such as emotional distress or loss of dignity. We discuss such use of deception, and contextualise their use within robotics.

Chatbots are capable of remembering and referencing previous conversations, but does this enhance user engagement or infringe on privacy? To explore this trade-off, we investigated the format of how a chatbot references previous conversations with a user and its effects on a user’s perceptions and privacy concerns. In a three-week longitudinal between-subjects study, 169 participants talked about their dental flossing habits to a chatbot that either, (1-None): did not explicitly reference previous user utterances, (2-Verbatim): referenced previous utterances verbatim, or (3-Paraphrase): used paraphrases to reference previous utterances. Participants perceived Verbatim and Paraphrase chatbots as more intelligent and engaging. However, the Verbatim chatbot also raised privacy concerns with participants. To gain insights as to why people prefer certain conditions or had privacy concerns, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 participants. We discuss implications from our findings that can help designers choose an appropriate format to reference previous user utterances and inform in the design of longitudinal dialogue scripting.

We present VOLVQAD, a volumetric video quality assessment dataset consisting 7,680 ratings on 376 video sequences from 120 participants. The volumetric video sequences are first encoded with MPEG V-PCC using 4 different avatar models and 16 quality variations, and then rendered into test videos for quality assessment using 2 different background colors and 16 different quality switching patterns. The dataset is useful for researchers who wish to understand the impact of volumetric video compression on subjective quality. Analysis of the collected data are also presented in this paper.

Recently standardized MPEG Video-based Point Cloud Compression (V-PCC) codec has shown promise in achieving a good rate-distortion ratio of dynamic 3D point cloud compression. Current error concealment methods of V-PCC, however, lead to significantly distorted 3D point cloud frames under imperfect network conditions. To address this problem, we propose a general framework for concealing distorted and lost 3D point cloud frames due to packet loss. We also design, implement, and evaluate a suite of tools for each stage of our framework, which can be combined into multiple variants of error concealment algorithms. We conduct extensive experiments using seven dynamic 3D point cloud sequences with diverse characteristics to understand the strengths and limitations of our proposed error concealment algorithms. Our experiment results show that our algorithms outperform: (i) the method employed by V-PCC by at least 3.58 dB in Geometry Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (GPSNR) and 10.68 in Video Multi-Method Assessment Fusion (VMAF) and (ii) point cloud frame copy method by at most 5.8 dB in (3D) GPSNR and 12.0 in (2D) VMAF. Further, the proposed error concealment framework and algorithms work in the 3D domain, and thus are agnostic to the codecs and are applicable to future point cloud compression standards

Crowdsourcing can collect many diverse ideas by prompting ideators individually, but this can generate redundant ideas. Prior methods reduce redundancy by presenting peers’ ideas or peer-proposed prompts, but these require much human coordination. We introduce Directed Diversity, an automatic prompt selection approach that leverages language model embedding distances to maximize diversity. Ideators can be directed towards diverse prompts and away from prior ideas, thus improving their collective creativity. Since there are diverse metrics of diversity, we present a Diversity Prompting Evaluation Framework consolidating metrics from several research disciplines to analyze along the ideation chain — prompt selection, prompt creativity, prompt-ideation mediation, and ideation creativity. Using this framework, we evaluated Directed Diversity in a series of a simulation study and four user studies for the use case of crowdsourcing motivational messages to encourage physical activity. We show that automated diverse prompting can variously improve collective creativity across many nuanced metrics of diversity.