The increasing adoption of conversational agents powered by large language models (LLMs) raises questions about its effects across culturally diverse interactions. While these agents are linguistically versatile and multilingual, their ability to adapt along cultural dimensions--defined as geographically and communally nurtured sets of values and behavioral norms--lacks close scrutiny of both their design and deployment. To achieve inclusive conversational AI, it is essential to understand how agents adapt to users from diverse cultural backgrounds. In this study, we analyze dialogues between human users from different countries and LLM-powered agents to examine how both parties adapt their word use, a salient aspect of linguistic styles, toward one another throughout casual conversations. Our analysis reveals that LLMs exhibit varying degrees of style matching based on users' national cultures and demonstrate asymmetric adaptation when interacting with culturally diverse users. Moreover, we observe a reciprocal dynamic where both the LLMs and users from certain cultures adjust their styles in response to one another. Additionally, our findings support the hypothesis that LLMs and users naturally converge in conversational styles over the course of interactions, mirroring the dynamics of human conversations that accommodate and converge. To develop localized and culturally aware agents, there's a potential to utilize such cross-cultural convergence process during fine-tuning to align LLMs.

Global work collaboration creates invisible physical and social barriers. Collaborating across non-physical barriers can be communicatively and cognitively taxing, which may disincentivize workers to form and participate in global teams with diverse members. As virtual environments (VEs) enabled by VR and game technologies become prevalent in global work, it is important to consider the design of workers' profiles to socially display language information in a way that supports global team formation. We conducted an online study involving participants from the U.S. and Japan to find team members in a VE - Gather Town. Participants were asked to form teams and complete a slogan generation task under one of the following profile display conditions - no display, constant display, and adaptive display to supplement language and personal cues. We studied how participants' search cost and attitudes towards global teamwork were affected. Our findings reveal team formation strategies depending on workers' local cultures and profile information available.

Educational live streaming has become a complement to in-person teaching. While synchronous instructor-learner communication is useful, the technology-mediated nature of live streaming can obscure many interaction cues (e.g., learners' facial expressions and body language), which dampens the instructors' ability to respond to remote learners' needs. We explore the opportunity of leveraging real-time transcripts generated from instructors' audio as a basis for re-creating interaction cues. Transcripts can be leveraged to reveal the content of live streams in a form that learners can trace back and annotate, and such annotations can be further aggregated and presented to instructors as signals to assist them in tracking learners' engagement. By designing and evaluating our proof-of-concept prototype system, EduLive, we show that instructors benefited from the summative information extracted from learners' annotations, and the context provided by the transcript enhanced their ability to answer learners' questions. Our system contributes to the design space of social annotations in CSCW by employing social annotations in educational live streaming scenarios.

Using chatbots to make recommendations is increasingly popular. The design of recommendation chatbots has mainly been taking an information-centric approach by focusing on the recommended content per se. Limited attention is on how social connection and relational strategies, such as self-disclosure from a chatbot, may influence users' perception and acceptance of the recommendation. In this work, we designed, implemented, and evaluated a social chatbot capable of performing three different levels of self-disclosure: factual information (low), cognitive opinions (medium), and emotions (high). In the evaluation, we recruited 372 participants to converse with the chatbot on two topics: movies and COVID-19 experiences. In each topic, the chatbot conducted small talks and made relevant recommendations to the topic. Participants were randomly assigned to four experimental conditions where the chatbot used factual, cognitive, emotional, and adaptive strategies to perform self-disclosures. By training a text classifier to identify users' level of self-disclosure in real-time, the adaptive chatbot can dynamically match its self-disclosure language to the level of disclosure exhibited by the users. Our results show that users reciprocate with higher-level self-disclosure when a recommendation chatbot displays emotions throughout the conversation. The utilization of emotional disclosure by the chatbot resulted in enhanced enjoyment during interactions and a more favorable perception of the bot. This, in turn, led to greater effectiveness in making recommendations, including a higher likelihood of accepting the recommendation. We discuss the understandings obtained and implications to future design.

Medication intake monitoring is pivotal for healthcare management. While several medication management technologies have been developed, limitations include cost, adoption and adherence, and learning how to use a new system, which is particularly challenging for older adults with cognitive impairment. In this work, we present PA-Pill, a vibration-based sensing system for medication intake monitoring. PA-Pill leverages a physical structure with a unique vibration signature for medication intake event detection and recognition. We implement a prototype and depict preliminary results to verify the feasibility.

Online platforms commonly collect and display user-generated information to support subsequent users’ decision-making. However, studies have noticed that presenting collective information can pose social influences on individuals’ opinions and alter their preferences accordingly. It is essential to deepen understanding of people’s preferences when exposed to others’ opinions and the underlying cognitive mechanisms to address potential biases. Hence, we conducted a laboratory study to investigate how products’ ratings and reviews influence participants’ stated preferences and cognitive responses assessed by their Electroencephalography (EEG) signals. The results showed that social ratings and reviews could alter participants’ preferences and affect their status of attention, working memory, and emotion. We further conducted predictive analyses to show that participants’ Electroencephalography-based measures can achieve higher power than behavioral measures to discriminate how collective information is displayed to users. We discuss the design implications informed by the results to shed light on the design of collective rating systems.

No abstract available.

Video-based learning is widely adopted by online learners, yet, learning experience and quality may be negatively affected by asynchronous and remote natures of video-based learning. As note-taking is a common practice employed by video-based learners and is known to be an effective way to trigger active construction and processing of knowledge, yet as a meta-skill, it is challenging to most learners. In this study, we aim to approach the goal of providing cognitive and social scaffolds to video-based learners by structuring their note-taking process. We presented and evaluated structured note-taking systems designed for learners in two contexts, namely, individual learning context and social learning context. With an online controlled study involving 43 participants, we compared the structured note-taking systems with two baseline systems (for individual learning and social learning contexts respectively) and found that structured note-taking significantly improved certain aspects of video-based learning such as and higher cognitive engagement and lower distraction. We discussed our results to inform the design, iteration, and adoption of note-taking tools in video-based learning.

In online communities, members often join as resource receivers and later transition to contributors. This study aims to examine the process of the transition through the lens of reciprocity. In the context of Gomusin Café, an online support group where women with romantic partners serving in South Korean military exchange social support, we conducted semi-structured interviews (n = 16) probing how the members return the support they received to unspecified audience (generalized reciprocity) and to repeated interaction partners (direct reciprocity). We found experiencing common hardships and forming social attachment to the community as important preceding conditions for the members to practice generalized reciprocity. The members also sought direct reciprocity despite it's not technically and normatively supported in the platform. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

We are delighted to present this issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, which contains scholarship from the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) community. This issue has 293 papers, 94 that were accepted from the April 2021 cycle, 61 that were accepted from the July 2021 cycle, and 138 that were accepted from the January 2022 cycle. It reflects great efforts and contributions from external reviewers, Associate Chairs and Editors, who together have conducted a rigorous review process. As Papers Chairs, we are grateful for the community's collective efforts to continue shaping and sharing CSCW's tradition of high-quality scholarship during an ongoing global pandemic.

Workers tend to make inferences about one another's commitment and dedication to work depending on what cues are available to them, affecting worker relationships and collaboration outcomes. In this work, we investigate how remote work affects workers' perceptions of their colleagues with different levels of social connectivity, commonly referred to as strong ties and weak ties. When working remotely, workers' perceptions of weak ties may suffer due to the lack of in-person interaction. On the other hand, workers' inferences about their strong ties may also be impacted by losing richer communication cues, even though they had more connections with their strong ties than weak ties. This study explores how remote workers make inferences about engagement levels of and willingness to collaborate with weak ties compared to strong ties. We used a mixed-methods approach involving survey data, experience sampling, and in-depth interviews with 20 workers from different companies in Taiwan. Results showed that workers depended on one-on-one synchronous tools to infer the engagement level of strong ties but used group-based communication tools to infer the engagement level of weak ties. Interestingly, the absence of cues in remote workplaces exacerbated prior impressions formed in the physical office. Furthermore, remote work led workers to develop polarized perceptions of their respective ties. We discuss how characteristics of computer-mediated communication tools and interaction types interplay to affect workers' perceptions of remote colleagues and identify design opportunities for helping remote workers maintain awareness of weak ties.

For haptic guidance, vibrotactile feedback is a commonly-used mechanism, but requires users to interpret its complicated patterns especially in 3D guidance, which is not intuitive and increases their mental effort. Furthermore, for haptic guidance in virtual reality (VR), not only guidance performance but also realism should be considered. Since vibrotactile feedback interferes with and reduces VR realism, it may not be proper for VR haptic guidance. Therefore, we propose a wearable device, GuideBand, to provide intuitive 3D multilevel force guidance upon the forearm, which reproduces an effect that the forearm is pulled and guided by a virtual guider or telepresent person in VR. GuideBand uses three motors to pull a wristband at different force levels in 3D space. Such feedback usually requires much larger and heavier robotic arms or exoskeletons. We conducted a just-noticeable difference study to understand users’ force level distinguishability. Based on the results, we performed a study to verify that compared with state-of-the-art vibrotactile guidance, GuideBand is more intuitive, needs a lower level of mental effort, and achieves similar guidance performance. We further conducted a VR experience study to observe how users combine and complement visual and force guidance, and prove that GuideBand enhances realism in VR guidance.

Maintaining an awareness of one’s well-being and making work-related decisions to achieve work-life balance is critical for flexible long-hour workers. In this study, we propose that social sensing could address bottlenecks in worker’s awareness, interpretation of the informatics, and subsequent behavioral change. We conducted a four-week technology probe study by recruiting flexible long-hour professional drivers (Taxi and Uber drivers) and their significant others to use a social sensing prototype which collects data from the drivers and shares it with their partners as well as incorporates partners’ observations. We interviewed them before and after the probe study and found that while technological sensing was able to increase drivers’ awareness of their well-being status and intention to modify behaviors. The “social sensing” design was able to further shape such awareness or intention into action, highlighting the potential of using the sociotechnical approach in promoting work-life balance among long-hour workers.

People increasingly use online video platforms, e.g., YouTube, to locate educational videos to acquire knowledge or skills to meet personal learning needs. However, most of existing video platforms display video search results in generic ranked lists based on relevance to queries. The design of relevance-oriented information display does not take into account the inner structure of the knowledge domain, and may not suit the need of online learners. In this paper, we present ConceptGuide, a prototype system for learning orientations to support ad hoc online learning from unorganized video materials. ConceptGuide features a computational pipeline that performs content analysis on the transcripts of YouTube videos retrieved for a topic, and generates concept-map-based visual recommendations of inter-concept and inter-video links, forming learning pathways as structures for learners to consume. We evaluated ConceptGuide by comparing the design to the general-purpose interface of YouTube in learning experiences and behaviors. ConceptuGuide was found to improve the efficiency of video learning and helped learners explore the knowledge of interest in many constructive ways.

This paper introduces the Sustainable Prototyping Life Cycle for Digital Fabrication, an adaptation from the Life Cycle Assessment method that presents the environmental impact of digital fabrication in every phase of prototyping. The cycle has four phases: raw materials acquisition, manufacturing and distribution, use, and end of life. It presents designers as manufacturers of their own materials for digital fabrication, and bio-based materials are used as an alternative and sustainable prototyping material. We interviewed ten experts in digital fabrication and introduced the use of bio-based materials such as mycelium-composite for prototyping with digital fabrication.Using experts' reflections, we conducted a workshop about the environmental impact of prototyping with 22 design students. We reported their decisions on materials used for prototyping and their perception of using mycelium-composite within the Sustainable Prototyping Life Cycle. Our aim is to increase environmental awareness in prototyping and highlight the importance of designers' decision-making through the cycle.

Online learning platforms such as MOOCs have been prevalent sources of self-paced learning to people nowadays. However, the lack of peer accompaniment and social interaction may increase learners' sense of isolation and loneliness. Prior studies have shown the positive effects on visualizing peer students' appearances with virtual avatars or virtualized online learners in VR learning environments. In this work, we propose to build virtual classmates, which were constructed by synthesizing previous learners' messages (time-anchored comments). Configurations of virtual classmates, such as the number of classmates participating in a VR class and the behavioral features of the classmates, can also be adjusted. To build the characteristics of virtual classmates, we propose a technique called comment mapping to aggregate prior online learners' comments to shape virtual classmates' behaviors. We conduct a study with 100 participants to evaluate the effects of the virtual classmates built with and without the comment mapping and the amount of virtual classmates rendered in VR. The findings of our study suggest design implications for developing virtual classmates in VR environments.

Interpersonal communication is essential to group creativity tasks, such as group brainstorming. However, what's easily overlooked in supporting group creativity is the potential use of nonverbal behavior in communication. When people communicate verbally (e.g., discussing a topic through conversation), they may also co-produce hand movements along with verbal contents as part of the communication process. Going beyond using external interventions for creativity gain, we examine the potential to facilitate worker's in-conversation gesture use as an intrinsic mechanism for bolstering group creativity. In this paper, we aim to gain a deeper understanding of the usage and function of hand gestures in computer-mediated group brainstorming. Through a laboratory study, we verified that metaphoric gestures, or producing spatial cues with hands to convey intended concepts, can best influence self's and partner's idea generation. Also, the positive effect of metaphoric gesture is independent of media richness of communication medium (e.g., whether there's visibility or not). The results help to fill in the knowledge gap regarding how gesture use may relate to group creativity, and reveal the potential viability of shaping metaphoric gesture use as an intrinsic creativity support.

In workplaces, knowledge has the property of being individually kept and collectively shared. It is distributed and embedded among members but needs to be transferred and pooled through knowledge networks for successful collaboration. In order to understand and embody such networks, we employed a mixture of field observations, social network analysis, and in-depth interviews to examine the practices of knowledge transfer in a local financial institute (N=32). Results from the analyses show that there is a discrepancy between inbound and outbound knowledge transfer, and also suggest that expertise or social relation cannot solely account for members' decision on whom to ask questions and share knowledge. We also found that scaffolding workers to connect to the right person with metaknowledge of the knowledge network is important. Our findings point to research and design opportunities to support knowledge transfer at the collaborative level within a knowledge community.

While video has become a widely adopted medium for online learning, existing video players provide limited support for navigation and learning. It is difficult to locate parts of the video that are linked to specific concepts. Also, most video players afford passive watching, thus making it difficult for learners with limited metacognitive skills to deeply engage with the content and reflect on their understanding. To support concept-driven navigation and comprehension of lecture videos, we present ConceptScape, a system that generates and presents a concept map for lecture videos. ConceptScape engages crowd workers to collaboratively generate a concept map by prompting them to externalize reflections on the video. We present two studies to show that (1) interactive concept maps can be useful tools for concept-based video navigation and comprehension, and (2) with ConceptScape, novice crowd workers can collaboratively generate complex concept maps that match the quality of those by experts.

In romantic relationships, Instant Messaging (IM) can serve as a communication channel to maintain a sense of mutual presence and relational closeness when being physically separated. However, IM is asynchronous by design. There can exist time delay for people to receive and reply to incoming messages, which may violate romantic partner's mutual expectation. Limited understanding is available around how unintended and intended delays affect the relationship of romantic partners. This work examines how romantic partners grow, perceive, and use mutual knowledge about each other in delayed IM to resolve the expectancy violation. We conducted a 7-day diary study on 16 pairs of romantic couples and used the diary entries as probes for post-study one-on-one interviews. Our findings show that couples employ different strategies of information grounding to parse and resolve delayed IM. Based on these findings, we propose several theoretical and practical implications.

When multiple non-native speakers (NNSs) who share the same native language join a group discussion with native speakers (NSs) of the common language used in the discussion, they sometimes switch back and forth between common language and their native language to reach common ground. However, such code-switching makes others feel excluded and thus not considered appropriate during formal meetings. To offer NNSs more flexibility to code-switch in a group discussion while minimizing the cost of excluding others, we introduced a language support tool that automatically detects a user's spoken language, and then transcribe as well as translate them into another language (common language or NNS's native language). In a within-subject study involving 19 quads (two Japanese and two Chinese) in a collocated setting, participants were asked to perform a series of decision-making tasks with and without the tool. Results showed that the language support tool encouraged diverse use of language during a meeting, resulting in more participation from NNSs - they increased active initiating behaviors from NNSs. Although the perceived quality of collaboration became lower, it also elicited helping behaviors among the NNS pairs.

To accomplish collaborative work, collaborators need to know one another's states of work for coordination. Similarly, in situations of knowledge transfer where experts need to instruct novices by passing implicit knowledge and personal experience about the task, one challenge lies in the knowledge gap between experts and novices. Both parties need to gain an awareness of each other's state of task knowledge for effective knowledge transfer. In this paper, we aim to investigate how online knowledge transfer is supported by a design called knowledge transparency of a shared document workspace, which allows explicitly annotating and sharing ones' knowledge state to make it visible to their collaborators. We conducted a laboratory study to examine how knowledge transparency affects knowledge transfer among experts and novices using an image editing task over an online document. The results shed light on how to support knowledge co-construction and communication for the purpose of knowledge transfer through interface design.

As experts and expertise are increasingly distributed across distance, remote collaboration on physical tasks also becomes popular. Physical collaboration requires collaborators to produce and resolve references to physical objects unambiguously. We present a novel annotation system called AlphaRead that enables users to add and see readable annotations of physical objects, such as labels in letter, in a dynamic video-mediated workspace. Explicit support for object readability can help people coordinate language and vision for collaboration, and allow them to directly read out object labels as a way to make unambiguous references. Object readability as a resource of linguistic references can reduce the ambiguity and complexity associated with traditional methods of referential expressions such as deictic pronouns ("this" or "that") or descriptions of object attributes. In a video-mediated collaboration study, by making objects referable with readable labels, we improved the communication efficiency over the alternative options of using raw video or video with non-readable annotations to collaborate. We also identified patterns of language behaviors that people exhibited with readable labels and discussed the implications to the design of collaboration support tools.

In multilingual communication through a common language among both native speakers (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS), NNS may encounter problems in comprehending the messages of NS or following conversations. Even though automated speech recognition (ASR) transcripts provide support to NNS, such transcripts may contain errors and impose the need to simultaneously listen and read. To reduce this burden, we propose adding another channel (i.e., highlighting) through which NS can help NNS by highlighting the critical parts of transcripts, thus making them more useful to NNS. In a laboratory study involving 14 triads (two NS and one NNS in each triad), participants engaged in collaborative discussions under two conditions: audio conferencing plus ASR transcripts with and without the highlighting function. NS showed various motivations to perform the extra task of highlighting. The highlighting efforts helped NS themselves focus on the discussion and enhanced their task performance while increasing the clarity and comfort perceived by NNS during communication. Having NS generating highlights can benefit both NS and NNS, but in different ways. We discuss the implications for research and design of multilingual collaborative work.

Writing is challenging, especially for non-native speakers. To support English as a Second Language (ESL) writing, we propose StructFeed, which allows native speakers to annotate topic sentence and relevant keywords in texts and generate writing hints based on the principle of paragraph unity. First, we compared our crowd-based method with three naive machine learning (ML) methods and got the best performance on the identification of topic sentence and irrelevant sentence in the article. Next, we evaluated the StructFeed system with two feedback-generation mechanisms including feedback generated by one expert and by one crowd worker. The results showed that people who received feedback by StructFeed got the highest improvement after revision.

Abstract MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are increasingly prevalent as an online educational resource open to everyone and have attracted hundreds of thousands learners enrolling these online courses. At such scale, there is potentially rich information of learners' behaviors embedded in the interactions between learners and videos that may help instructors and content producers adjust the instructions and refine the online courses. However, the lack of tools to visualize information from interactive data, including messages left to the videos at particular timestamps as well as the temporal variations of learners' online participation and perceived experience, has prevented people from gaining more insights from video‐watching logs. In this paper, we focus on extracting and visualizing useful information from time‐anchored comments that learners left to specific time points of the videos when watching them. Timestamps as a kind of metadata of messages can be useful to recover the interactive dynamics of learners occurring around the videos. Therefore, we present a visualization system to analyze and categorize time‐anchored comments based on topics and content types. Our system integrates visualization methods of temporal text data, namely ToPIN and ThemeRiver, which can help people understand the quality and quantity of online learners' feedback and their states of learning. To evaluate the proposed system, we visualized time‐anchored commenting data from two online course videos, and conducted two user studies participated by course instructors and third‐party educational evaluators. The results validate the usefulness of the approach and show how the quantitative and qualitative visualizations can be used to gain interesting insights around learners' online learning behaviors.

Ketamine is an addictive drug that has been shown to inflict considerable physical and mental damage on users. Due in part to its low cost, ketamine has become one of the most popular club drugs among young adults and teenagers in Southeast Asia. This paper proposes a phone-based support system (KeDiary) with Bluetooth-enabled device for the screening of saliva, as a means of assisting ketamine-dependent patients to self-monitor their ketamine use following acute withdrawal treatment. We also conducted a practical experiment to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed system, wherein three ketamine-dependent patients self-administered tests at least once per day over a period of three weeks. Follow-up interviews with the same users helped in the further refinement of the proposed self-monitoring system.

Online learning is increasingly prevalent as an option for self-learning and as a resource for instructional design. Prerecorded video is currently the main medium of online education content delivery and instruction; this affords asynchronicity and flexibility, and enables the dissemination of lecture content in a distributed and scalable manner. However, the same properties may impede learners' engagement due to the lack of social interaction and peer support. In this paper, we propose a time-anchored commenting interface to allow online learners who watch the same video clips to exchange comments on them. Comments left by previous learners at specific time points of a video are displayed to new learners when they watch the same video and reach those time points. We investigated how the display of time-anchored comments (dynamic or static) and type of comments (content-related or social-oriented) influenced users' perceived engagement, perceived social interactivity, and learning outcomes. Our results show that dynamically displaying time-anchored comments can indeed enhance learners' perceived social interactivity. Moreover, the content of comments would further affect learners' intention of commenting. Based on our findings, we make various recommendations for the improvement of social interaction and learning experience in online education.

Alcohol dependence is a chronic disorder associated with severe harm in multiple areas, and relapsing is easy, despite treatment. This study proposes SoberDiary, a phone-based support system that enables alcohol-dependent patients to self-monitor and -manage their own alcohol behavior, and remain sober in their daily lives. We tested SoberDiary in a real-life 12-week user study involving 27 clinical patients. The quantitative and qualitative results revealed that SoberDiary helped patients self-monitor and -manage their alcohol-use behavior, and reduced their total alcohol consumption as well as the number of heavy drinking days. Compared with patients who received standard treatment alone, this study demonstrated SoberDiary successfully complemented current alcohol treatment in reducing patients' alcoholic cravings and dropout rate over 3-month study period. Follow-up interviews further revealed the sophisticated use practices and value of SoberDiary.

One key difference between face-to-face (F2F) communication and computer-mediated communication (CMC) is the availability of visual cues. It is often assumed that the reduction of visibility in audio and video conferencing may negatively impact the use of gesture to communicate, and thus negatively influence other outcomes. In this paper we "Kinect-taped" F2F and CMC communication in brainstorming groups by using motion sensors to record and analyze group members' hand movements during communication. We investigate how different media influence gesture use and gestural similarity, and how the use of gesture associates with level of understanding and brainstorming performance. Implications to future research and design are discussed.

One growing use of computer-based communication media is for gathering people to initiate or sustain social events. Although the use of computer-mediated communication and social network sites such as Facebook for event promotion is becoming popular, online participation in an event does not always translate to offline attendance. In this paper, we report on an interview study of 31 participants that examines how people handle online event invitations and what influences their online and offline participation. The results show that people's event participation is shaped by their social perceptions of the event's nature (e.g., public or private), their relationships to others (e.g., the strength of their connections to other invitees), and the medium used to communicate event information (e.g., targeted invitation via email or spam communication via Facebook event page). By exploring how people decide whether to participate online or offline, the results illuminate the sophisticated nature of the mechanisms that affect participation and have design implications that can bridge virtual and real attendance.

Not all images are interesting to people. People are drawn by interesting images and ignore tasteless ones. Image interestingness has the importance no less than other subjective image properties that have received significant research interest, but has not been systematically studied before. In this work we focus on visual and social aspects of image interestingness. We rely on crowdsourcing tools to survey human perceptions for these subjective properties and verify data by analyzing consistency and reliability. We show that people have an agreement when deciding if an image is interesting or not. We examine the correlation between the social, visual aspects of interestingness and aesthetics. By exploring the correlation, we find that: (1) Weak correlation between social interestingness and both of visual interestingness and image aesthetics indicates that the images frequently re-shared by people are not necessarily aesthetic or visually interesting. (2) High correlation between image aesthetics and visual interestingness implies aesthetic images are more likely to be visually interesting to people. Then we wonder what features of an image lead to social interestingness, e.g. receiving more likes and shares on social networking sites? We train classifiers to predict visual and social interestingness and investigate the contribution from different image features. We find that social and visual interestingness can be best predicted with color and texture, respectively, providing a way to manipulate social and visual liking of images with image features. Further, we investigate the correlation between social/visual image interestingness and image color. We find that colors with arousal effect show more frequently in images with higher social interestingness. That could be explained by previous studies for activation-related affect of colors and provides useful and important advice when advertising on social networking sites.

Machine translation (MT) has the potential to allow members of multilingual organizations to interact via their own native languages, but issues with the quality of MT output have made it difficult to realize this potential. We hypothesized that highlighting keywords in MT output might make it easier for people to overlook translation errors and focus on what was intended by the message. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a laboratory experiment in which native English speakers interacted with a Mandarin-speaking confederate using machine translation. Participants performed three brainstorming tasks, under each of three conditions: no highlighting, keyword highlighting, and random highlighting. Our results indicated that people consider the identical messages clearer and less distracting when the keywords in the message are highlighted. Keyword highlighting also improved subjective impressions of the partner and the quality of the collaboration. These findings inform the design of future communication tools to support multilingual communications.

Diversity among members of international teams can be a valuable source of novel ideas. However, to reap these benefits, groups need to overcome communication barriers that stem from differences in members' native languages. We compare two strategies for overcoming these barriers: the use of English as a common language, and the use of machine translation (MT) tools that allow each person to communicate in his or her own native language. Dyads consisting of one English-speaking American and one native Mandarin-speaking Chinese participant exchanged ideas to perform brainstorming tasks, either through English or using MT. We found that MT helped the non-native English speakers produce ideas but that both native and non-native English speakers viewed MT-mediated messages as less comprehensible than English messages. The findings suggest it can be effective to support cross-lingual communication with asymmetric design, using MT technology to help people produce messages in their native languages, while leaving incoming messages untranslated and leveraging people's second language proficiency for comprehension.

Group brainstorming, or collaboratively generating ideas through idea sharing, demands diverse contributions to spark more ideas and improve creativity. One approach to supporting group brainstorming is to introduce conceptual diversity. In this study, we evaluate the effects of two sources of diversity on group brainstorming: cultural differences internal to multicultural groups and pictures related to the conversation retrieved by a computer agent. The pictures generally enhanced performance as measured by both originality and diversity of ideas. The pictures also helped to convert cultural diversity into a creative outcome, the diversity of ideas generated. We argue that with appropriate technology mediation, cultural diversity may be used strategically to enhance task outcomes.

Creativity is central to much human problem solving and innovation. Brainstorming processes attempt to leverage group creativity, but group dynamics sometimes limit their utility. We present IdeaExpander, a tool to support group brainstorming by intelligently selecting pictorial stimuli based on the group's conversation The design is based on theories of how perception, thinking, and communication interact; a pilot study (N=16) suggests that it increases individuals' idea production and that people value it.

Online collaboration, in comparison to face-to-face collaboration, is advantageous in making multiparty teamwork possible at a very low cost. As multicultural multiparty collaboration becomes ubiquitous, it is crucial to understand how communication processes are shaped in the social and media environments that computer-mediated communication affords. We conducted a laboratory study investigating how different types of cultural asymmetry in group composition (Chinese of the majority versus American of the majority) and communication media (text-only versus video-enabled chatroom) influence conversational similarity between Chinese and Americans. The paper presents an analysis identifying that the selection of media and the cultural composition of the group jointly shape intercultural conversational closeness.

Group brainstorming is a commonly practiced technique to enhance creative outcomes. A close observation of group brainstorming suggests that ensuring the abundance and diversity of stimuli available in brainstorming sessions is critical. Cultural differences in knowledge and perspectives are valuable sources for diversity, while cultural discrepancy in communication styles and language may impede knowledge sharing. My dissertation research aims to reconcile the tension between the benefits and obstacles of intercultural brainstorming with pictures that are triggered by verbal ideas. Pictures provide extra stimulation without explicitly interrupting normal communication. Pictures may also mediate concepts in a language-independent manner, which may complement the still imperfect machine translation and make cross-lingual brainstorming feasible.

Supporting creativity via collaborative group brainstorming is a prevalent practice in organizations. Today's technology makes it easy for international and intercultural group members to brainstorm together remotely, but surprisingly little is known about how culture and medium shape the underlying brainstorming process. In a laboratory study, we examined the influences of individual cultural background (American versus Chinese), group cultural composition (same- versus mixed-culture groups), and communication medium (text-only versus video-enabled chatrooms) on group brainstorming conversations. Cultural differences and adaptation in conversational talkativeness and responsiveness were identified. The text-only medium reduced cultural differences in talkativeness. Working in a mixed-culture group led to cultural adaptation in the communication style of Chinese but not American participants. We discuss implications for international group brainstorming.

Creativity plays an important role in many learning activities but how to enhance creativity with the support of modern computer tools deserves further studies. In this paper, we propose a game-based collaborative creativity support system called Idea storming cube to support creative thinking and help a user form a perspective-shift thinking habit. The system analyzes the knowledge acquired from the history of user inputs and compares it with the ideas possessed by the domain expert and other users in the current brainstorming group. The system is designed to provide user-, goal- and context-sensitive supports with this mechanism that stimulates more divergent thinking. We have implemented the proposed game with a magic-cube-like HCI for collaborative idea generation. A case study for preliminary evaluation of the system is also reported in this paper.

It has been a major objective for researchers to develop computer systems that can effectively deliver instruction to learners. Therefore, how to incorporate instructional strategies in computer-assisted learning systems in a systematic manner deserves further investigation. In this paper, a style-matching strategy that attempts to match learning materials' styles to learners' latent traits is proposed and realized in a web-based tutoring system, called CooTutor. The mechanism of adaptive material selection takes learners' different spatial ability and learning styles as an integral learning profile into account, and performs traits-based personalization of learning experience. This system is specifically designed to conquer the difficulty of tutoring the topic on fundamental spatial geometry in conventional curriculums. By conducting empirical evaluation with a small group of students, it is found that CooTutor is generally beneficial to learning the domain, but the effect of the styles-matching mechanism remains inconclusive. The work aims to contribute to the community of adaptive hypermedia in providing an explorative example adopting the concern of individual difference for personalization. The system design, a usage scenario, and an exploratory evaluation are presented in this paper as implications for further studies.

In this paper, we present an empirical study of using a new and cost-effective Web-based collaboration software, Wiki, in a freshman-level English as a second language (ESL) course. This paper explores and observes the scenario: what if the Wiki tool were to be used in an English as a second language course in Taiwan? Students who attended this study practiced English writing on a Wiki Web site. The data about their usage and learning achievements was collected and analyzed. Our finding of a significant, but inverse, relation between students' editing usage and academic performance challenges some idealistic hypotheses that Wiki technology is "naturally beneficial" to learning. We believe that building an instructive or constructive instructional model with Wiki in a rigorous manner requires more empirical evidence. This study provides fresh evidence that will hopefully serve as an impetus to fill that gap.

In this paper we focus on incorporating adaptive presentation and 3D visualization into Web-based learning environments to enhance learners' learning outcomes, especially to facilitate learners' spatial reasoning on geometric topics in computer graphics. This system is called CooTutor (coordinate tutor). According to educational media studies, "Media and Method" are the main concerns of developing such a system. In CooTutor, interactive 3D media is used to present spatial relations effectively to the learners. Instructional methods and strategies are embedded in its adaptive mechanism by incorporating ITS (intelligent tutoring systems) techniques. Since geometric transformation is the example domain of our study, learners' spatial ability is considered as an index for adapting the presentation. To achieve better abstraction and flexibility, we have chosen to separate the concept sequencing from the underlying learning materials. We believe that Web-based learning could take more advantages of available computing power to enhance learning by realizing innovative instructional design, as in the case of 3D interactive presentation.