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Computer Science Human-Computer Interaction

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Sunday 30 August

Human-Computer Interaction

TransCAVE-E: A distributed virtual reality testbed for adaptive external human-machine interfaces

External human-machine interfaces (eHMIs) are evolving from predefined displays toward adaptive communication strategies that respond to changing traffic and road-user states. This transition requires experimental infrastructure that supports human-in-the-loop (HIL) interaction, software-in-the-loop (SIL) algorithm execution, reusable experiment orchestration, and synchronized multimodal human-factors evaluation. This paper presents TransCAVE-E, a distributed virtual-reality testbed for developing and validating adaptive and intelligent eHMIs. The platform integrates three coupled modules: a Scenario Design Center for configurable traffic environments and experimental conditions; an eHMI Algorithm Module for bidirectional real-time coupling between simulation and external algorithms; and a Data Management System that synchronizes trajectories, eye-tracking, physiological, system-log, and subjective data. A distributed multi-agent architecture supports synchronous interaction among pedestrians, human drivers, automated vehicles, and other traffic entities. Two use cases demonstrate the platform. In an AV-pedestrian experiment, an intent-recognition-based eHMI improved decision efficiency by 12.8% and 13.0% in yielding and non-yielding scenarios, reduced gaze distraction by 17.1% in the yielding scenario, and reduced unnecessary prompts by 40% in the non-yielding scenario while maintaining interaction safety. An HV-AV study further demonstrated real-time SIL validation of a game-theoretic information-disclosure strategy under active driver interaction. TransCAVE-E provides an extensible and reproducible infrastructure for closed-loop evaluation and iterative refinement of intelligent human-vehicle communication strategies.
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All authors Yun Ye, Zexuan Li, Haoyang Liang, Boya Sun, Jian Sun, Haotian Shi

Human-Computer Interaction · Cross-listed from cs.CL

The Role of AI in Online Reviews

The rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) creates new opportunities for strategic content generation on online platforms, including potentially harmful forms of manipulation that may undermine platform effectiveness and reshape platform dynamics. However, measuring such activity is difficult because AI-generated content is rarely directly observable. We introduce an empirical approach that leverages discrete LLM supply shocks - abrupt changes in model prices and capabilities, and contrasts verified with non-verified reviews to identify changes in platform activity associated with generative AI supply improvements. We apply this approach to more than 13 million reviews from Trustpilot, one of the leading online platforms for business reviews. A robust finding is that following LLM supply shocks, unverified reviews shift toward greater negativity: more 1-stars, fewer 5-stars, and lower ratings, with effects driven primarily by new model releases and concentrated among firms with the lowest and highest review volumes, suggesting that strategic AI use may reshape platform competition dynamics. We further find that LLM supply shocks trigger short, concentrated bursts of review activity. Together, these findings suggest that generative AI is already reshaping how reputation and competition operate on online platforms.
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Human-Computer Interaction · Cross-listed from cs.CY

AMINA: The Inclusive and Accountable AI for Marginalized Immigrant Nonprofit Assistance

Immigrant-led nonprofit groups, particularly those operating in politically sensitive contexts, face exclusion from formal registries and digital platforms. This paper reports a three-phase mixed-methods study with Iranian immigrant nonprofit practitioners: 27 semi-structured interviews, a co-design session, and 7 evaluation and feedback interviews on a prototyped AI assistant, AMINA. Our findings highlight how legitimacy barriers, capacity gaps, and politically charged misinformation constrain nonprofit operations. We translate these insights into design goals for an inclusive nonprofit AI assistant: support for everyday group operations, recognition of informal nonprofit efforts, proactive countering of misinformation, and multilingual, accessible interaction. User evaluations show AMINAs potential to reduce reporting burdens and foster transparency through proactive reminders, and catalyze collaboration across dispersed networks. We contribute to CSCW and HCI by characterizing the cooperative work of transnational immigrant nonprofits, extending scholarship on informality and misinformation, and demonstrating how AI can act as a collaborative partner that strengthens, rather than displaces, the human connections at the core of nonprofit ecosystems, while also posing major risks.
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Human-Computer Interaction

Occlusion-induced risk and interventions in pedestrian-autonomous truck interactions on multi-lane roads: A virtual reality study

Autonomous trucks (ATs) may introduce distinct pedestrian-safety risks because of their large physical dimensions, constrained braking capability, limited driver-based communication cues, and potential to occlude surrounding traffic. This study employed a controlled virtual reality experiment with 54 participants to investigate pedestrian-AT interaction risk in an unsignalized multi-lane crossing scenario and to evaluate occlusion-targeted risk mitigation strategies. The experiment examined the effects of near-side vehicle type, weather condition, and far-side vehicle yielding strategy on pedestrian behavior, perceived risk, and objective safety. Based on a representative high-risk scenario, three targeted interventions were designed and tested: an environment-aware external human-machine interface (eHMI), a projected eHMI, and an auditory warning. The results showed that ATs increased perceived risk and encouraged more cautious crossing behavior, suggesting a risk-compensation effect. However, this compensation was weakened under rainy conditions, where braking-related safety margins were reduced. AT-induced occlusion further increased far-side interaction risk by limiting pedestrians' recognition of hidden vehicles. Among the three interventions, the projected eHMI showed the best overall performance, improving objective safety margins, enhancing risk awareness, and supporting behavioral adjustment. These findings highlight the need for AT-specific interface and warning strategies that address both intention communication and risk localization.
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All authors Yun Ye, Yuan Che, S.C. Wong, Stergios-Aristoteles Mitoulis, Haoyang Liang

Human-Computer Interaction

Looking Around by Looking Around: Omnidirectional Gaze-based VR Viewport Control

Traditional VR viewport control primarily relies on head and torso movement, which can be effortful and limiting in both constrained and extended-use settings. We introduce Looking Around by Looking Around (LALA), a gaze-based VR pitch-and-yaw viewport control technique designed for natural and effortless omnidirectional exploration via eye movements, without requiring or obstructing movement of the head, hand, or body, offering a low-effort and highly accessible interaction method. Because gaze is primarily used for perception and exhibits oculomotor and perceptual asymmetries, using it directly for control is difficult. To address this, we designed an asymmetric omnidirectional control profile for the eye, then built on it to exploit tendencies for eyes to stay within comfortable regions for viewport control. We evaluated LALA in a user study (N=18) featuring two contrasting tasks: alignment towards known directions and open-ended visual search towards unknown directions. LALA was strongly preferred over the traditional baseline, achieving competitive performance while enabling fully hands-free interaction with minimal physical movement.
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All authors Hock Siang Lee, Jinghui Hu, Florian Weidner, Haopeng Wang, Hans Gellersen

Human-Computer Interaction

Multimodal Takeover Requests for Drivers with Hearing Loss: Implications for AI-Enabled Communication in Automated Vehicles

More than 430 million people worldwide live with disabling hearing loss. Although people with hearing loss are legally permitted to drive and may benefit from conditionally automated vehicles, SAE Level 3 systems still require drivers to respond to takeover requests when automation reaches its limits. Existing takeover requests often rely on auditory information, yet little evidence addresses visual and tactile designs for drivers who cannot rely on sound. This driving-simulator study with 40 participants examined the effects of information type (instructional, informative, and baseline), signal type (visual, tactile, and visual-tactile), and hearing condition (normal hearing and simulated hearing impairment) on takeover performance. Information type significantly affected reaction time, with baseline displays producing the shortest times. Signal type significantly affected reaction and takeover time, with visual-tactile displays producing the shortest times. The interaction between signal type and information type was significant for all three measures. Visual-tactile displays produced the shortest reaction times within every information type. With visual-tactile signaling, simple baseline alerts prompted the fastest reactions and the most abrupt maneuvers, whereas informative content produced the lowest mean maximum resulting acceleration. Hearing condition showed no significant main effect on any measure. These findings suggest that AI-enabled vehicles can support urgent takeover communication through visual-tactile displays and can adapt message content to the time available and the maneuver quality required, with implications for drivers across hearing abilities.
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Human-Computer Interaction

A Cyber-Physical Machine Tool Framework with a Real-Time Machining Process Digital Twin

Digital Twins (DTs) have emerged as a key technology for improving the monitoring, optimization, and automation of manufacturing systems. However, existing Cyber-Physical Machine Tool (CPMT) implementations primarily represent the machine tool, while the machining process remains only partially synchronized with its physical counterpart. This paper extends a previously presented CPMT framework by introducing a hierarchical DT framework that simultaneously maintains DTs of both the machine tool and the machining process. The proposed framework integrates real-time CNC operational data, a voxel-based workpiece representation, synchronized process vibration measurements, and a persistent part DT repository for process replay, traceability, and future synthetic data generation. Experimental evaluation demonstrated real-time operation at a 20 Hz machining-state update rate, interactive visualization exceeding 100 frames per second, and a mean depth reconstruction error of 0.16 mm. The implementation provides a foundation for AI-assisted machining applications while preserving the machine tool monitoring and teleoperation capabilities.
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All authors Khalil Chakal, Tero Kaarlela, Jose Outeiro, Carlos Andrade

Human-Computer Interaction

The Policy Deficit in AI x Social-Emotional Learning Research

As artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrated into social-emotional learning (SEL) initiatives, the need for evidence-based policy has become paramount. We systematically reviewed 65 peer-reviewed papers that examine the intersection of AI and SEL to investigate how these studies articulate policy implications. Our analysis revealed a substantial "policy deficit" in the current AI x SEL literature: nearly three-quarters of the studies did not mention policy implications at all. Using the "WH-question" framework (Who, What, Why, When/Where, and How), we map the policy implications narratives present in the literature and show that they often lack the specificity and actor-oriented guidance required for effective evidence-informed policymaking. We find a significant association between publication venue and policy engagement, suggesting that current academic incentive structures may prioritize technical innovation and pedagogical feasibility over explicit engagement with governance and regulation. This study identifies a "techno-solutionist" trap, where technical potential is foregrounded while the institutional conditions for responsible implementation remain under-specified. We conclude by proposing a shift from "implication-as-afterthought" to "implication-as-methodology" and offer a set of actionable guidelines for researchers, editors, reviewers, and policymakers to bridge the gap between AI innovation and educational governance. Rather than presenting policy as a generic ethical horizon, we argue that AI-SEL studies should systematically specify Who should act, What actions are recommended, Why these actions are needed, When and Where they apply, and How strongly they are framed, thereby strengthening the translation of AI x SEL innovation into educational policy and practice.
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Human-Computer Interaction · Cross-listed from cs.LG

HoopMind: A Real-Time Neural Game-Tree System for Opponent-Aware Possession Planning

School coaches prepare for opponents with game film and intuition. The analytics tools of professional teams stay out of reach. We ask how far public data can close this gap. Professional basketball is our case study, chosen for its data rather than the league. We fuse five public sources into one per-shot dataset of 4.23M shots over 21 seasons. The sources are shot locations, two play-by-play feeds, official matchup tracking, and player biometrics. Alignment across them is 99.5% to 100%. We also report two data pitfalls that are easy to miss. We then model a half-court possession as a sequential game. Shot values come from ShotNet, an embedding multilayer perceptron (MLP). On a held-out season it beats a zone-rate baseline and a logistic baseline, and its probabilities are well calibrated. A depth-limited expectimax search then solves the offensive decision tree, with branch-and-bound pruning to keep it real time. All training runs offline, so the online system stays light. A scouting planner and a playable simulator both run in a single browser page.
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Human-Computer Interaction

Towards Effective Generation of Interactive Visualizations with Vibe Coding: An Empirical Study

Constructing interactive visualizations has traditionally required substantial human effort, involving both technical implementation and design decision-making. Recently, vibe coding, a programming paradigm leveraging Large Language Models to generate, interpret, and refactor code from natural language specifications, has emerged as a promising approach to reduce the burden. However, the capabilities and limitations of vibe coding in building interactive visualizations remain unexplored. To address this gap, we conducted a user study with 78 participants that were tasked with constructing interactive visualizations using vibe coding. We further collected users feedback through questionnaires, interviews, and case analyses. Based on this study, we examine (1) the capabilities and (2) user experience of vibe coding in generating interactive visualizations, and (3) the practical human-agent collaboration strategies adopted. Our findings provide the first systematic assessment of vibe coding for interactive visualization construction, revealing both its strengths and limitations, explaining the shift in developer labor and identifying the hybrid collaboration strategies participants adopted. Furthermore, our study offers insights for more intuitive and robust vibe coding practices.
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All authors Yanshan Zeng, Ruixuan Tu, Zuo Xiang, Lijia Feng, Guozheng Li, Chi Harold Liu

Human-Computer Interaction · Cross-listed from cs.CR

Context or Digits? Balancing Memorability and Efficiency in Virtual Reality Authentication

We present Adaptive Direction-Based Authentication (ADBA), a knowledge-based authentication method for Virtual Reality that decouples users' needs temporally by enforcing password creation based on virtual environment context while supporting both context- and digit-based entries during authentication. This design prioritizes memorability for new passwords and offers both efficient and memorable options to support users' evolving needs. We conducted a remote longitudinal study with 66 participants comparing ADBA against 6-digit PINs over 2-3 weeks. The results demonstrated that ADBA achieved superior memorability and lower perceived task load. Interestingly, no participant chose to enter via digits in the study, yet they still perceived ADBA to be highly efficiency despite longer objective entry times. ADBA also provided security benefits through randomly-generated digit representations, though some degree of password homogeneity was observed in specific virtual environments. Our findings suggest that ADBA offers solid advantages to the traditional PINs, and successfully addresses the tradeoffs between efficiency, memorability, and security under the usage scenarios considered in the study.
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All authors Yuxuan Huang, Qiao Jin, Tongyu Nie, Victoria Interrante, Evan Suma Rosenberg

Saturday 29 August

Human-Computer Interaction

EITWatch: Smartwatch-Integrated Planar Electrical Impedance Tomography for Hand Gesture Recognition

Wrist Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) senses hand gestures from muscle- and tendon-driven impedance changes, but prior wrist-EIT systems require electrode coverage beyond the watch-back contact patch and separate analog front ends. We present EITWatch, the first wrist-EIT system built around smartwatch case-back geometry, asking whether this contact patch alone can support gesture recognition: eight planar electrodes in a 31 mm ring acquire 35 impedance measurements at 48 Hz. Because a planar array cannot encircle the wrist, EITWatch uses multi-depth scanning to sample multiple source-sink distances and current paths; it beat matched adjacent injection by 15.1/10.4 percentage points (macro/micro) across all 12 participants. In a prompted study, within-session leave-one-round-out accuracy reached 91.4%/92.5% (window/trial) for six macro-gestures, and 90.1%/91.5% (window/segment) for five micro-gestures plus relax; window-level cross-session and leave-one-user-out transfer reached 73.2%/70.4% and 63.1%/55.3% (macro/micro).
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Human-Computer Interaction

Feelium: A Touchable Blimp Body for Aerial Telepresence

Floating things invite touch. We present Feelium, a blimp-based telepresence platform that enables visual embodiment and touch interaction through its inflatable skin. Through a VR headset, a remote person inhabits the blimp, looking out of it first-person, appearing on its skin as a face or avatar, and steering it through the room. Partners in the room pat it, press a palm against it, draw on it, or lean into it; the skin senses each contact, renders it into the wearer's view in VR spaces. Touch thus provides a physical interaction channel for remote presence, turning the skin into a shared surface between remote and co-located partners.
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All authors George Xi Wang, Henghao Li, Shan Lin, Yunge Wen, Jiaqian Hu, Yuhua Jin

Human-Computer Interaction · Cross-listed from cs.CV

FISICA: A Deployed Service for Plantar-Pressure and Posture Assessment with Ontology-Grounded Recommendation

FISICA is a body-assessment and recommendation service running in production. One standing session with two photographs returns foot-loading measures, posture coordinates, a driven 3D avatar, a visual report, and ranked shoe and exercise candidates. Measurement comes from a purpose-built scale carrying 634 force-sensitive elements on a 1 cm grid and four load cells, and a rule-based evaluator controls every recommendation while a language model only explains the stored result. The method contribution is the avatar. Instead of mapping a measured angle onto a rig through a tuned gain, we measure the avatar with the same function used on the subject and solve until the two agree, on a sampling-invariant spinal metric that separated a normal from a kyphotic record by 7.2 degrees against 0.9 degrees for a single-joint formulation. In production, general APIs respond at a 0.023 s median, plantar-pressure analysis at 0.45 s, and recommendation at 2.16 s to 2.26 s with the rule-based portion under one second in every trial. The served keypoint graph reaches 0.960 PCK@0.2 on public data, and the catalog holds 699 shoes with 10,500 typed facts. An approved study supplies the radiographic reference for the validation still ahead.
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All authors Juhwan Song, Heejung Kim, Juntae Noh, Jonghak Ryu, Huiju Park, Junseong Lee, Dohyeon Ahn, Byungwoo Jo

Human-Computer Interaction

Understanding Behavioral Dark Patterns of High BMI Individuals

Understanding how everyday behaviors influence body weight is essential for designing effective and personalized health interventions. Existing studies largely rely on self-reported questionnaires or limited sensing modalities, making it difficult to capture the temporal dynamics of daily behavior. In this work, we analyze the DiversityOne dataset, comprising four weeks of passive smartphone sensing and ecological momentary assessments collected from 453 university students across eight countries. We extract behavioral features spanning dietary habits, physical activity, screen time, and smartphone usage, and investigate their associations with self-reported Body Mass Index (BMI). Beyond feature-level analysis, we employ Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to uncover latent behavioral patterns. Our analysis reveals that higher BMI is associated with more frequent consumption of soda, alcohol, and processed meat. We further reveal that overweight and obese individuals spend longer periods in food delivery apps and are more likely to transition back to unhealthy eating and drinking routines after starting to exercise. In contrast, normal-weight individuals lead a more balanced lifestyle. These findings highlight key behavioral patterns that make weight loss particularly challenging.
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Human-Computer Interaction

Measuring the "Interaction Gap" in Drama Therapy with AI

Generative AI is increasingly being introduced into expressive arts therapy, where it is often credited with offering a non-judgmental environment that supports psychological safety. Existing HCI work has largely positioned AI as a co-creative material or as a bridge/mediator into human-led care. This paper explores a different position. When a patient performs the same drama therapy task with an AI partner and with a human partner, the resulting self-presentations tend to differ in patterned ways. We propose treating this difference, the Interaction Gap, as a diagnostic lens within drama therapy. Rather than asking which context elicits a truer self, the lens reads the difference between the two performances as information about the social pressures shaping self-expression in each context. We sketch a starting point for task design and measurement signals grounded in drama therapy's existing use of role and aesthetic distance, and raise provocations for workshop discussion: the observer effect and privacy paradox that measurement introduces, and the question of whose lens the gap is.
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Human-Computer Interaction · Cross-listed from cs.AI

GuardianAgent: Policy-Conditioned Risk-Adaptive Anonymization with Verified Adversarial Escalation

Privacy protection for live web traffic requires more than detecting private spans. Agent-based privacy protection systems must determine whether an outgoing action complies with the destination site's privacy policy, then apply only the level of rewriting or sanitisation justified by the residual disclosure risk. We present GuardianAgent, a policy-conditioned anonymization framework that couples structured risk assessment with verified adaptive rewriting. GuardianAgent computes risk through AMRSF (Adaptive Multi-factor Risk Scoring Formula), an explicit controller that combines policy-violation likelihood with data sensitivity, recipient transmission, purpose legitimacy, contextual basis, and policy transparency, rather than relying on an LLM to assign risk directly. This risk score determines both the allow/transform/deny decision and the initial anonymization level. For efficiency, GuardianAgent uses an evidential fast path for low-uncertainty policy matches and invokes an LLM slow path only for uncertain cases. For rewriting, it applies a five-level hierarchy driven by a verified adversarial guesser: guesses trigger escalation only when supported by the original text, preventing hallucinated attacker confidence from causing unnecessary over-anonymization. Experiments across three benchmarks spanning legal text (TAB), Reddit posts (SynthPAI), and multi-format synthetic PII records (PII-Masking-300k) show that GuardianAgent achieves the strongest privacy-utility trade-off among published baselines and is the only method to reach more than 0.90 privacy in all three domains, remaining robust under a backbone switch. Action-context stress tests further show that the same outgoing text receives different decisions and anonymization strengths under different recipients, purposes, action bases, and policy-transparency conditions.
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All authors Ruiyi Yang, Gayathri Lihinikaduarachchi, Rahat Masood, Flora D. Salim, Salil S. Kanhere

Human-Computer Interaction · Cross-listed from cs.CL

Toward Cultural Alignment: Human-Centered Evaluation of Multimodal AI Stories Across Five African Communities

In this paper, we examine how well AI-generated multimodal stories align with the lived practices, relationships, language, values, and visual expectations of the communities they represent. We conduct a community-grounded mixed-methods evaluation with 19 culture representatives across five African communities, combining quantitative annotations with qualitative focus group discussions. We find that cultural alignment depends not simply on recognizable cultural markers, but on how those markers fit social, linguistic, procedural, and visual context. From these evaluations, we develop a taxonomy of cultural alignment comprising five broader cultural marker categories and eight recurring mechanisms of misalignment. We additionally evaluate five multimodal LLM judges to examine whether automated evaluation can approximate community-grounded judgments at scale. Judge reliability and score calibration vary substantially across communities, with no single judge performing consistently across all five settings. These findings motivate community-calibrated evaluation pipelines in which automated judges are validated against community judgments to determine where they can be trusted and where human review remains necessary.
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All authors Millicent Ochieng, Felermino D. M. A. Ali, Elizabeth A. Ankrah, Najeeb Gambo Abdulhamid, Migisha Boyd, Stephanie Nyairo, Mercy Muchai, Samuel Chege Maina, Aditya Vashistha, Anja Thieme, Jacki O'Neill

Human-Computer Interaction

An Eye-Tracking Dataset for Viewing Distance Categories in Real-World Scenarios

Estimating viewing distance from gaze behavior is essential for understanding user intent and enabling distance-aware interactive systems. However, most existing eye-tracking datasets have been collected in constrained settings, such as laboratory environments or static tasks. Consequently, they only partially capture viewing behaviors in real-world situations where viewing distance changes with natural head and body movements. We introduce GazeDepth, an eye-tracking dataset collected from 19 participants using a wearable tracker during tasks reflecting real-world scenarios. GazeDepth includes fixed-distance viewing scenarios with constant observer-target distances at near (33 cm), middle (50 cm), and far (300 cm), as well as variable-distance viewing scenarios in which participants shift gaze among targets at different depths in indoor and outdoor environments. The dataset provides synchronized gaze data, pupil size, 3D eye-vectors, and head-motion signals, along with distance labels. Statistical analyses showed that distance-related gaze features, such as vergence angle and estimated viewing distance, differed consistently across viewing-distance categories. In addition, classification models trained on GazeDepth further demonstrated that the dataset captures gaze characteristics that distinguish the three viewing-distance categories, supporting gaze-based distance inference and distance-aware interaction in realistic scenarios.
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All authors Dohwa Kim, Yejin Choi, Seungbok Lee, Chi Yoon Jeong, Eunji Park

Human-Computer Interaction

Sharing Roughness with Hand-Outline Visualization to Reduce Sensory Asymmetry in VR Collaboration

In collaborative VR, asymmetric access to haptic hardware creates a critical information gap: tactile evidence remains private to the haptic user, hindering the shared understanding needed for joint decision-making. While prior work has explored crossmodal sensory cues in virtual environments, it remains unclear how such cues should be designed for asymmetric collaboration, where collaborators receive information through different modalities. In our setting, the haptic user feels roughness through fingertip vibration, whereas the non-haptic user relies on vision alone. To reduce this asymmetry, we propose externalizing an object's tactile state through a glanceable hand-outline visual proxy. Specifically, we examine whether abstract visual roughness cues based on line shape and motion can encode three discrete roughness levels for both haptic and non-haptic users. Two preliminary studies establish a shared visual semantics by identifying visually distinguishable cues for non-haptic users and validating their visuo-haptic correspondence for haptic users. In a main study of a collaborative sorting task, showing this visualization on both users' hands significantly reduced completion time relative to a no-visualization baseline. Moreover, NU-side cue visibility was associated with higher confidence and perceived contribution for the non-haptic user. These findings show that hand-anchored abstract visual cues provide a lightweight means of externalizing object tactile state, reducing information asymmetry without compromising social presence.
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All authors Minju Baeck, Yoonseok Shin, Hyunjin Lee, Boram Yoon, Sang Ho Yoon, Woontack Woo

Human-Computer Interaction

How Mental Health Self-Disclosure Becomes Visible: Evidence from Eight Conditions on Reddit

People share mental health diagnoses on social media, yet how such language becomes visible around their self-disclosure, and whether community engagement tracks it, remain unexamined across conditions. We analyze 89,605 Reddit posts from 739 users across eight conditions, removing each user's diagnosis disclosure and aligning their surrounding posts to that anchor. Within the pre-disclosure year, language-visible burden was highest in the month before disclosure for six conditions, earlier for post-traumatic stress disorder and furthest from it for borderline personality disorder, and remained visible afterward rather than resolving. The theme Seeking Clinical Explanations showed the largest early-to-late difference before disclosure in five conditions, yet engagement rarely tracked what users wrote: only 9 of 360 language–engagement correlations survived correction. Disclosure is therefore a waypoint in an unevenly visible process, and we offer implications for community practice and platform design where engagement metrics do not reflect clinical need.
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All authors Renkai Ma, Lingyao Li, Shanting Chen, Chen Chen, Fan Yang, Yuanyuan Lei

Human-Computer Interaction

Using LLMs to Mimic the Conversational Dynamics of Reddit Communities

Online communities face a constant battle against toxicity and misinformation. While human moderators struggle to keep pace with the volume of content, LLMs offer a promising solution for automatically generating constructive responses and shaping online interactions. This paper preliminarily investigates if LLMs can mimic the communication styles of Reddit users using their comment history as context. We evaluate two prompting approaches: predicting a target comment and filling in masked comments. We find that LLMs outperform expectations at replicating comment structure and formality, but struggle to accurately capture nuanced emotions, e.g. understating joy and overstating anger. These findings highlight a promising direction for LLMs in guiding online conversations towards prosociality influencing emergent communication patterns and norms within the community. The results of our study inspire future work with more rigorous methods of evaluation to explore the LLMs' effectiveness across diverse online communities to better understand their broader societal impact.
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All authors Vedaant Jain, Yoshee Jain, Ishq Gupta, Aditi Shrivastava, Koustuv Saha, Eshwar Chandrasekharan

Human-Computer Interaction

AREAs-Lab: An Interactive Environment for AI-driven Requirement Elicitation for AI Systems

Building effective AI systems increasingly depends on writing high-quality task requirements, yet users often struggle to articulate the constraints, preferences, and edge cases that determine success. This problem is especially acute in AI development, where behavior is shaped not only by human expectations but also by data characteristics. We present AREAs-Lab, an interactive environment for AI-driven Requirement Elicitation for AI systems. In AREAs-Lab, an assistant iteratively refines an initially incomplete requirement by analyzing the underlying dataset and asking targeted clarification questions to uncover the user's latent intent. To study this setting systematically, we construct a synthetic benchmark grounded in 16 public datasets spanning diverse domains and task types. Each benchmark instance includes a user profile, a complete reference requirement, and an intentionally underspecified version that serves as the assistant's starting point. We further introduce an automated evaluation pipeline based on an AI-simulated user that reveals hidden information only when appropriately prompted, enabling scalable and reproducible assessment of interactive elicitation quality. AREAs-Lab provides a controlled testbed for studying how AI assistants can transform vague user goals into actionable requirements for AI systems.
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All authors Pengshan Cai, Zihao Zhang, Ting Jin, Chenyang Zhu, Kushal Chawla, Sangwoo Cho, Scott Novotney, Yebowen Hu, Fei Liu, Shi-Xiong Zhang, Sambit Sahu

Friday 28 August

Human-Computer Interaction

From Maturity Models to Ground Truth: Reconciling Cybersecurity Capacity Frameworks with Household-Level Governance Realities in the Global South

National cybersecurity and digital-governance capacity frameworks, most prominently the Cybersecurity Capacity Maturity Model for Nations (CMM), shape hundreds of millions of dollars in donor-funded governance investments across the Global South. Yet a persistent, under-theorised gap remains between state-level institutional maturity and the governance actually experienced by end-users. We term this the last-mile governance gap: the structural space between what a maturity assessment can see - laws, agencies, standards, awareness campaigns - and what a household living under that formal architecture can access, understand, or enforce. Drawing on a dual vantage point combining CMM assessment experience with peer-reviewed empirical fieldwork on smart-home privacy governance in Jordan, corroborated against studies from Kenya and China, we identify four mechanisms by which national capacity fails to reach the household: legibility, intra-household power distribution, accessibility of redress, and infrastructure-affordability constraints. We map these mechanisms explicitly onto the CMM's five dimensions, propose four concrete, low-cost last-mile indicators pilotable within existing CMM deployments, and outline a staged adoption roadmap with responses to anticipated objections. With AI-enabled devices entering homes across the Global South faster than institutional capacity can adapt, the stakes are rising: this dynamic risks converting a measurable maturity gap into an invisible one. We conclude with actionable implications for the GCSCC, the ITU, the World Bank, and other institutions relying on maturity scores to prioritize investment.
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Human-Computer Interaction · Cross-listed from cs.CY

Beloved Afterlives: Governing AI Resurrection Beyond Consent

AI resurrection is often framed as a question of consent: did the represented person authorize being made to speak? That question matters, but it freezes authority at the moment of creation. A representation can later change models, pass to relatives, depend on a provider, incorporate records shared with others, or circulate far beyond its intended audience. We argue that the central governance problem is therefore not whether authorization exists once, but whether it remains legible as the representation moves. Across a public-record audit of 93 systems, creation was far easier to inspect than the conditions for speaking, contesting, preserving, or leaving: consent or authority information was thin in 82 systems, objection or redress in 82, and deletion or export in 77. The differences among systems reveal why these gaps cannot be reduced to one transparency score. Human afterlives show consent becoming incomplete over time. Companion-animal afterlives begin where subject consent is unavailable and shared care must allocate authority. Adjacent persona and mimetic systems show how voices, likenesses, and personalities can travel into later afterlife uses. Four public cases follow the same movement from premortem participation, through intimate postmortem creation, to third-party circulation and family contestation. From this evidence we develop relational authority: authorization is distributed across people, records, providers, and audiences, and must remain traceable as those relations change. This reframes AI resurrection from a product authorized once into an accountability chain linking creation authority, source boundaries, circulation, contestation, and exit. The study measures what users and affected parties can inspect publicly; private implementation and lived outcomes remain open empirical questions.
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Human-Computer Interaction

The Web-CLI: Verifiable Privacy for Tools, Models, and Inference Engines in the Browser

We introduce the Web-CLI, a novel application architecture deploying powerful computational capabilities (command-line tools compiled to WebAssembly, models run through client-side inference runtimes, and GPU-accelerated engines) as zero-install, offline-capable browser applications that preserve full underlying capability. Unlike web-based alternatives that require server-side processing and expose user data to third parties, Web-CLI applications execute entirely on the client, providing a verifiable privacy guarantee by architecture rather than policy. We define the pattern and its four properties: fidelity, progressive disclosure, offline-first, and zero egress. We present four reference implementations across distinct domains: ffmpeg-webCLI, a browser-based video editor built on FFmpeg; whisper-webCLI, speech transcription via Transformers.js; chat-webCLI, WebLLM-based language model inference; and 3mf-webCLI, a deterministic tool segmenting 3D models into multi-material files for physical 3D printing. Together they demonstrate that the pattern generalizes across deterministic media processing, neural speech recognition, LLM inference, and geometry processing with a physical output, and we outline how it extends to AI-native interfaces in which a local language model becomes the command surface itself. We further report early, anecdotal signs of independent reuse by third-party tools, suggesting the pattern generalizes beyond its reference implementations. We evaluate the primary implementation against native FFmpeg on performance and feature parity, and argue that progressive disclosure lowers the barrier for non-technical users. We argue that for applications processing sensitive user data (medical, legal, journalistic, or personal), the Web-CLI should be the default architecture, as it makes data locality an independently verifiable technical property rather than a policy promise.
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Human-Computer Interaction

Structured State Reconciliation for Human-AI Task Handover

Task handover requires communicating enough current state for a successor to resume work, yet the relevant information is often divided between system records and human observations. System records can be precise and timestamped but only partially observe the task, while human reports capture intent and task knowledge that no log contains but are vulnerable to omission and memory error. We present a provenance-aware pipeline that converts task telemetry and human-authored reports into a shared typed task-state representation, aligns and reconciles their facts, detects conflicts, and generates structured handover reports. We evaluate the approach on 13 paired task states collected in a controlled spatial multitask environment, using task-grounded metrics that estimate the state-reconstruction cost a report would spare a hypothetical recipient and the misinformation burden it would impose. Reconciling both sources preserved greater estimated task-state utility than either the user report or telemetry alone. Relative to a direct end-to-end LLM given the same inputs, structured reconciliation maintained comparable estimated utility while incurring substantially less misinformation, and task-aware rendering retained utility more efficiently (per token) than exhaustive rendering. An exploratory content analysis further shows that human reports contain substantial strategic knowledge that lies outside state-focused metrics. These results support provenance-aware state reconciliation as a design pattern for safer AI-assisted handover.
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All authors Kayleigh Bishop, Maria P. Stull, Breanne Crockett, Bradley Hayes

Human-Computer Interaction · Cross-listed from cs.SE

FlowCheck: Helping End-Users Specify and Verify Intent in Vibe-Coded Web Apps

Vibe-coded applications often contain silent behavioral failures in which the interface appears functional even though user-visible information does not flow to the expected state or output. We introduce FlowCheck, a constraint language to specify these user-visible information flows directly through the application interface, where constraints can also be displayed and inspected without reading code, and are structured enough for reliable LLM generation. FlowCheck translates the constraints into deterministic CodeQL analyses, and we evaluate it across four applications generated via Claude Code, and compare with three coding models as bug-finding baselines. We find that FlowCheck correctly translates and flags all 30 of our injected constraint violations with no false positives. In contrast, frontier models (Claude Opus 4.7, DeepSeek V3, and Gemini Pro) showed significantly lower accuracy when prompted to find bugs in the same code, with none achieving full accuracy. This approach lets vibe coders state intent in terms of the interface they understand, and checks it deterministically against the code they do not.
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All authors Reya Vir, Lydia Chilton, Zhuo Zhang, Eugene Wu

Human-Computer Interaction

Toward Postural State Classification in Immersive VR with Multimodal Data and Explainability Analysis

Ensuring a safe virtual reality (VR) experience requires systems that can predict and respond when users lose their balance. Although prior work has examined fall prediction and motion sickness, many approaches are regression-based and postural state classification remains less explored. This study compares machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models for classifying postural states in VR under visual perturbations. We used a multimodal dataset containing kinematic, electromyographic (EMG), and electrodermal activity (EDA) signals. The data were prepared for a binary task to distinguish balanced from imbalanced postural states, and participant-wise downsampling addressed class imbalance. All models were evaluated with Leave-One-Participant-Out (LOPO) cross-validation to test generalization to unseen participants. Among the models, the Mamba-inspired CNN (MI-CNN) achieved the highest accuracy of 96.76%. SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) analysis improved interpretability and identified the most influential classification factors. The SHAP results showed that kinematic features were dominant, indicating that body-motion patterns are informative for detecting imbalance in VR. We also evaluated MI-CNN using only the top two-thirds of features ranked by SHAP importance. Despite a 33% reduction in input dimensionality, the model maintained performance, achieving 0.957 accuracy and 0.957 F1-score, with about a 1% decrease compared with the full-feature model. These findings suggest that multimodal sensing, temporal deep learning, and explainable AI can support reliable classification of balance-related instability in VR. Accurate recognition of imbalanced postural states may raise awareness of fall risk and guide safer, adaptive VR systems that respond to instability while improving user safety and experience. Code is available at: https://github.com/NipaAnjum/MI-CNN.
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All authors Nipa Anjum, Md Irfan Pavel, Robert Gonzalez Jr, Kevin Desai, Alberto Cordova, M. Rasel Mahmud, John Quarles

Human-Computer Interaction

Delegating Before Learning: Where Generative AI Sits in Students' Professional Communication

We conducted an interview study with twelve students on their use of generative AI in academic communication. Students delegated professional messages to AI most where the pressure to sound professional is highest: email to instructors and administrators. AI involvement ranged from correcting the writer's own text to working out and writing the message outright, and students checked AI-written text against two criteria: whether it looks like AI and whether it sounds like them. Building on these findings, we model the AI-mediated process of writing a student–instructor email at the highest level of involvement we observed, and compare it with an unaided model of writing the same messages, built from participants' accounts and a classic model of the writing process. Three differences emerge: the learning loop that builds writing skill is removed, the message is no longer written for its specific recipient, and the confidence a successful exchange returns goes to using the system rather than to the writer's own ability. From these differences we derive two risks, that individual capacities never form and that authenticity and trust in communication become work. Design can respond to both but is unlikely to be enough, so the risks also need research and policy attention.
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