Peer Revenue Publish or profit

Papers

Fresh from arXiv, typeset properly. Highlighted words trade on the market.

Computer Science Human-Computer Interaction

cs.HC Watch Human-Computer Interaction (sign in to use)

Friday 2 October

Human-Computer Interaction

A study on human-agent teaming through spoken interaction: the impact of human individual traits and agent characteristics

Human-agent teams are collaborative systems where humans and agents work interdependently to achieve shared goals. The success of such teams is associated with the human's perception of the agent as a legitimate teammate. This perception is thought to depend not only on the agent's capabilities and reliability but also on social factors. We explore whether simple changes in an agent's communicative behavior can influence the human's perception of the agent's teammate-likeness. To this end, we developed a protocol based on a collaborative game requiring spoken interaction, in which a human subject and a virtual agent collaborate to identify a target object and place it on a board. Each subject interacted with two agents which provided the same task-relevant information but differed in behavior. While one was a neutral tool-like agent, the other was a team-building agent that used simple social strategies such as empathy, politeness, and positivity. Our analysis shows that the team-building agent was perceived as significantly more teammate-like, even in terms of its ability, despite both agents having identical capabilities for game-solving. Further, subjects with a higher propensity to trust automated systems and lower neuroticism tended to have a more favorable perception of the agent. Finally, we found that subjects tended to change their prosodic patterns when talking to the team-building agent, as a classifier based on prosodic features was able to predict the type of agent with better-than-random performance. A practically relevant conclusion is that minimal changes in spoken communication behavior of the agent, easily implemented in a variety of scenarios, can have a significant positive impact on the human's perception of its teammate-likeness.
Read the full abstract

All authors Lara Gauder, Martin Bernardo Meza, Javier Krick, Alejandro Masin, Luciana Benotti, Marcos Luis Pietto, Luciana Ferrer

Human-Computer Interaction

Assessing Acceptance and Privacy Preferences of Third-party Financial Data Sharing in Bipolar Disorder

Bipolar disorder is strongly associated with financial instability. We examine how different interventions motivate individuals with bipolar disorder to share financial data with others. This approach can inform the development of tools for digital monitoring and intervention designed to promote financial stability in this population. 500 individuals with BD completed a pre-registered factorial vignette survey to examine level of comfort with hypothetical scenarios involving third-party financial interventions during symptomatic and euthymic periods. Scenario components were systematically varied between third-party actors, mood states, and intervention types. Participants rated sharing comfort on a 0-10 point scale. Multilevel models tested differences alongside clinical and financial histories, relational trust, and personality. Participants were most comfortable involving care partners in financial planning. They were more comfortable with temporary spending restrictions during symptomatic states than euthymic periods, underscoring the importance of accurate mood detection for intervention delivery. Prior financial help-seeking behavior and higher relational trust predicted greater comfort. Bankruptcy experience — declared by 11.4% and considered by 31.7% — was associated with increased comfort with spending restrictions. Individuals with psychiatric advance directives (8%) were significantly more comfortable sharing spending behaviors than those without. Comfort with financial interventions was higher among those with prior financial challenges or help-seeking histories. Participants distinguished between symptomatic and euthymic periods, favoring targeted, time-limited restrictions over general monitoring. These findings extend prior work on financial data sharing for illness self-management.
Read the full abstract

All authors Jeff Brozena, Johnna Blair, Dahlia Mukherjee, Erika F. H. Saunders, Thomas Richardson, Mark Matthews, Saeed Abdullah

Human-Computer Interaction

viaCross: A Pen-Based Technique for Selecting Objects and Attributes of Interest using Crossing-Based Gestures

Crossing-based selection is well-studied, yet past research has overlooked multi-object and attribute selection with crossing gestures. We present viaCross, a pen-based technique in which crossing strokes define attribute constraints, paired with attribute widgets that visualize and allow subsequent edits to these constraints. A controlled study compared viaCross with traditional WIMP filter panels. Results show that viaCross was more efficient for complex object-level selections, requiring fewer strokes and maintaining efficiency as task difficulty increased. WIMP panels were faster and more intuitive for simple attribute-based selections, but participants encountered repeated deselections and occasional misclicks. viaCross matched panel performance for creating attribute selections but was slower during refinement, as widgets had to be recreated, indicating the need for persistent widgets or hybrid support with a WIMP-style interface. Overall, viaCross demonstrates that crossing-based gestures can provide an efficient and scalable approach to multi-object and attribute selection.
Read the full abstract

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

Govern, Map, Measure, Absorb: The Legibility Trap in Public Sector Participatory AI Governance

Public sector agencies have adopted participatory design as a prominent procedural safeguard proposed against algorithmic harm. Across methods, institutional contexts, and well-intentioned implementations, the participation gap persists. Communities engage, input is documented, and systems are deployed largely unchanged. This paper locates the persistence of that gap in the mechanism institutions use to document participation itself. We develop the concept of the legibility trap, in which institutional mechanisms for documenting participation systematically select for forms of community input that fit institutional categories and filter out the forms that would most constrain state power, including foundational dissent, demands for non-deployment, and what Kelly Oliver calls witnessing to structural conditions of harm. Drawing on James Scott's theory of state simplification, we demonstrate the legibility trap through critical discourse analysis of twenty-two official, community-produced, and public-record documents across three public sector AI deployments: the Allegheny Family Screening Tool, Detroit Project Green Light, and the Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS) ordinances in Oakland. We identify the structural conditions under which participation partially escapes the trap, and we theorize that repeated non-response constitutes a harm to community subjectivity that AI ethics frameworks have not yet named.
Read the full abstract

Human-Computer Interaction

Interactive Machine Learning Interfaces for Disease Risk Prediction: Effects on Risk Perception and Behaviour

Machine learning risk models are increasingly being used in patient-facing health tools, but it remains unclear how well users understand the information these systems present. In this work, we study how people interpret an interactive Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) risk interface and whether interacting with it influences their attitudes toward behavioural change. Through an exploratory mixed-methods study with 15 participants, we compare participants' perceived understanding with their actual understanding and identify key themes from qualitative interviews. We find that participants often understood the interface better than they initially believed, but still faced important barriers related to unclear terminology, ambiguous risk framing, and limited explanations of model inputs. Finally, we propose relevant design guidelines and discuss broader issues surrounding trust and fairness. Our findings highlight the importance of intuitive visual design, familiar presentation, and clear explanations in patient-facing ML interfaces.
Read the full abstract

All authors Tiffany Ngai, Max Homm, Matthew Bradbury, Anamaria Crisan

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

Harmonic Eigenspace: A Web-based Application for Navigating and Composing Microtonal Harmony

This paper presents a web-based application for navigating and composing microtonal harmony, built on the Harmonic Eigenspace, a four-dimensional psychoacoustically grounded space in which tetrad chord types are located by their spectral dissonance profiles, computed with Sethares's roughness/dissonance model. The coordinate system is transposition-invariant: a coordinate triple ({\alpha}, e̱ta}, {\gamma}) locates the three upper notes in relation to the root, so a chord quality corresponds to a direction in the space, the invariant ray along which transposition acts, while the root frequency sets the scale. The dissonance field over these coordinates can be computed at any register; the locations of its local minima are register-invariant, as they arise from partial-coincidence ratio conditions. The dissonance volume contains 100 local minima that align with just-intonation intervals and act as landmarks, organising the space into basins around the most consonant tetrads. We embed tetrads from three tonal equal temperaments as discrete lattices within this continuous volume. The application presents this space through two components: the Harmonic Eigenspace as a navigable 3D visualisation of the dissonance volume in which all nodes are playable, and a Modal Studio that extends modal interchange logic to the ten-gradation interval vocabulary of 53-TET. The application also functions as a MIDI controller with MIDI Polyphonic Expression support, usable in any digital audio workstation that supports this format. A listening study with 31 participants used both scenes of the application: listeners first rated isolated 53-TET chords alongside chords familiar from Western practice, such as the maj7 and the m7; they then rated chord progressions composed in the Modal Studio, measuring their acceptance or rejection of microtonal progressions heard for the first time.
Read the full abstract

Human-Computer Interaction

Seeing through the Eyes of AI: Situated Explainability in Augmented Reality

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (AI) enables humans to understand and interpret decisions of AI models. Instead of having a black box, explainability supports humans in understanding AI models' behavior. Existing explainable AI approaches often present explanations on 2D displays using pre-recorded data, requiring users to relate the displayed information back to the physical objects and real world locations involved in a model's decision. Users are forced to decouple data exploration and capture from AI model interpretation. For AI systems that work within physical environments, this separation can make explanations difficult to interpret in context. We propose using Augmented Reality (AR) to enhance the understanding of AI models by enabling spatial explainability information directly in a user's workspace, in real time, as they explore the world. We show how known explainability methods can be applied in AR and provide insights into user experiences with such an application.
Read the full abstract

All authors Ana Stanescu, Lucchas Ribeiro Skreinig, Tobias Langlotz, Stefanie Zollmann, Peter Mohr, Dieter Schmalstieg, Mark Billinghurst, Denis Kalkofen

Human-Computer Interaction

The Effects of Air-Conditioning and Road-Traffic Noise on Perceived, Cognitive, and EEG Responses in a University Classroom

Air-conditioning and road-traffic noise are common in classrooms, and their effects are often judged by cognitive performance. However, a sound that leaves performance unchanged may still be perceived differently or alter brain activity. In a within-participant design, this study tested whether perceived, cognitive, and EEG responses are consistent, and whether perceived and EEG responses distinguish conditions that performance does not. Sixteen students completed cognitive tasks in a university classroom under air-conditioning and road-traffic noise, each played back at 55, 60, and 65 dBA. Participants rated acoustic appraisal and perceived workload after each condition, and EEG was recorded during the tasks. The results show that cognitive performance did not differ significantly between conditions in any task. By contrast, noise was rated louder, less pleasant, and more arousing than a no-noise control, and all three ratings varied with sound level; perceived workload was also higher under noise. Task-period EEG power also showed significant differences between sources or levels in specific tasks and scalp regions. Within participants, relative EEG band power covaried mainly with loudness and pleasantness; louder and less pleasant ratings coincided with higher relative theta and lower relative gamma power. Associations with arousal and performance were rare, and none were found for workload. The three response types were thus only partly consistent, and perceived responses and EEG distinguished conditions that performance did not. Non-significant performance differences do not mean the conditions were equivalent for students. Assessments of air-conditioning and road-traffic noise in classrooms should therefore consider perceived responses alongside cognitive performance, with EEG providing complementary information on neural activity during tasks.
Read the full abstract

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

TSGuard: A Real-Time Framework for Detecting and Imputing Missing Data in Streaming Time Series

Streaming sensor applications routinely suffer from delayed or missing observations caused by faults, communication losses, or environmental interference. Although recent imputation methods exploit temporal and spatial dependencies effectively, most either assume offline access to future observations or prioritize throughput without enforcing domain plausibility. We present TSGuard, a real-time demonstration system for monitoring, validating, and imputing missing values in streaming time series. TSGuard combines a lightweight graph-aware temporal imputation model with constraint-aware validation, fallback estimation, and operator-facing explanations. Rather than treating imputation as an isolated prediction task, TSGuard integrates it into a broader data-quality loop: detect problematic observations, impute missing values, validate estimated against physical and spatial constraints, and either retain the original value as a plausible anomaly or replace it when it violates domain constraints. Using environmental sensing as a motivating setting, the demo enables users to inspect delayed sensors, compare imputers, define constraints, and validate flagged values in real time. The combination of lightweight online spatiotemporal imputation, domain-aware validation, and explicit retain-or-replace decisions is our central contribution, while interactive explanations make these decisions inspectable and actionable. for operators.
Read the full abstract

All authors Imane Hocine, Asma Abboura, Soror Sahri, Abhijith Senthilkumar, Yacine Hakimi, Grégoire Danoy

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

A Benchmark for Spatially Grounded Gesture Generation

Communication in shared space interweaves verbal and non-verbal signals, and pointing gestures anchor language to the environment: "put the cup on that one" is uninterpretable without the gesture that fixes the referent. Yet no common framework exists for evaluating whether generated gestures indicate their intended referent; distributional metrics reward a gesture aimed at the wrong object as long as it looks natural. We introduce a benchmark for spatially grounded gesture generation, comprising ~2K pointing-annotated clips from naturalistic VR dialogue with ground-truth 3D referents, a task in which systems must decide when, how and where to point within conversational speech, and a protocol that separates temporal alignment, spatial grounding and perceived naturalness. We also provide a flow-matching baseline, MM-Conv-Flow. Evaluating it alongside an independent retrieval-based system and captured human motion, we find that geometric grounding can exceed that of human pointing without any gain in perceived naturalness, showing that referential gesture quality must be measured along separate dimensions.
Read the full abstract

All authors Anna Deichler, Rishabh Dabral, Fethiye Irmak Dogan, Anindita Ghosh, Jonas Beskow

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

Personalized Automatic Speech Recognition for a Dysarthric and Tracheostomic Speaker using Artificial Conversations

This work presents an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system personalized for a Czech speaker with a permanent tracheal stoma and severe dysarthria rendering their speech unintelligible to untrained listeners. We release a public dataset containing 33 annotated hours of the speaker's speech, collected using a novel "artificial conversation" protocol designed for high engagement and dialogue realism. We propose a multi-stage training pipeline based on Whisper Base: fine-tuning on standard Czech speech, acoustically simulated tracheostomic speech, and the speaker's data. We evaluate the system across three near real-time scenarios: scripted conversations, question answering, and spontaneous dialogue, achieving a 50% relative reduction in Character Error Rate compared to Whisper Base baseline and surpassing the average recognition accuracy of their assistants in acoustic recognition of isolated utterances. We demonstrate that even for severely impeded speech, a helpful ASR is achievable, as evidenced by the quantitative results and the feedback from the speaker.
Read the full abstract

All authors David Nadrchal, Monorama Swain, Florian Schmid, Gerhard Widmer, Paul Primus

Human-Computer Interaction

Tracking Human Daily Cognitive Activity from EEG and Biometric Data

Understanding human cognitive activity in everyday life remains challenging due to the dynamic, context-dependent, and multimodal nature of cognition. Laboratory-based studies often fail to capture real-world cognitive processes, while single-modality approaches provide only partial insight into cognitive states. Advances in wearable sensing now enable the collection of heterogeneous data streams for a more comprehensive view of daily cognition. This paper presents a multimodal framework for tracking human cognitive activity using electroencephalography (EEG), wearable physiological signals, behavioral context, and self-reported measures. A preliminary pilot study was conducted with observational data from three participants (N = 3) over 280 annotated 10-minute intervals spanning nine activity domains across two weeks. Results reveal consistent temporal patterns, including a discernible mid-day decrease in motivation and energy at 13:00, followed by afternoon recovery. Work and IADLs yielded the highest flow state rates (51% and 50%), while ADLs produced the lowest (15%). Motivation correlated strongly with arousal (r = 0.78) and attention (r = 0.74), whereas perceived stress showed a weaker negative relationship (r = -0.33). A linear regression model predicting motivation from arousal, attention, energy, and stress achieved R2 = 0.76 (MAE = 9.84, RMSE = 12.85). Lag-based analysis indicates that prior energy levels positively predict subsequent motivation, confirming temporal dependencies in cognitive dynamics. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of multimodal cognitive activity analysis in real-world environments and highlight the importance of integrating physiological and behavioral indicators. The proposed framework provides a foundation for future large-scale multimodal systems and applied intelligent solutions.
Read the full abstract

Human-Computer Interaction

Co-Designing AI For Mental Health Support With Young Adults of Color (YOC): Needs, Expectations, and Implications for AI Literacy

Young adults of color (YOC) face heightened mental health challenges and barriers to care while navigating developmental and life transitions. Situated between youth-oriented safeguards and adult-oriented AI systems, little is known about how they use AI chatbots for mental health and well-being support or how sociocultural contexts shape their expectations, concerns, and design preferences. We conducted a two-day co-design workshop with 13 Asian, Black, and Hispanic/Latino/a young adults aged 18–24. Participants found generic chatbot advice to flatten their lived experiences; rather than making incorrect assumptions, they wanted more opportunities for identity-informed disclosure. Preferences for YOC-centered personalization also revealed gaps in privacy and AI literacy. Participants negotiated different therapeutic roles for chatbots and sought greater AI accountability and user agency, highlighting blurred boundaries between clinical and non-clinical AI-mediated support. Findings suggest directions for integrating AI literacy with mental health literacy and centering YOC's experiences in the privacy calculus.
Read the full abstract

All authors Elaine Dabin Jeon, John Bosco S. Bunyi, Hannah Kim, Renkai Ma, Yaman Yu, Michal Luria, Jason Yip, Alexis Hiniker, Katie Davis, Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang

Human-Computer Interaction

Characterizing the Performance Gap in Human Activity Recognition for Older Adults

Human activity recognition (HAR) from wrist-worn accelerometers is increasingly used for health and behavioral tracking. Yet, most wearable HAR models are developed and evaluated on datasets dominated by younger adults, leaving it unclear whether benchmark progress generalizes across age groups. In this work, we leverage MyMove, our carefully annotated, free-living older-adult HAR dataset (mean age 71), to evaluate deep-learning architectures and training regimes under both leave-one-subject-out and cross-dataset transfer. We find that improvements on younger-adult benchmarks fail to transfer equally to data collected from older adults, resulting in a persistent and often widening performance gap. However, richer representations, particularly frozen self-supervised features pretrained on the age-diverse UK Biobank dataset, substantially improve performance on data from older adults and consistently narrow the performance gap, at modest cost to younger-adult performance, though disparities remain. These findings suggest that benchmark gains and architectural scaling alone provide an incomplete picture of progress in wearable HAR, and broader advances may require representations that better capture population diversity, alongside personalized adaptation to individual movement patterns and routines.
Read the full abstract

All authors Hossein Khayami, Sungjin Hwang, Eshed Ohn-Bar, David E. Conroy, Amanda Lazar, Eun Kyoung Choe, Hernisa Kacorri

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

LearnAdapt Praxis: Controlled AI Assistance and Evidence Traces for Adult Workplace Learning

AI can help adults produce plausible workplace artefacts while leaving their independent reasoning difficult to inspect. LearnAdapt Praxis addresses this design problem through a five-stage learning workspace: Frame, Learn, Build, Validate and Transfer. The application stores an initial response, versioned specifications, coaching records, validation observations, a separate transfer response and facilitator feedback. Project-level server controls restrict coaching, access to earlier work and learner export during an active transfer attempt; they do not establish that a learner avoided assistance outside the application. This technical report describes the implemented architecture and evaluates selected workflow, authority, failure-recovery and provenance properties. A reproducible synthetic rehearsal exercised 120 serial project episodes across three fictional workplace contexts and four injected provider conditions. All 3,990 recorded checks met their specified expectations. The resulting records contained 240 specification versions, 1,200 activity events and 60 stored synthetic hints; 60 injected provider failures produced no fabricated hints. Separate authentication regressions exposed and resolved a session-expiry defect, and limited staging and production checks verified account access and live model connectivity. The evidence supports the tested engineering properties of the recorded release. It does not establish learning gains, model-output quality, unaided assessment validity, population usability or production capacity. The contribution is an implemented arrangement for separating assisted work, project-level assistance withdrawal and inspectable evidence, accompanied by executable tests and an explicit account of what remains to be validated with adult learners.
Read the full abstract

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

Lessons from Trauma-Informed Training on Technology-Facilitated Abuse for Gender-Based Violence Advocates

Technology-facilitated abuse (TFA) is an emerging gendered public health crisis affecting millions of people across the globe. TFA coincides with other forms of gender-based violence (GBV), such as emotional, psychological, and physical abuse by an intimate partner. Survivors often seek support from GBV advocates who specialize in helping survivors navigate abusive situations and potential pathways for healing and remediation. With the rise in TFA, however, survivors and GBV advocates experience barriers and gaps in knowledge in identifying and mitigating this newer, ever-evolving form of abuse. To address this, we developed trauma-informed training as a critical capacity-building intervention to improve GBV advocates' knowledge and skills for responding to survivors and to encourage multi-stakeholder collaboration toward a structural response. We facilitated 8 training workshops at local, state, and national US-based GBV organizations. Our study demonstrates that the trainings increased advocates' perceived understanding of TFA abuse vectors and their impacts on survivors, along with advocates' confidence in providing support, safety planning, and referrals through collaboration with community stakeholders. We then conducted retrospective reflections through autoethnography to surface key lessons, contestations, and tensions that emerged from our experiences in designing and coordinating trainings with host GBV organizations. Our analysis of autoethnographic notes revealed three key design decisions: coordinating logistics flexibly, reducing reflexive distance from host organizations and attendees, and using our field experience to tailor content for accessibility. We contribute a concrete checklist to guide future HCI scholars in conducting training interventions for stakeholders in high-stakes contexts.
Read the full abstract

All authors Naman Gupta, Connie W. Chau, Sophie Stephenson, Kate Walsh, Rahul Chatterjee

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

DataWeave: Deploying Human-LLM Analytics for Exploratory Structured Data Analysis

Data journalism, the practice of using data analysis to surface newsworthy stories, depends increasingly on the ability of reporters and investigative journalists to uncover trends, disparities, and accountability narratives. In practice, exploring large structured datasets remains slow and brittle: journalists must navigate hundreds of variables across many datasets over years, understand data coding conventions, and write non-trivial analysis code while hypotheses evolve. Although LLMs are often touted as "ask in English, get SQL/answers," real newsroom workflows expose recurring failures, e.g., schema mismatches and drift, misread domain semantics and units, and silent assumptions. We present DataWeave, a system that addresses these needs by combining conversational interaction, schema grounding, analytical planning, and executable query generation to support exploratory analysis over structured data. Rather than treating LLMs as autonomous answer engines, DataWeave frames them as interactive partners whose outputs can be inspected, corrected, and steered as hypotheses shift. We present a case study with professional journalists using our system to analyze the U.S. Department of Education's Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), a high-stakes public dataset with substantial domain semantics and frequent schema updates. We also report how deployment experience and iterative refinement shaped the current DataWeave architecture and its analytical workflow. Our findings distill design principles and deployment lessons for trustworthy human-LLM collaboration in structured data analysis.
Read the full abstract

All authors Raquib Bin Yousuf, Harith Laxman, Vitaliy Shkremetko, Eunice Son, Shambhavi Verma, Brian O'Leary, Venketesh Subramony, Sylvain Nazef, Jacquelyn Elias, Ron Coddington, Chris Contakes, Michael Riley, Naren Ramakrishnan

Human-Computer Interaction

Asterism: Exploring and Synthesizing Scattered Observations into Literature-Grounded Hypotheses and Theories

A theory draws many independent observations into one framework with novel hypotheses. A researcher building such a theory must synthesize observations scattered across many papers, each describing related concepts but often in different terms. Which concepts matter most also depends on their preferences and research questions. Recent approaches scale theory synthesis with LLMs, but automate away choices and intuitions from researchers. We present Asterism, which extracts observations from hundreds of papers as concept-relation triples, with concepts unified in a hierarchical ontology. Researchers curate an evidence graph using the ontology and aggregate observations at different levels of granularity to focus theory formation on specific phenomena of interest. In a field deployment (n=10), researchers worked from observations to theories, and kept concepts and hypotheses fitting their preferences. In two case studies, teams of immunology and agriculture researchers discovered mechanisms outside their standard analyses and constructed hypotheses worth follow-up experiments.
Read the full abstract

All authors Joseph Chee Chang, Michael D'Arcy, Amy X. Zhang, Pao Siangliulue, Sangho Suh, Aakanksha Naik, Jena D. Hwang, Javier Ramos Benitez, Stella Wroblewski, Matt Latzke, Michael Cuoco, Ruben Lozano-Aguilera, Kris Ganjam, Joel Chan, Doug Downey, Peter Jansen, Kyle J. Travaglini, Daniel S. Weld

Thursday 1 October

Human-Computer Interaction

Designing Adaptive Affective Chatbots for Online Learning: Trade-offs Between User Control, Automation, and Transparency

Online students often face emotional challenges such as frustration, isolation, and fluctuating motivation, which can hinder sustained engagement in online learning. While affective chatbots have shown promise in healthcare and wellness, most learning support chatbots focus primarily on cognitive assistance with limited attention to learners' emotional and motivational experiences. In this work, we investigate how adaptive affective chatbot support can be designed for online learning through an iterative design process. Through a mixed-methods needfinding study (n=38), we identified substantial variation in how learners respond to affective support, with no single strategy universally preferred. This led us to develop three adaptive design alternatives: user-controlled, AI-driven, and hybrid co-controlled adaptation, and examine key trade-offs between automation, transparency, and user control. A final evaluation (n=25) showed that 88% of participants favored the adaptive hybrid design over a non-adaptive alternative, highlighting the value of balancing transparency, user control, and interaction simplicity. We discuss design implications for adaptive affective chatbot systems in emotionally challenging online learning contexts.
Read the full abstract

Human-Computer Interaction

Effects of a Behavioural Commitment Scheme on Study Regularity in a Self-Paced Learning Platform

Online education has enabled learners worldwide to take up courses from reputed institutions. However, a self-paced online course cannot guarantee the motivation and engagement that a learner experiences in a real-time classroom. Self-paced access also makes platform load unpredictable, which drives up the compute cost. We propose a Commitment Scheme for course access that aligns learner commitment with platform capacity. Learners book their study slots in advance; the instructor sets the budget of learning hours available for the course; and learners who use a full window earn additional watch hours. A booked window records an intention to study at a stated time, and a learner who appears in that window implements it. The byproduct is a platform load that can be forecast and bounded. The study involved two courses taken in sequence by the same learners, with the slot booking system activated only in the second. In-window study was observed on 86.8% of booked windows, and the median committer placed 95.5% of all study time inside self-booked windows. Among learners who studied across the launch, study regularity improved from 1.01 to 1.33 active days per week, with a supporting difference of +1.37 days per week against the same learners' preceding course. Commitments made on the same day as the study slot were honoured more often than advance bookings (88.8% against 62.5% two days ahead), which is consistent with the classic intention-behaviour gap.
Read the full abstract

All authors Meenakshi V., Pavani Ayinampudi, Aditya B. M. V., Jinal Gupta, Prakash Hegade, Rohit Sharma, Sakshi Sharma, S. R. S. Iyengar

Human-Computer Interaction

Santiago's A.T. Field: Visualizing Urban Accessibility through an Evangelion-Inspired Interface

Science-fiction interfaces are often reproduced for their appearance, and their diagnostic logic is rarely rebuilt around real data. Here we describe Santiago's A.T. Field, an interactive visualization of urban accessibility built from a diagnostic interface in Episode 13 of Neon Genesis Evangelion. We translated that interface in five stages: phenomenon, field, progression, interface, and response. A microscopic Angel became a relational urban problem, and a fictional scanning lattice became an accessibility field computed with the E2SFCA method. Every element of the fictional display is tied to a quantity of the model. Three tensions appeared when we made the fictional language operational: the saturated palette of the genre against color-vision deficiency, the motion of the genre against the reduced-motion preference, and the per-frame cost of the animation. The urgency of the fictional command center has its own cost, because emergency aesthetics can cast urban populations as threats. These three tensions are what the translation cost, and they are what transfers to other attempts of this kind.
Read the full abstract

Human-Computer Interaction

Connectedness, Cognitive Load, and Human-AI Oversight in Cyber Operations

AI-assisted cyber situational awareness triggers machine-generated reasoning traces (step-by-step justifications for anomaly classifications) that a human operator is expected to review. Because cyber signals and their traces arrive faster than any operator can process, human review is the limiting constraint on oversight. The standard approach is to identify the riskiest cyber events for review using model-side signals such as confidence or uncertainty. That framing ignores the operator's cognitive capacity which varies sharply with the operational environment. We propose an alternative where the system's environmental and connectivity telemetry serves as an available, non-invasive proxy for operator load. That same telemetry determines whether the human-AI partnership can reach the broader collective for support. In a maritime platform, environmental and connectivity attributes including depth, number of active communications paths, density of the tracked contact picture, and operational tempo all carry this signal. Need for operator oversight becomes a decision that materializes as a combination of both risk and environment-derived operator capacity. We present a reference architecture for a connectedness-aware oversight engine, demonstrating everyday use cases alongside its intended incorporation into the submarine cyber-defense toolkit. Two themes emerge: 1) the operator's environmental state is itself a connectedness measurement, and 2) connectedness drives the cognitive load and defines a collective boundary in human-AI cyber operations.
Read the full abstract

Human-Computer Interaction

"I'm trying not to get hacked:" How Adults with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Navigate Security and Privacy Notifications

Security and privacy notifications, such as login alerts, spam email warnings, and cookie consent requests, play a critical role in shaping users' responses to digital risks. Yet most notifications overlook cognitive accessibility, limiting their effectiveness for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). We investigate how adults with IDD perceive and respond to common security and privacy notifications across mobile and web applications. Through a formative user study with seven adults with IDD, we identify three factors shaping understanding and decision-making: (1) interpretation is influenced by task and interface context; (2) unfamiliar terms, both technical and non-technical, are grounded in everyday concepts; and (3) uncertainty about outcomes leads to hesitation, avoidance, diagnostic exploration, or support-seeking. These findings lead to three design implications: (1) address context-dependent language misunderstandings beyond jargon simplification; (2) make action-outcome connections transparent; and (3) enable interdependent decision-making. Together, these insights aim to inform the design of more cognitively accessible security and privacy notifications that better support safe and supported user action.
Read the full abstract

All authors Hailey L. Johnson, Julia Nonnenkamp, Bilge Mutlu, Rahul Chatterjee

Human-Computer Interaction

Automating the Application of HCI Principles: Skills for On-Demand UI Construction, the Human-AI Space to Think, and the Future of HCI

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is in the middle of a transition: large language models can now generate functional user interfaces (UIs) on demand from natural-language task descriptions. A user explains what they are trying to accomplish, and the system materializes a working interface to support it. This capability already exists in systems such as Claude and ChatGPT and continues to grow in fidelity as the underlying models improve. The next step along this trajectory is to move from interfaces that are merely generated to interfaces that are generated well. We propose a framework in which the dialogue between user and artificial intelligence (AI) becomes a Space to Think: a shared, structured cognitive workspace in which task decomposition produces an on-demand user interface as an extension of the user's thinking rather than as a separate artifact. Within this paradigm, classical HCI design knowledge (Nielsen's heuristics, Norman's affordance prescriptions, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) success criteria, cognitive-load constraints, and mixed-initiative principles) is encoded as skills: machine-readable skill.md files that the generating agent loads at runtime as software engineering tools. Skills turn HCI design knowledge into declarative, inspectable, version-controlled, and editable artifacts owned by the HCI community itself so that accessibility, learnability, and consistency become properties of a generative process rather than properties of a finished product. We outline a research agenda depicting a future where the HCI field transitions from today's design and knowledge heuristic checklist towards a future where the craft becomes machine-readable, executable, and open.
Read the full abstract

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

One Basis to Animate Them All: Gaussian Blendshape Distillation for Real-Time Avatars

3D Gaussian avatars support fast rendering, however, their real-time animation is often challenged by the costly neural inference. We address this bottleneck and show that the animation of pretrained avatar models can be closely approximated by a linear combination of identity-independent blendshapes. Building on this finding, we introduce GALA (Gaussian Animation via Linear Approximation), a distillation method that replaces per-frame heavy neural decoding with a shallow coefficient predictor and a linear blend. To improve fidelity and reduce memory requirements, we propose to construct the basis using block-local PCA under a rendering-aware metric and a memory budget. Our method learns a shallow MLP network to predict blendshape coefficients and applies to various animation architectures without retraining original models. We validate GALA by accelerating the inference of three distinct avatar models for 3D animation of facial expressions and full-bodies with clothing dynamics. Across these models, our distillation generalizes to held-out identities and reduces CPU animation cost by up to three orders of magnitude while preserving most of the rendering quality. Excellent results of our method confirm the shared linear structure of learned avatar representations and enable highly efficient and accurate animation at frame rates reaching up to 60fps on mobile devices. Project page: https://ramazan793.github.io/gala/
Read the full abstract

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

Catscan: Visualizing Pipelines of CPU Performance Simulation

Processor pipeline visualization tools are routine inside industry CPU teams, but few of them are described or released publicly. As a result, students, researchers, and other practitioners rarely see the tooling that processor architects use to debug performance before silicon. This paper describes two pieces of Ampere Computing's performance- analysis infrastructure that we have released to the community as open source: event streams, a simulator-output format, and Catscan, an interactive viewer built around that format. Event streams record microarchitectural activity as typed events connected by transaction relationships, so a user can move between a symptom and the instruction, uop, or memory transaction that explains it. Catscan uses that structure to support resource- and transaction-oriented views, persistent highlighting, domain-specific search, comparative trace synchronization, and other workflows used during product development. In this paper we report the design choices that survived production use, the limitations we encountered, and the lessons we think are useful for future microarchitectural visualization tools.
Read the full abstract

All authors Aaron Lindsay, Nicholas Kelly, Scott Witscher, Mahesh Madhav

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

SPHERE: Adaptive VR Indoor Scene Generation via LLM-Enhanced Spatial Preference Learning and Human-in-the-Loop RL

While Large Language Models (LLMs) advance 3D indoor scene synthesis, current pipelines fail to retain user-specific preferences across sessions, making immersive authoring a repetitive and physically fatiguing process. We present SPHERE, an adaptive VR generation framework that transforms isolated synthesis into continuous human-AI co-creation. SPHERE extracts persistent spatial preferences from natural multimodal interactions (speech and controller edits). To ensure geometric resilience against spatial distortions, it abstracts these raw edits into hierarchical constraints modeling both local functional and global topological contexts. Furthermore, a human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning mechanism dynamically updates retrieval policies based on the user's final edited scenes. A mixed-design user study ($N=42$) and an offline ablation demonstrate that SPHERE significantly reduces corrective edits and physical demand, preventing bias toward shallow object-level traits to yield geometrically resilient, profile-aligned layouts. Ultimately, SPHERE demonstrates how capturing demonstrated spatial logic enables controlled spatial adaptation, establishing a reliable, governed human-AI collaboration framework for immersive authoring. Project page and source code will be available at: https://github.com/hyeonmin11/SPHERE
Read the full abstract

All authors Hyeonmin Lee, Zheng Wei, Kyungmin Kwon, Jumin Seo, Jiwon Park, Hayoung Oh

Human-Computer Interaction

XAI Evaluation Cards: A Practical Method for Designing Human-Centred XAI Evaluations

Evaluating explainable AI (XAI) systems from a human-centred approach requires researchers to select from numerous evaluation dimensions and measures, often in an ad hoc and fragmented manner. This paper introduces a method to help HCI, computer science, designers and social science researchers systematically evaluate XAI systems. The approach is based on an updated XAI-specific evaluation framework derived from an analysis of 82 studies. Using this framework, we developed a card-sorting method with 36 cards to help researchers prioritise relevant evaluation aspects. The process was tested with two research groups (n = 13) across five projects. The XAI Evaluation Cards are available as a printable appendix, along with an online repository of methods from previous XAI studies. Although not exhaustive, our findings indicate that the card-sorting approach can organise and streamline the design of the evaluation process, encouraging a more comprehensive and multidisciplinary assessment of XAI systems in research and development.
Read the full abstract

All authors Kristýna Sirka Kacafírková, Ivania Donoso-Guzmán, Denis Parra, Katrien Verbert, An Jacobs

Human-Computer Interaction · Cross-listed from eess.SY

Interactive Power Flow in the Browser

This paper introduces tellegen, an open source framework for interactive power flow (PF) and optimal power flow (OPF) studies that run in the browser. This provides intuitive and democratized access to power system analysis tools compiled to WebAssembly. A user can drag and drop a case file, click and drag to change a nodal demand or line rating, preview the impacts via sensitivity analysis, and obtain an exact re-solve on release. User case files and results stay entirely on the device: tellegen transmits zero Critical Energy/Electric Infrastructure Information (CEII). The framework comprises a core numerical engine for PF and OPF, reusable browser components, saved studies, and structured WebMCP tools for agentic interaction. We evaluate the transmission OPF solver by comparing objectives with PGLib baselines; the distribution PF solver by comparing voltages and currents with OpenDSS; and the WebAssembly execution times by comparing with PowerModels.jl. On realistic synthetic grids, WebAssembly OPF solves take only 25-43% longer than native binary solves. The implementation shows how an engineer can distribute an executable numerical study as a URL, reducing installation and hosting requirements while keeping case data local.
Read the full abstract

All authors Samuel Talkington, Frederik Geth, Qian Zhang, Le Xie, Skyler Liu

Human-Computer Interaction

Where LLMs Fail with Visualization DSLs

As LLMs take up the role of authoring charts using visualization domain-specific languages (DSLs), the human constraints that shaped those languages may no longer apply, as what is easy for a person is not necessarily easy for a model. To understand how LLMs might work better with DSLs, we explore where and how they fail with current DSL designs. We evaluate 10 JSON-style visualization DSLs with 41 tasks across 3 LLMs, then assess the generated specifications with JSON and rendering checks, and qualitative coding of failed cases. Analyzing how this specification generation process fails, we identify four recurring failure patterns, link each to specific DSL features, and discuss design considerations for future DSL designs.
Read the full abstract