Updates from Human Centered Design & Engineering faculty, PhD students, and research scientists.
Spring 2025
May 23, 2025
Shana Hirsch, with collaborators at the UW eDNA Collaborative and the Vashon Nature Center, received a grant award in the amount of $78,000 from the Green/Duwamish & Central Puget Sound Watershed (WRIA 9) for “Developing an eDNA based rapid assessment for juvenile chinook presence in small non-natal streams.” Of the total award, $53,506 will come to UW.
Murtaza Ali published “I Teach Data Viz with a Bag of Rocks” in towards data science.
Mark Haselkorn and Lynette Arias were quoted in the UW Daily article featuring the SECURE Center, “UW leads ongoing national research security effort backed by $50 million NSF grant.”
May 16, 2025
Emily Tseng, with co-authors Thomas Ristenpart and Nicola Dell, had an article, “Mitigating Trauma in Qualitative Research Infrastructure: Roles for Machine Assistance and Trauma-Informed Design” published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, CSCW.
Brett Halperin and collaborator Adam Hersko-RonaTas (Antennarosa Pictures) presented their work in progress, "The People v. Their Creation: Designing a Docu-Fiction Film," at the Data & Society workshop "What is Work Worth? Exploring What Generative AI Means for Workers’ Lives and Labor."
Samuel So was interviewed in the UW News article, “Q&A: UW researcher discusses the “cruel optimism” of tech industry layoffs.” Collaborators Sucheta Ghoshal, Sean Munson and Vannary Sou were mentioned. GeekWire published a related article, “‘Cruel optimism’: Mass layoffs take the shine off careers in the tech sector, UW research finds.” This work was also featured in UW Today.
Kate Starbird was featured in the Science article, “Trump’s ‘fear factor’: Scientists go silent as funding cuts escalate.”
Kate Starbird was interviewed by the Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) program, Think Out Loud: “What NSF funding cuts could mean for misinformation research at UW and across the country.”
May 9, 2025
McKane Andrus, Sucheta Ghoshal, and Sayamindu Dasgupta had an article, “From Data Activism to Activism in a Time of Data-Centrism: Affirming Epistemological Heterogeneity in Social Movements,” published in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.
Soobin Cho with co-authors JaeWon Kim, Robert Wolfe, Jishnu Hari Nair, and Alexis Hiniker had an article, “Privacy as Social Norm: Systematically Reducing Dysfunctional Privacy Concerns on Social Media,” published in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.
Jay Cunningham with co-authors Sheena Erete, Eric Corbett, Natasha Smith-Walker, Erin Gatz, Tina Park, Tam Perry, Lauren Wilcox, Remi Denton had an article, “Towards Equitable Community-Industry Collaborations: Understanding the Experiences of Nonprofits’ Collaborations with Tech Companies,” published in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.
Gary Hsieh with co-authors Anant Mittal, Tae Jones, Ravi Karkar, Jina Suh, Spencer Williams, Yihao Zheng, Lydia Andris, Nicole Bates, Amy Bauer, Ty Lostuter, Jesse Fann and James Fogarty, had an article, “SCOPE: Examining Technology-Enhanced Collaborative Care Management of Depression in the Cancer Setting,” published in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.
Joseph Schafer, Annie Denton, Chloe Seelhoff, Jordyn Vo, Lance Garcia, Isha Madan, Alisha Mudbhary, Ruijingya Tang, and Kate Starbird had an article, “'I Blow Up': Understanding TikTok Users' Reactions to Sudden Social Media Attention,” published in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.
Kate Starbird with co-authors Rachel Moran, Sukrit Venkatagiri, and Emma Spiro had an article, “Privacy versus Transparency: Navigating Public Records Requests and Adversarial Dynamics in a Distributed Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration,” published in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.
Kate Starbird contributed a book chapter, “Unraveling the Big Lie: Participatory Disinformation and the 2020 Election,” to Connective Action and the Rise of the Far-Right: Platforms, Politics, and the Crisis of Democracy.
Kate Starbird was mentioned in the Seattle Times opinion piece “Learn from Seattle's legacy of organized protest to make a difference.”
May 2, 2025
Tricia Aung, with collaborators Lesley Steinman, Najma Mohamed, Jacob Bentley, Roberto Orellana, KeliAnne Hara-Hubbard, and Farhiya Osman, received a UW Population Health Initiative Tier 2 Grant of $65,000 for “Pilot Study to Integrate Low-Barrier, Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Mental Health Care into Community-Based Social Services.”
Hyeonjeong Byeon was selected for the summer 2025 cohort of the UW Population Health Initiative’s Social Entrepreneurship Fellowship Program for the project “Virtual Study Assistant for Potential Research Participants.”
HCDE authors contributed to 36 research articles at the 2025 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25)! Included in the Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems are:
- Best Paper Award (selected as top 1% of submissions):
- Sean Munson with co-authors Richard Li, Philip Vutien, Sabrina Omer, Michael Yacoub, George Ioannou, Ravi Karkar, and James Fogarty: “Deploying and Examining Beacon for At-Home Patient Self-Monitoring With Critical Flicker Frequency”
- Best Paper Honorable Mentions (selected as top 5% of submissions):
- Blair Subbaraman and Nadya Peek with co-author Nathaneal Bursch: “It's Not the Shape, It's the Settings: Tools for Exploring, Documenting, and Sharing Physical Fabrication Parameters in 3D Printing”
- Sean Munson with co-authors Amira Skeggs, Ashish Mehta, Valerie Yap, Seray Ibrahim, Charla "Aubrey" Rhodes, James Gross, Predrag Klasnja, Amy Orben, and Petr Slovak: “Micro-Narratives: A Scalable Method for Eliciting Stories of People's Lived Experience”
- Sayan Bhattacharjee and David Ribes: “Technical Responses to Critique: The Case of Skin Tone”
- Joseph Schafer and Kate Starbird with co-authors Rachel Moran and Mert Bayar: “'The End of "Trust and Safety"?: Examining the Future of Content Moderation and Upheavals in Professional Online Safety Efforts”
- Priya Dhawka and Sayamindu Dasgupta: “The Social Construction of Visualizations: Practitioner Challenges and Experiences of Visualizing Race and Gender”
- Leah Findlater with co-authors Han Zhang, Rotem Shalev-Arkushin, Vasileios Baltatzis, Connor Gillis, Gierad Laput, Raja Kushalnagar, Lorna Quandt, Abdelkareem Bedri, and Colin Lea: “Towards AI-driven Sign Language Generation with Non-manual Markers”
- Brett Halperin and Daniela Rosner: “"AI Is Soulless": Hollywood Film Workers Strike and Emerging Perceptions of Generative Cinema”
- Kevin Feng and David W. McDonald with co-authors Q Vera Liao, Ziang Xiao, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, and Amy X Zhang: “Canvil: Designerly Adaptation for LLM-Powered User Experiences”
- Fumi Tsukiyama with co-authors Casey Lee Hunt, Kaiwen Sun, Zahra Dhuliawala, Allison Druin, Amanda Huynh, Daniel Leithinger, and Jason Yip: “Children Using Tabletop Telepresence Robots for Collaboration: A Longitudinal Case Study of Hybrid and Online Intergenerational Participatory Design”
- Amanda Chih-han Ong and Julie Kientz with co-authors Maitraye Das, Megan Tran and Heather Feldner: “Cultivating Computational Thinking and Social Play Among Neurodiverse Preschoolers in Inclusive Classrooms”
- Nisha Devasia with co-authors Runhua Zhao and Jin Ha Lee: “Does the Story Matter? Applying Narrative Theory to an Educational Misinformation Escape Room Game”
- Leah Findlater with co-authors Jocelyn Shen, Jennifer King Chen, and Griffin Dietz Smith: “eaSEL: Promoting Social-Emotional Learning and Parent-Child Interaction through AI-Mediated Content Consumption”
- Meghna Gupta with co-author Audrey Desjardins: “Echoes of Care: Unveiling the Intertwined Tensions Between Childcare Work and Voice Assistants”
- Murtaza Ali and Sayamindu Dasgupta: “"Even Though I Went Through Everything, I Didn't Feel Like I Learned a Lot": Insights From Experiences of Non-Computer Science Students Learning to Code”
- Aayushi Dangol, Hyewon Suh, and Julie Kientz, with co-authors Aaleyah Lewis, Abbie Olszewski, and James Fogarty: “Exploring AI-Based Support in Speech-Language Pathology for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Children”
- Brett Halperin with co-author Stephanie Lukin: “From Camera-Eye to AI: Exploring the Interplay of Cinematography and Computational Visual Storytelling”
- Aayushi Dangol, Hyewon Suh and Julie Kientz with co-authors Aaleyah Lewis, Xuesi Hong, Hedda Meadan, and James Fogarty: “"I Want to Think Like an SLP": A Design Exploration of AI-Supported Home Practice in Speech Therapy”
- Kevin Feng with co-authors Kevin Pu, Tovi Grossman, Tom Hope, Bhavana Dalvi Mishra, Matt Latzke, Jonathan Bragg, Joseph Chee Chang and Pao Siangliulue: “IdeaSynth: Iterative Research Idea Development Through Evolving and Composing Idea Facets With Literature-Grounded Feedback”
- Arpita B. with co-authors Phoebe Staab and Petr Slovak: “Identifying Opportunities and Envisioning Ecological Momentary Interoceptive Awareness Interventions With Young Women”
- Lucy Jiang with co-authors Sharon Heung, Shiri Azenkot, and Aditya Vashistha: “"Ignorance is not Bliss": Designing Personalized Moderation to Address Ableist Hate on Social Media”
- Ruiqi Chen with co-authors Ke Zhao, Xiaziyu Zhang, Chenxi Wang, Siling Chen, Xiaoguang Wang, Yujue Wang, and Xin Tong: “Immersive Biography: Supporting Intercultural Empathy and Understanding for Displaced Cultural Objects in Virtual Reality”
- Kiley Sobel and Julie Kientz with co-authors Maitraye Das and Sara Behbakht: “Incloodle-Classroom: Technology for Inclusive Joint Media Engagement in a Neurodiverse Kindergarten Classroom”
- Cayla Key with co-authors Cally Gatehouse, Stevie Koepp, and Nick Taylor: “Leaky Cups: Tinkering with Hydrofeminist Temporalities for HCI”
- Nina Lutz with co-authors Garrett Souza and Katlyn Turner: “Mediating the Marginal: A Quantitative Analysis of Curated LGBTQ+ Content on Instagram”
- Daniela Rosner with co-authors Nava Haghighi, Sunny Yu, and James Landay: “Ontologies in Design: How Imagining a Tree Reveals Possibilities and Assumptions in Large Language Models”
- Jiachen Tammy Yan with co-authors Qiuyue "Shirley" Xue, Dilini Nissanka, Ruiqing Wang, Shwetak Patel, and Vikram Iyer: “PPG Earring: Wireless Smart Earring for Heart Health Monitoring”
- Lucy Jiang with co-authors Woojin Ko, Shirley Yuan, Tanisha Shende, and Shiri Azenkot: “Shifting the Focus: Exploring Video Accessibility Strategies and Challenges for People With ADHD”
- Steven Goodman, Emma McDonnell, and Leah Findlater with co-author Jon Froehlich: “SPECTRA: Personalizable Sound Recognition for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Users Through Interactive Machine Learning”
- Brock Craft with co-authors Wyatt Olson, Freesoul El Shabazz-Thompson, Melanie Wells, Chuanzhe Xiong, Janey Yee, Julia Saimo, Ocean Vu, Jonathan Narita, Timea Tihanyi, and Audrey Desjardins: “Stills From the Inner Ear Shorts: Collecting and Living With Data”
- Samuel So, Sean Munson, and Sucheta Ghoshal with co-author Vannary Sou: “The Cruel Optimism of Tech Work: Tech Workers' Affective Attachments in the Aftermath of 2022-23 Tech Layoffs”
- Lubna Razaq and Sucheta Ghoshal: “The Role of ICTs in the Maintenance and Reproduction of Digital Border Assemblages”
- Julie Vera and Sourojit Ghosh: “"They've Over-Emphasized That One Search": Controlling Unwanted Content on TikTok's for You Page”
- Brett Halperin and Daniela Rosner with co-author Diana Flores Ruíz: “Underground AI? Critical Approaches to Generative Cinema through Amateur Filmmaking”
- Gina Clepper, Emma McDonnell, Leah Findlater, and Nadya Peek: “"What Would I Want to Make? Probably Everything": Practices and Speculations of Blind and Low Vision Tactile Graphics Creators”
- Sean Munson with co-authors Eleanor Burgess, David Mohr, and Madhu Reddy: “What's in Your Kit? Mental Health Technology Kits for Depression Self-Management”
HCDE authors also contributed works in progress & extended abstracts to be included in CHI EA '25: Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing System:
- Lucy Jiang with co-authors Amanda Zhu and Brett Oppegaard: “Audio Description Automatons: Exploring Perspectives on Personas for Generative AI Description Writing Assistants”
- Saumik Shashwat, Xiaoyi Xue, Zhe Yu, and Jonathan Aboky-Djanty: “common::ground: A Gamified Toolkit for Facilitating Meaningful Interactive Sessions”
- Sean Munson with co-authors Ignacio Avellino, Pei-Yi (Patricia) Kuo, Pin Sym Foong, Jason Wiese, Helena Mentis, James Wallace, Aneesha Singh, Andrew Miller, Daniel Epstein, and Francisco Nunes: “Envisioning the Future of Interactive Health”
- Sean Munson with co-authors Tae E. Jones and James Fogarty: ”Examining Researcher Experiences and Tensions Around Participant Engagement in Health HCI Research”
- Ruiqi Chen with co-authors Keyi Zeng, Jingyang Lin, RAY LC, Pan Hui, and Xin Tong: “Parental Perceptions of Children’s d/Deaf Identity Shaping Technology Use: A Qualitative Study on Communication Technologies in Mixed-hearing Families”
- Zixiao Wang with co-authors Haonan Nan, Yu Zhang, Xuantao Zhang, and Saixing Zeng: ”ResponSight: Explainable and Collaborative Moderation Approach for Responsible Video Content in UGC Platform”
- K. J. Kevin Feng and Emily Tseng with co-authors Rock Yuren Pang, Tzu-Sheng Kuo, Amy Winecoff, David Gray Widder, Harini Suresh, Katharina Reinecke, and Amy X. Zhang: “Sociotechnical AI Governance: Challenges and Opportunities for HCI”
- Daniela Rosner with co-authors Liza Gak, Isabel Li, and Niloufar Salehi: “’The world has changed...’ — Unlocking Teen Perspectives on Technological Futures through Design Fiction Workshops”
- Kelly Avery Mack with co-authors Shuxu Huffman, Si Chen, Haotian Su, Qi Wang, and Raja Kushalnagar: “"We do use it, but not how hearing people think": How the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Community Uses Large Language Model Tools”
Kate Starbird was quoted in the Science article “Trump’s team, often accused of spreading misinformation, slashes misinformation research.”
Cecilia Aragon was quoted in the KUOW article “Seattle crosswalk signals with deepfake Bezos audio may have been hacked with just a cellphone” and the related NPR All Things Considered segment “Pedestrians hear AI-generated messages from billionaires at hacked crosswalks.”
April 18, 2025
Katya Cherukumilli received an award from the UW Student Technology Fee Fund for $85K for proposal "Increasing Access to Sustainable and Safe Drinking Water Sources on Campus."
Emily Tseng, with co-authors Meg Young, Marianne Aubin Le Quéré, Aimee Rinehart, and Harini Suresh, had a paper, “Ownership, Not Just Happy Talk”: Co-Designing a Participatory Large Language Model for Journalism, accepted to the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT 2025). This work describes an effort to co-design participatory AI with journalists, and a collaboration with colleagues at multiple institutions.
Kate Starbird was quoted in the NPR article, “How a false X post about pausing tariffs led to multitrillion-dollar market swings.”
April 11, 2025
Cecilia Aragon will be a panelist on the “Lab to Industry: Universities and Research Labs Leading the AI Revolution” panel at the Transatlantic AI eXchange Remarkable Women in AI (RWIAI) 2025 event on April 24, 2025.
Brett Halperin was a panelist on the “Community Sustainability and Engagement” panel at the “Examining Critical Sociotechnical Challenges in Information Science” Symposium at Rutgers University on April 4, 2025.
Julie Kientz with co-authors, Carol Miller, Hedda Meadan, Abbie Olszewski and Jinjun Xiong had an article, “Supporting Speech-Language Pathologists in Schools With Interdisciplinary Team Science: A Viewpoint From the National Artificial Intelligence Institute for Exceptional Education,” published in Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools.
Kate Starbird was quoted in the NPR article, “How a false X post about pausing tariffs led to multitrillion-dollar market swings.”
Nupur Gorkar (HCDE Undergraduate) has been selected for the Summer 2025 cohort of the UW Population Health Initiative’s Applied Research Fellows. The Fellows program seeks to offer students training in data analysis, critical thinking and team science skills that will help them solve complex population health challenges on their way to becoming future leaders in population health.
April 4, 2025
David Ribes, with collaborators Stephen Molldrem, Marika Cifor, and Andrew Spieldenner, hosted the Knowledge of AIDS (KOA) Year 2 Workshop at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston, Texas on March 26-28, 2025. The network of 30+ leading critical scholars of HIV/AIDS hosts the annual workshop and fosters scholarly community to build intellectual infrastructure in support of social and critical scholarship about HIV/AIDS in STS and adjacent fields. Steven Epstein was keynote speaker for the two-day event.
Kevin Feng will be a panelist at the Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Freedoms Symposium hosted by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University on April 10, 2025.
Gary Hsieh, with co-authors Serena Jinchen Xie, Carolin Spice, Patrick Wedgeworth, Raina Langevin, Kevin Lybarger, Angad Preet Singh, Brian Wood, Jared Klein, Herbert Duber, and Andrea Hartzler, had an article, “Patient and clinician acceptability of automated extraction of social drivers of health from clinical notes in primary care” published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
Cecilia Aragon, with co-authors Jared Hand, Alex Kim, Pierre Antilogus, Stephen Bailey, Charles Baltay, Kyle Boone, Clément Buton, Yannick Copin, Samantha Dixon, Dominique Fouchez, Emmanuel Gangler, Ravi Gupta, Brian Hayden, Mitchell Karmen, Marek Kowalski, Daniel Küsters, Pierre-François Léget, Jakob Nordin, Reynald Pain, Saul Perlmutter, Kara Ponder, David Rabinowitz, Mickael Rigault, David Rubin, Clare Saunders, Nao Suzuki, Stefan Taubenberger, R. C. Thomas, and Maria Vincenzi, had an article, “An Agnostic Approach to Building Empirical Type Ia Supernova Light Curves: Evidence for Intrinsic Chromatic Flux Variation Using Nearby Supernova Factory Data” published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Cecilia Aragon was featured on KCBS-LA’s Mission Unstoppable television show in “Using math to fly.”
Kate Starbird was quoted in the New York Times article, “Trump leads a ‘machinery’ of misinformation in second term.”