By HCDE PhD students Lubna Razaq and Ruoxi (Anna) Shang

Lubna Razaq

I presented a paper titled ‘'We Even Borrowed Money From Our Neighbor": Understanding Mobile-based Frauds Through Victims' Experiences in the session on User Experiences. Even though the conference was online for a second year, the format of paper presentations was different this year. Before the conference, I uploaded a 10 minute video of my paper to Midspace. All authors were required to upload videos which will be shared on a Youtube channel. The actual presentation on the conference day was 3 minutes long with 7 minutes for QnA from the audience. The expectation was that participants could either view the presentation videos beforehand and hence most of the time on conference day was dedicated to QnA. Due to some usability issues the session chair was unable to take questions from audiences and asked a few questions from each author himself. 

I also attended a Community Organized meetup on Sharing/collaborative economy where I got introduced to researchers from Europe mostly who had been formed a working group for research on sharing economy in Europe and shared their resources with the rest of us. I also got connected to a researcher from India interested in collaborating on research on Uber. I attended paper sessions on Future of Work. Three papers were on Uber drivers in South Asia and explored the intersection of the sharing economy with the particular socio-cultural and socio-economic dynamics of Uber in these countries such as Uber drivers for hire, their poor working conditions and the need to design for these dynamics. I also attended the paper session on Interpreting and Explaining AI. The session had papers on algorithmic folk theorization. I interacted with the authors about the particular methods they used for eliciting the folk theories.

Ruoxi (Anna) Shang

I presented a poster at this year’s cscw conference. Posters of similar topics are grouped into themes, and authors are gathered in zoom breakout rooms to discuss and share. People were really engaging in the Q&As and conversations sparked many interesting questions that lead to potential future works. The poster sessions are very rewarding in terms of getting constructive feedback and clarifying ambiguities for those who will continue to work in this direction. For the paper sessions, I specifically enjoyed presentations around responsible AI and explainability. There are a few papers this year on algorithm auditing, and I found the paper “Everyday Algorithm Auditing: Understanding the Power of Everyday Users in Surfacing Harmful Algorithmic Behaviors” particularly interesting. It proposed a bottom-up and user-driven approach to detect and monitor harmful machine behaviors that does not require knowledge about the underlying algorithms. There’s also a survey paper of empirical methodologies around evaluating trust in AI-assisted Decision Making studies. It points out the constraints and limitations of the existing measures of trust and provides guidelines for future research. Apart from my moments of confusion with MidSpace navigation, it was overall a good experience as I got more used to virtual social environments over the last year.