Svetlana Yarosh

Sabirat Rubya, Joseph Numainville, Svetlana Yarosh

Targeting the right group of workers for crowdsourcing often achieves better quality results. One unique example of targeted crowdsourcing is seeking community-situated workers whose familiarity with the background and the norms of a particular group can help produce better outcome or accuracy. These community-situated crowd workers can be recruited in different ways from generic online crowdsourcing platforms or from online recovery communities. We evaluate three different approaches to recruit generic and community-situated crowd in terms of the time and the cost of recruitment, and the accuracy of task completion. We consider the context of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), the largest peer support group for recovering alcoholics, and the task of identifying and validating AA meeting information. We discuss the benefits and trade-offs of recruiting paid vs. unpaid community-situated workers and provide implications for future research in the recovery context and relevant domains of HCI, and for design of crowdsourcing ICT systems.

Adel Al-Dawood, Serene Alhajhussein, Svetlana Yarosh

Finding a date or a spouse online is usually considered an individualistic endeavor in Western cultures. This presents a challenge for collectivist non-Western cultures such as Saudi Arabia where choosing a spouse is viewed as a union of two families with parents of both spouses being heavily involved. Our work aims to investigate how Saudi Arabian parents view the utilization of technology by their young adults to seek potential spouses online. We report our findings of interviews conducted with 16 Saudi Arabian parents (8 fathers, 6 mothers and 1 couple). We generate qualitative themes that provide insights about how parents wanted to preserve their values, integrate technology into the traditional process and protect their young adults from potential harms. These themes lead to implications for designing suitable marital matchmaking technologies in Saudi Arabia and opportunities for future work.

Zachary Levonian, Marco Dow, Drew Erikson et al.

Online health communities offer the promise of support benefits to users, in particular because these communities enable users to find peers with similar experiences. Building mutually supportive connections between peers is a key motivation for using online health communities. However, a user's role in a community may influence the formation of peer connections. In this work, we study patterns of peer connections between two structural health roles: patient and non-professional caregiver. We examine user behavior in an online health community where finding peers is not explicitly supported. This context lets us use social network analysis methods to explore the growth of such connections in the wild and identify users' peer communication preferences. We investigated how connections between peers were initiated, finding that initiations are more likely between two authors who have the same role and who are close within the broader communication network. Relationships are also more likely to form and be more interactive when authors have the same role. Our results have implications for the design of systems supporting peer communication, e.g. peer-to-peer recommendation systems.

C. Estelle Smith, Zachary Levonian, Haiwei Ma et al.

Online Health Communities (OHCs) are known to provide substantial emotional and informational support to patients and family caregivers facing life-threatening diagnoses like cancer and other illnesses, injuries, or chronic conditions. Yet little work explores how OHCs facilitate other vital forms of social support, especially instrumental support. We partner with CaringBridge.org---a prominent OHC for journaling about health crises---to complete a two-phase study focused on instrumental support. Phase one involves a content analysis of 641 CaringBridge updates. Phase two is a survey of 991 CaringBridge users. Results show that patients and family caregivers diverge from their support networks in their preferences for specific instrumental support types. Furthermore, ``prayer support'' emerged as the most prominent support category across both phases. We discuss design implications to accommodate divergent preferences and to expand the instrumental support network. We also discuss the need for future work to empower family caregivers and to support spirituality.

Adel Al-Dawood, Norah Abokhodair, Houda El Mimouni et al.

Websites and applications that match and connect individuals for romantic purposes are commonly used in the Western world. However, there have not been many previous investigations focusing on cultural factors that affect the adoption of similar technologies in religiously conservative non-Western cultures. In this study, we examine the socio-technical and cultural factors that influence the perceptions and use of matchmaking technologies in Saudi Arabia. We report the methods and findings of interviews with 18 Saudi nationals (nine males and nine females) with diverse demographics and backgrounds. We provide qualitatively generated insights into the major themes reported by our participants related to the common approaches to matchmaking, the current role of technology, and concerns regarding matchmaking technologies in this cultural con-text. We relate these themes to specific implications for designing marital matchmaking technologies in Saudi Arabia and we outline opportunities for future investigations.

Yuan Yao, Svetlana Yarosh

This paper describes the design and evaluation of the vision-based classification of social gestures, such as handshake, hug, high-five, etc. This is a component of the mediated social touch systems, which can be incorporated into ShareTable and SqueezeBands system to achieve automated gestures recognition and transmission of the touch between the users in real time. The results from our pilot study show the recognition accuracy of each gestures, and they indicate that significant future work is necessary to improve its practical feasibility in the mediated social touch applications.

Pamela Zave, Eric Cheung, Svetlana Yarosh

Many user studies of home automation, as the most familiar representative of the Internet of Things, have shown the difficulty of developing technology that users understand and like. It helps to state requirements as largely-independent features, but features are not truly independent, so this incurs the cost of managing and explaining feature interactions. We propose to compose features at runtime, resolving their interactions by means of priority. Although the basic idea is simple, its details must be designed to make users comfortable by balancing manual and automatic control. On the technical side, its details must be designed to allow meaningful separation of features and maximum generality. As evidence that our composition mechanism achieves its goals, we present three substantive examples of home automation, and the results of a user study to investigate comprehension of feature interactions. A survey of related work shows that this proposal occupies a sensible place in a design space whose dimensions include actuator type, detection versus resolution strategies, and modularity.