Chun Yu

Ruolan Wu, Chun Yu, Xiaole Pan et al.

Problematic smartphone use negatively affects physical and mental health. Despite the wide range of prior research, existing persuasive techniques are not flexible enough to provide dynamic persuasion content based on users' physical contexts and mental states. We first conducted a Wizard-of-Oz study (N=12) and an interview study (N=10) to summarize the mental states behind problematic smartphone use: boredom, stress, and inertia. This informs our design of four persuasion strategies: understanding, comforting, evoking, and scaffolding habits. We leveraged large language models (LLMs) to enable the automatic and dynamic generation of effective persuasion content. We developed MindShift, a novel LLM-powered problematic smartphone use intervention technique. MindShift takes users' in-the-moment app usage behaviors, physical contexts, mental states, goals \& habits as input, and generates personalized and dynamic persuasive content with appropriate persuasion strategies. We conducted a 5-week field experiment (N=25) to compare MindShift with its simplified version (remove mental states) and baseline techniques (fixed reminder). The results show that MindShift improves intervention acceptance rates by 4.7-22.5% and reduces smartphone usage duration by 7.4-9.8%. Moreover, users have a significant drop in smartphone addiction scale scores and a rise in self-efficacy scale scores. Our study sheds light on the potential of leveraging LLMs for context-aware persuasion in other behavior change domains.

Zhuojun Li, Chun Yu, Chen Liang et al.

The data scarcity problem is a crucial factor that hampers the model performance of IMU-based human motion capture. However, effective data augmentation for IMU-based motion capture is challenging, since it has to capture the physical relations and constraints of the human body, while maintaining the data distribution and quality. We propose PoseAugment, a novel pipeline incorporating VAE-based pose generation and physical optimization. Given a pose sequence, the VAE module generates infinite poses with both high fidelity and diversity, while keeping the data distribution. The physical module optimizes poses to satisfy physical constraints with minimal motion restrictions. High-quality IMU data are then synthesized from the augmented poses for training motion capture models. Experiments show that PoseAugment outperforms previous data augmentation and pose generation methods in terms of motion capture accuracy, revealing a strong potential of our method to alleviate the data collection burden for IMU-based motion capture and related tasks driven by human poses.

Xin Zeng, Xiaoyu Wang, Tengxiang Zhang et al.

Existing gesture interfaces only work with a fixed set of gestures defined either by interface designers or by users themselves, which introduces learning or demonstration efforts that diminish their naturalness. Humans, on the other hand, understand free-form gestures by synthesizing the gesture, context, experience, and common sense. In this way, the user does not need to learn, demonstrate, or associate gestures. We introduce GestureGPT, a free-form hand gesture understanding framework that mimics human gesture understanding procedures to enable a natural free-form gestural interface. Our framework leverages multiple Large Language Model agents to manage and synthesize gesture and context information, then infers the interaction intent by associating the gesture with an interface function. More specifically, our triple-agent framework includes a Gesture Description Agent that automatically segments and formulates natural language descriptions of hand poses and movements based on hand landmark coordinates. The description is deciphered by a Gesture Inference Agent through self-reasoning and querying about the interaction context (e.g., interaction history, gaze data), which is managed by a Context Management Agent. Following iterative exchanges, the Gesture Inference Agent discerns the user's intent by grounding it to an interactive function. We validated our framework offline under two real-world scenarios: smart home control and online video streaming. The average zero-shot Top-1/Top-5 grounding accuracies are 44.79%/83.59% for smart home tasks and 37.50%/73.44% for video streaming tasks. We also provide an extensive discussion that includes rationale for model selection, generalizability, and future research directions for a practical system etc.

Zeyu Wang, Yuanchun Shi, Yuntao Wang et al.

Modern information querying systems are progressively incorporating multimodal inputs like vision and audio. However, the integration of gaze -- a modality deeply linked to user intent and increasingly accessible via gaze-tracking wearables -- remains underexplored. This paper introduces a novel gaze-facilitated information querying paradigm, named G-VOILA, which synergizes users' gaze, visual field, and voice-based natural language queries to facilitate a more intuitive querying process. In a user-enactment study involving 21 participants in 3 daily scenarios (p = 21, scene = 3), we revealed the ambiguity in users' query language and a gaze-voice coordination pattern in users' natural query behaviors with G-VOILA. Based on the quantitative and qualitative findings, we developed a design framework for the G-VOILA paradigm, which effectively integrates the gaze data with the in-situ querying context. Then we implemented a G-VOILA proof-of-concept using cutting-edge deep learning techniques. A follow-up user study (p = 16, scene = 2) demonstrates its effectiveness by achieving both higher objective score and subjective score, compared to a baseline without gaze data. We further conducted interviews and provided insights for future gaze-facilitated information querying systems.

Kai Qin, Kexin Du, Yimeng Chen et al.

The integration of various AI tools creates a complex socio-technical environment where employee-customer interactions form the core of work practices. This study investigates how customer service representatives (CSRs) at the power grid service customer service call center perceive AI assistance in their interactions with customers. Through a field visit and semi-structured interviews with 13 CSRs, we found that AI can alleviate some traditional burdens during the call (e.g., typing and memorizing) but also introduces new burdens (e.g., earning, compliance, psychological burdens). This research contributes to a more nuanced understanding of AI integration in organizational settings and highlights the efforts and burdens undertaken by CSRs to adapt to the updated system.