Taha Hassan

Jennifer Posada, Taha Hassan, Lujie Karen Chen et al.

Data storytelling workflows ask learners to integrate analytical, design, and narrative skills, but instructors rarely have the capacity to provide detailed feedback at each step. Computational and AI-assisted storytelling offers opportunities to support student learning, but how feedback should be structured effectively remains unclear. To address this gap, we conducted a two-phase participatory design study. Through participant observations (N=8) and interviews (N=6), the first phase explored learners and educators' feedback needs and challenges in a data storytelling course. The second phase conducted two design workshops (N=8/10) to design and evaluate feedback strategies (frequency, seamlessness, accountability) for Story Studio: an AI-assisted narrative storytelling application. Our findings show that participants perceived on-demand and process feedback modes as effective, but automatic and outcome feedback as slightly more persuasive. We discuss implications for designing AI-augmented storytelling systems that adapt their feedback modes to the diverse needs and expectations of students.

Taha Hassan, Bob Edmison, Timothy Stelter et al.

Trust in a recommendation system (RS) is often algorithmically incorporated using implicit or explicit feedback of user-perceived trustworthy social neighbors, and evaluated using user-reported trustworthiness of recommended items. However, real-life recommendation settings can feature group disparities in trust, power, and prerogatives. Our study examines a complementary view of trust which relies on the editorial power relationships and attitudes of all stakeholders in the RS application domain. We devise a simple, first-principles metric of editorial authority, i.e., user preferences for recommendation sourcing, veto power, and incorporating user feedback, such that one RS user group confers trust upon another by ceding or assigning editorial authority. In a mixed-methods study at Virginia Tech, we surveyed faculty, teaching assistants, and students about their preferences of editorial authority, and hypothesis-tested its relationship with trust in algorithms for a hypothetical `Suggested Readings' RS. We discover that higher RS editorial authority assigned to students is linked to the relative trust the course staff allocates to RS algorithm and students. We also observe that course staff favors higher control for the RS algorithm in sourcing and updating the recommendations long-term. Using content analysis, we discuss frequent staff-recommended student editorial roles and highlight their frequent rationales, such as perceived expertise, scaling the learning environment, professional curriculum needs, and learner disengagement. We argue that our analyses highlight critical user preferences to help detect editorial power asymmetry and identify RS use-cases for supporting teaching and research

Taha Hassan, D. Scott McCrickard

The prevalence of misinformation on online social media has tangible empirical connections to increasing political polarization and partisan antipathy in the United States. Ranking algorithms for social recommendation often encode broad assumptions about network structure (like homophily) and group cognition (like, social action is largely imitative). Assumptions like these can be naïve and exclusionary in the era of fake news and ideological uniformity towards the political poles. We examine these assumptions with aid from the user-centric framework of trustworthiness in social recommendation. The constituent dimensions of trustworthiness (diversity, transparency, explainability, disruption) highlight new opportunities for discouraging dogmatization and building decision-aware, transparent news recommender systems.