Vahe Zaprosyan

Jessica H. Zhu, Shayla Stringfield, Vahe Zaprosyan et al.

Firearm violence is a pressing public health issue, yet research into survivors' lived experiences remains underfunded and difficult to scale. Qualitative research, including in-depth interviews, is a valuable tool for understanding the personal and societal consequences of community firearm violence and designing effective interventions. However, manually analyzing these narratives through thematic analysis and inductive coding is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have opened the door to automating this process, though concerns remain about whether these models can accurately and ethically capture the experiences of vulnerable populations. In this study, we assess the use of open-source LLMs to inductively code interviews with 21 Black men who have survived community firearm violence. Our results demonstrate that while some configurations of LLMs can identify important codes, overall relevance remains low and is highly sensitive to data processing. Furthermore, LLM guardrails lead to substantial narrative erasure. These findings highlight both the potential and limitations of LLM-assisted qualitative coding and underscore the ethical challenges of applying AI in research involving marginalized communities.

Gitan Balogh, June Cagan, Bea Fatima et al.

Neighborhood graphs and clustering algorithms are fundamental structures in both computational geometry and data analysis. Visualizing them can help build insight into their behavior and properties. The Ipe extensible drawing editor, developed by Otfried Cheong, is a widely used software system for generating figures. One particular aspect of Ipe is the ability to add Ipelets, which extend its functionality. Here we showcase a set of Ipelets designed to help visualize neighborhood graphs and clustering algorithms. These include: $\eps$-neighbor graphs, furthest-neighbor graphs, Gabriel graphs, $k$-nearest neighbor graphs, $k^{th}$-nearest neighbor graphs, $k$-mutual neighbor graphs, $k^{th}$-mutual neighbor graphs, asymmetric $k$-nearest neighbor graphs, asymmetric $k^{th}$-nearest neighbor graphs, relative-neighbor graphs, sphere-of-influence graphs, Urquhart graphs, Yao graphs, and clustering algorithms including complete-linkage, DBSCAN, HDBSCAN, $k$-means, $k$-means++, $k$-medoids, mean shift, and single-linkage. Our Ipelets are all programmed in Lua and are freely available.