Pin Sym Foong

Kellie Yu Hui Sim, Pin Sym Foong, Darryl Lim et al.

Work on persona-persistent post-mortem agents typically frames design around a life/death binary. This framing neglects a consequential yet under-theorised condition: when individuals remain alive but have impaired decisional capacity. Drawing on a multi-phase workshop in which participants trained and reflected on an AI agent for Advance Care Planning, we examined how people reason about agentic delegation post-capacity loss. Initially, participants favoured bounded agents grounded in first-party authorship and representational fidelity over autonomous or evolving stand-ins. However, temporality introduced novel ideas like adjacent use driven by persona persistence over functional expansion: agents should evolve while users retain capacity, remain static once capacity is lost, but somehow inform adjacent post-mortem uses. We discuss the implications of these findings and propose that the configuration of agents for post-capacity use reshapes our understanding of provenance, temporality, and legitimacy for post-mortem agents.

Jie Gao, Pin Sym Foong, Yifan Yang et al.

During the COVID-19 epidemic in China, millions of workers in tech companies had to start working from home (WFH). The change was sudden, unexpected and companies were not ready for it. Additionally, it was also the first time that WFH was experienced on such a large scale. We used the opportunity to describe the effect of WFH at scale for a sustained period of time. As the lockdown was easing, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 participants from China working in tech companies. While at first, WFH was reported as a pleasant experience with advantages, e.g. flexible schedule, more time with family, over time, this evolved into a rather negative experience where workers start working all day, every day and feel a higher workload despite the actual workload being reduced. We discuss these results and how they could apply for other extreme circumstances and to help improve WFH in general.

Viral Parekh, Pin Sym Foong, Shendong Zhao et al.

Engagement in dementia is typically measured using behavior observational scales (BOS) that are tedious and involve intensive manual labor to annotate, and are therefore not easily scalable. We propose AVEID, a low cost and easy-to-use video-based engagement measurement tool to determine the engagement level of a person with dementia (PwD) during digital interaction. We show that the objective behavioral measures computed via AVEID correlate well with subjective expert impressions for the popular MPES and OME BOS, confirming its viability and effectiveness. Moreover, AVEID measures can be obtained for a variety of engagement designs, thereby facilitating large-scale studies with PwD populations.