Anind Dey

Joshua Gluck, Christian Koehler, Jennifer Mankoff et al.

Heating, Ventilation, and Cooling (HVAC) systems are often the most significant contributor to the energy usage, and the operational cost, of large office buildings. Therefore, to understand the various factors affecting the energy usage, and to optimize the operational efficiency of building HVAC systems, energy analysts and architects often create simulations (e.g., EnergyPlus or DOE-2), of buildings prior to construction or renovation to determine energy savings and quantify the Return-on-Investment (ROI). While useful, these simulations usually use static HVAC control strategies such as lowering room temperature at night, or reactive control based on simulated room occupancy. Recently, advances have been made in HVAC control algorithms that predict room occupancy. However, these algorithms depend on costly sensor installations and the tradeoffs between predictive accuracy, energy savings, comfort and expenses are not well understood. Current simulation frameworks do not support easy analysis of these tradeoffs. Our contribution is a simulation framework that can be used to explore this design space by generating objective estimates of the energy savings and occupant comfort for different levels of HVAC prediction and control performance. We validate our framework on a real-world occupancy dataset spanning 6 months for 235 rooms in a large university office building. Using the gold standard of energy use modeling and simulation (Revit and Energy Plus), we compare the energy consumption and occupant comfort in 29 independent simulations that explore our parameter space. Our results highlight a number of potentially useful tradeoffs with respect to energy savings, comfort, and algorithmic performance among predictive, reactive, and static schedules, for a stakeholder of our building.

Anthony Wise, Xinyi Zhou, Martin Reimann et al.

Similar to social media bots that shape public opinion, healthcare and financial decisions, LLM-based ChatBots like ChatGPT can persuade users to alter their behavior. Unlike prior work that persuades via overt-partisan bias or misinformation, we test whether framing alone suffices. We conducted a crowdsourced study, where 336 participants interacted with a neutral or one of two value-framed ChatBots while deciding to alter US defense spending. In this single policy domain with controlled content, participants exposed to value-framed ChatBots significantly changed their budget choices relative to the neutral control. When the frame misaligned with their values, some participants reinforced their original preference, revealing a potentially replicable backfire effect, originally considered rare in the literature. These findings suggest that value-framing alone lowers the barrier for manipulative uses of LLMs, revealing risks distinct from overt bias or misinformation, and clarifying risks to countering misinformation.

Julian Ramos, Zhen Li, Johana Rosas et al.

Pointing devices that reside on the keyboard can reduce the overall time needed to perform mixed pointing and typing tasks, since the hand of the user does not have to reach for the pointing device. However, previous implementations of this kind of device have a higher movement time compared to the mouse and trackpad due to large error rate, low speed and spatial resolution. In this paper we introduce Keyboard Surface Interaction (KSI), an interaction approach that turns the surface of a keyboard into an interaction surface and allows users to rest their hands on the keyboard at all times to minimize fatigue. We developed a proof-of-concept implementation, Fingers, which we optimized over a series of studies. Finally, we evaluated Fingers against the mouse and trackpad in a user study with 25 participants on a Fitts law test style, mixed typing and pointing task. Results showed that for users with more exposure to KSI, our KSI device had better performance (reduced movement and homing time) and reduced discomfort compared to the trackpad. When compared to the mouse, KSI had reduced homing time and reduced discomfort, but increased movement time. This interaction approach is not only a new way to capitalize on the space on top of the keyboard, but also a call to innovate and think beyond the touchscreen, touchpad, and mouse as our main pointing devices. The results of our studies serve as a specification for future KSI devices.