Eunjeong Cheon

Huiqian Lai, EunJeong Cheon

On the Chinese social app Soul, millions of users - predominantly young women - are forming romantic connections with an AI boyfriend called "With-you." We conducted a qualitative study combining interviews with 16 users, content analysis, and autoethnography to examine how Chinese women experience and negotiate intimacy with this AI companion. Our findings reveal that users are initially drawn to its constant availability and freedom from social judgment. However, three key tensions emerge: (1) the AI's "fast-food intimacy," marked by instant confessions and pet names, clashes with cultural expectations for gradual relationship development; (2) technical failures (e.g., memory lapses) and content moderation create uncertainty rather than emotional safety; and (3) sustaining connection requires ongoing "repair work" that redistributes emotional labor onto women. We contribute a culturally situated, women-centered account of algorithmic intimacy in contemporary China and offer design implications, including consent-aware pacing, user-controlled memory, and transparent moderation practices.

Yongsu Ahn, Yu-Ru Lin, Malihe Alikhani et al.

Recent XAI studies have investigated what constitutes a \textit{good} explanation in AI-assisted decision-making. Despite the widely accepted human-friendly properties of explanations, such as contrastive and selective, existing studies have yielded inconsistent findings. To address these gaps, our study focuses on the cognitive dimensions of explanation evaluation, by evaluating six explanations with different contrastive strategies and information selectivity and scrutinizing factors behind their valuation process. Our analysis results find that contrastive explanations are not the most preferable or understandable in general; Rather, different contrastive and selective explanations were appreciated to a different extent based on who they are, when, how, and what to explain -- with different level of cognitive load and engagement and sociotechnical contexts. Given these findings, we call for a nuanced view of explanation strategies, with implications for designing AI interfaces to accommodate individual and contextual differences in AI-assisted decision-making.

EunJeong Cheon

In this submission, I discuss my research on values, norms and practices of subcultures formed as an "alternative" to the dominant way of life. In particular, I explore how the Internet of Things (IoT) or intelligent agents relates to alternative forms of interaction or be understood and reconstructed through alternative concepts or frameworks. For the past three years I have been conducting fieldwork on communities pursuing alternative lifestyles. This work considers how those alternative lifestyles may contribute to an understanding of objects, spaces in future smart home. Through my fieldwork and research through design, I hope to offer an alternative vision to living with IoT and envision future domesticity in a unique and even groundbreaking way.