Chin-Chia Hsu

Marios Papachristou, Longqi Yang, Chin-Chia Hsu

In various work contexts, such as meeting scheduling, collaborating, and project planning, collective decision-making is essential but often challenging due to diverse individual preferences, varying work focuses, and power dynamics among members. To address this, we propose a system leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to facilitate group decision-making by managing conversations and balancing preferences among individuals. Our system aims to extract individual preferences from each member's conversation with the system and suggest options that satisfy the preferences of the members. We specifically apply this system to corporate meeting scheduling. We create synthetic employee profiles and simulate conversations at scale, leveraging LLMs to evaluate the system performance as a novel approach to conducting a user study. Our results indicate efficient coordination with reduced interactions between the members and the LLM-based system. The system refines and improves its proposed options over time, ensuring that many of the members' individual preferences are satisfied in an equitable way. Finally, we conduct a survey study involving human participants to assess our system's ability to aggregate preferences and reasoning about them. Our findings show that the system exhibits strong performance in both dimensions.

Yujin Kim, Chin-Chia Hsu

Large Language Models (LLMs) hold the potential to perform a variety of text processing tasks and provide textual explanations for proposed actions or decisions. In the era of hybrid work, LLMs can provide intelligent decision support for workers who are designing their hybrid work plans. In particular, they can offer suggestions and explanations to workers balancing numerous decision factors, thereby enhancing their work experience. In this paper, we present a decision support model for workspaces in hybrid work environments, leveraging the reasoning skill of LLMs. We first examine LLM's capability of making suitable workspace suggestions. We find that its reasoning extends beyond the guidelines in the prompt and the LLM can manage the trade-off among the available resources in the workspaces. We conduct an extensive user study to understand workers' decision process for workspace choices and evaluate the effectiveness of the system. We observe that a worker's decision could be influenced by the LLM's suggestions and explanations. The participants in our study find the system to be convenient, regardless of whether reasons are provided or not. Our results show that employees can benefit from the LLM-empowered system for their workspace selection in hybrid workplace.