Jason I. Hong

Ángel Alexander Cabrera, Adam Perer, Jason I. Hong · cmu

People work with AI systems to improve their decision making, but often under- or over-rely on AI predictions and perform worse than they would have unassisted. To help people appropriately rely on AI aids, we propose showing them behavior descriptions, details of how AI systems perform on subgroups of instances. We tested the efficacy of behavior descriptions through user studies with 225 participants in three distinct domains: fake review detection, satellite image classification, and bird classification. We found that behavior descriptions can increase human-AI accuracy through two mechanisms: helping people identify AI failures and increasing people's reliance on the AI when it is more accurate. These findings highlight the importance of people's mental models in human-AI collaboration and show that informing people of high-level AI behaviors can significantly improve AI-assisted decision making.

Tzu-Sheng Kuo, Hong Shen, Jisoo Geum et al.

Recent years have seen growing adoption of AI-based decision-support systems (ADS) in homeless services, yet we know little about stakeholder desires and concerns surrounding their use. In this work, we aim to understand impacted stakeholders' perspectives on a deployed ADS that prioritizes scarce housing resources. We employed AI lifecycle comicboarding, an adapted version of the comicboarding method, to elicit stakeholder feedback and design ideas across various components of an AI system's design. We elicited feedback from county workers who operate the ADS daily, service providers whose work is directly impacted by the ADS, and unhoused individuals in the region. Our participants shared concerns and design suggestions around the AI system's overall objective, specific model design choices, dataset selection, and use in deployment. Our findings demonstrate that stakeholders, even without AI knowledge, can provide specific and critical feedback on an AI system's design and deployment, if empowered to do so.

Eunkyu Park, Wesley Hanwen Deng, Cheyon Jin et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) continue to struggle to make morally salient judgments in multimodal and socially ambiguous contexts. Prior works typically rely on binary or pairwise supervision, which often fail to capture the continuous and pluralistic nature of human moral reasoning. We present MM-SCALE (Multimodal Moral Scale), a large-scale dataset for aligning VLMs with human moral preferences through 5-point scalar ratings and explicit modality grounding. Each image-scenario pair is annotated with moral acceptability scores and grounded reasoning labels by humans using an interface we tailored for data collection, enabling listwise preference optimization over ranked scenario sets. By moving from discrete to scalar supervision, our framework provides richer alignment signals and finer calibration of multimodal moral reasoning. Experiments show that VLMs fine-tuned on MM-SCALE achieve higher ranking fidelity and more stable safety calibration than those trained with binary signals.

Megan Li, Wendy Bickersteth, Ningjing Tang et al.

Despite growing concerns about the risks of Generative AI (GenAI), there is limited understanding of public perceptions of these risks and their associated failure modes -- defined as recurring patterns of sociotechnical breakdown across the GenAI lifecycle that contribute to risks of real-world harm. To address this gap, we present a survey instrument, validated with eight subject matter experts and deployed on a sample of 960 U.S.-based participants, to assess awareness and perceptions of GenAI's failure modes, their associated risks, and stakeholder responsibilities to address them. To support realism and content validity, our instrument is structured around scenarios grounded in publicly reported incidents and a taxonomy of GenAI's failure modes. Findings suggest that our instrument is (1) effective for assessing risk awareness and perceptions in a way that is grounded in people's current contexts of use, yet is extensible to new contexts that will inevitably arise; and (2) potentially useful for informing the design of AI literacy tools and interventions. We argue for AI literacy and governance approaches that align with how people encounter and reason about GenAI in everyday life.

Alexander Yu, Yuvraj Agarwal, Jason I. Hong

Privacy concerns have long been expressed around smart devices, and the concerns around Android apps have been studied by many past works. Over the past 10 years, we have crawled and scraped data for almost 1.9 million apps, and also stored the APKs for 135,536 of them. In this paper, we examine the trends in how Android apps have changed over time with respect to privacy and look at it from two perspectives: (1) how privacy behavior in apps have changed as they are updated over time, (2) how these changes can be accounted for when comparing third-party libraries and the app's own internals. To study this, we examine the adoption of HTTPS, whether apps scan the device for other installed apps, the use of permissions for privacy-sensitive data, and the use of unique identifiers. We find that privacy-related behavior has improved with time as apps continue to receive updates, and that the third-party libraries used by apps are responsible for more issues with privacy. However, we observe that in the current state of Android apps, there has not been enough of an improvement in terms of privacy and many issues still need to be addressed.

Dan Tasse, Jason I. Hong

Many modern tourists want to know about everyday life and spend time like a local in a new city. Current tools and guides typically provide them with lists of sights to see, which do not meet their needs. Manually building new tools for them would not scale. However, public geotagged social media data, like tweets and photos, have the potential to fill this gap, showing users an interesting and unique side of a place. Through three studies surrounding the design and construction of a social-media-powered Neighborhood Guides website, we show recommendations for building such a site. Our findings highlight an important aspect of social media: while it lacks the user base and consistency to directly reflect users' lives, it does reveal the idealized everyday life that so many visitors want to know about.

Xingyu Liu, Annabel Sun, Jason I. Hong

Terms and conditions (T&Cs) are pervasive on the web and often contain important information for consumers, but are rarely read. Previous research has explored methods to surface alarming privacy policies using manual labelers, natural language processing, and deep learning techniques. However, this prior work used pre-determined categories for annotations, and did not investigate what consumers really deem as important from their perspective. In this paper, we instead combine crowdsourcing with an open definition of "what is important" in T&Cs. We present a workflow consisting of pairwise comparisons, agreement validation, and Bradley-Terry rank modeling, to effectively establish rankings of T&C statements from non-expert crowdworkers on this open definition, and further analyzed consumers' preferences. We applied this workflow to 1,551 T&C statements from 27 e-commerce websites, contributed by 3,462 unique crowd workers doing 203,068 pairwise comparisons, and conducted thematic and readability analysis on the statements considered as important/unimportant. We found that consumers especially cared about policies related to after-sales and money, and tended to regard harder-to-understand statements as more important. We also present machine learning models to identify T&C clauses that consumers considered important, achieving at best a 92.7% balanced accuracy, 91.6% recall, and 89.2% precision. We foresee using our workflow and model to efficiently and reliably highlight important T&Cs on websites at a large scale, improving consumers' awareness

Ángel Alexander Cabrera, Abraham J. Druck, Jason I. Hong et al.

AI systems can fail to learn important behaviors, leading to real-world issues like safety concerns and biases. Discovering these systematic failures often requires significant developer attention, from hypothesizing potential edge cases to collecting evidence and validating patterns. To scale and streamline this process, we introduce crowdsourced failure reports, end-user descriptions of how or why a model failed, and show how developers can use them to detect AI errors. We also design and implement Deblinder, a visual analytics system for synthesizing failure reports that developers can use to discover and validate systematic failures. In semi-structured interviews and think-aloud studies with 10 AI practitioners, we explore the affordances of the Deblinder system and the applicability of failure reports in real-world settings. Lastly, we show how collecting additional data from the groups identified by developers can improve model performance.

Jason I. Hong, Yuvraj Agarwal, Matt Fredrikson et al.

We present the design and design rationale for the user interfaces for Privacy Enhancements for Android (PE for Android). These UIs are built around two core ideas, namely that developers should explicitly declare the purpose of why sensitive data is being used, and these permission-purpose pairs should be split by first party and third party uses. We also present a taxonomy of purposes and ways of how these ideas can be deployed in the existing Android ecosystem.

Tianshi Li, Camille Cobb, Jackie et al.

Smartphone-based contact-tracing apps are a promising solution to help scale up the conventional contact-tracing process. However, low adoption rates have become a major issue that prevents these apps from achieving their full potential. In this paper, we present a national-scale survey experiment ($N = 1963$) in the U.S. to investigate the effects of app design choices and individual differences on COVID-19 contact-tracing app adoption intentions. We found that individual differences such as prosocialness, COVID-19 risk perceptions, general privacy concerns, technology readiness, and demographic factors played a more important role than app design choices such as decentralized design vs. centralized design, location use, app providers, and the presentation of security risks. Certain app designs could exacerbate the different preferences in different sub-populations which may lead to an inequality of acceptance to certain app design choices (e.g., developed by state health authorities vs. a large tech company) among different groups of people (e.g., people living in rural areas vs. people living in urban areas). Our mediation analysis showed that one's perception of the public health benefits offered by the app and the adoption willingness of other people had a larger effect in explaining the observed effects of app design choices and individual differences than one's perception of the app's security and privacy risks. With these findings, we discuss practical implications on the design, marketing, and deployment of COVID-19 contact-tracing apps in the U.S.

Tianshi Li, Jackie, Yang et al.

Contact-tracing apps have potential benefits in helping health authorities to act swiftly to halt the spread of COVID-19. However, their effectiveness is heavily dependent on their installation rate, which may be influenced by people's perceptions of the utility of these apps and any potential privacy risks due to the collection and releasing of sensitive user data (e.g., user identity and location). In this paper, we present a survey study that examined people's willingness to install six different contact-tracing apps after informing them of the risks and benefits of each design option (with a U.S.-only sample on Amazon Mechanical Turk, $N=208$). The six app designs covered two major design dimensions (centralized vs decentralized, basic contact tracing vs. also providing hotspot information), grounded in our analysis of existing contact-tracing app proposals. Contrary to assumptions of some prior work, we found that the majority of people in our sample preferred to install apps that use a centralized server for contact tracing, as they are more willing to allow a centralized authority to access the identity of app users rather than allowing tech-savvy users to infer the identity of diagnosed users. We also found that the majority of our sample preferred to install apps that share diagnosed users' recent locations in public places to show hotspots of infection. Our results suggest that apps using a centralized architecture with strong security protection to do basic contact tracing and providing users with other useful information such as hotspots of infection in public places may achieve a high adoption rate in the U.S.