UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) sent five faculty members and more than 20 graduate students and recent alumni to the Association of Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems (CHI), held May 11-16 at the Hawaii Convention Center in Oahu, Hawaii. 

The international human-computer interaction conference accepted 15 full papers and seven late-breaking works from IST, the most ever for the college. 

“In the 21 years I have been a member of IST, this is the strongest CHI review outcome we’ve had,” said Jack Carroll, distinguished professor of information sciences and technology. “Both the full papers and the late-breaking works are peer-reviewed and presented in the main conference program. The full papers have two rounds of review that are quite thorough and exacting — rejecting nearly 80% of submissions. That’s where CHI gets it black belt reputation.”

The College of IST's human-computer interaction research area focuses on creating and evaluating interactive systems, advocating for users first and technology second. This includes studying the social, cognitive and affective aspects of the user experience, as well as consequences for communities, organizations and society. 

CHI, established in 1982, attracts researchers and practitioners from around the world to discuss and advance interactive digital technologies. The 2024 conference theme — Surfing the World — reflected the focus on pushing forth the wave of cutting-edge technology and riding the tide of new developments in human-computer interaction research, according to CHI's website. This year, the conference accepted 1,060 submissions with an overall acceptance rate of 26.4%.

One IST paper received an honorable mention:

• “Third-Party Developers and Tool Development for Community Management on Live-Streaming Platform Twitch” received a Best Paper Honorable Mention. Jie Cai, assistant research professor in the College of IST, was first author on the paper. Contributors included Professor Carroll and IST doctoral students Ya-Fang Lin and He “Albert” Zhang.

The other full papers accepted at CHI include the following:

• “A Teaspoon of Authenticity: Exploring How Young Adults BeReal on Social Media,” by Ananya Reddy, Priya Kumar
• “At the End of the Day, I Am Accountable: Gig Workers’ Self-Tracking for Multi-Dimensional Accountability Management,” by Rie Helene “Lindy” Hernandez, Xinning Gui, Yubo Kou, Qiurong Song
• “BubbleCam: Engaging Privacy in Remote Sighted Assistance,” by Jingyi Xie, Syed Billah, John M. Carroll, Sooyeon Lee, Rui Yu, He Zhang
• “Community Begins Where Moderation Ends: Peer Support and Its Implications for Community-Based Rehabilitation,” by Yubo Kou, Xinning Gui, Renkai Ma, Zinan Zhang, Yingfan Zhou
• “I Got Flagged for Supposed Bullying Even Though It Was in Response to Someone Harassing Me About My Disability: A Study of Blind TikTokers’ Content Moderation Experiences,” by Yao Lyu, Jie Cai, Anisa Callis, John M. Carroll, Kelley Cotter,
• “If in a Crowdsourced Data Annotation Pipeline, a GPT-4,” by Zeyu He, Chien-Kuang Cornelia Ding, Chieh-Yang Huang, Ting-Hao “Kenneth” Huang, Shaurya Rohatgi
• “Integrating Measures of Replicability Into Scholarly Search: Challenges and Opportunities,” by Chuhao Wu, John M. Carroll, Tatiana Chakravorti, Sarah Rajtmajer, Chuhao Wu
• “Our Users’ Privacy Is Paramount to Us: A Discourse Analysis of How Period and Fertility Tracking App Companies Address the Roe v. Wade Overturn,” by Qiurong Song, Xinning Gui, Lindy Hernandez, Yubo Kou,
• “#PoetsOfInstagram: Navigating the practices and challenges of novice poets on Instagram,” by Ankolika De, Zhicong Lu
• “Supportive fintech for individuals with bipolar disorder: Financial data sharing preferences to support longitudinal care management,” by Jeff Brozena, Saeed Abdullah, Johnna Blair, Mark Matthews, Dahlia Mukherjee, Thomas Richardson, Erika F. H. Saunders
• “Trading as Gambling: Social Investing and Financial Risks on the r/WallStreetBets Subreddit,” by Yubo Kou, Xinning Gui, Sam Moradzadeh
• “Uncovering Human Traits in Determining Real and Spoofed Audio: Insights From Blind and Sighted Individuals,” by Chaeeun Han, Syed Billah, Prasenjit Mitra
• “We Happen to Be Different and Different Is Not Bad: Designing for Intersectional Fat-Positive Information Seeking,” authored by Rebecca Jonas, Kelley Cotter, Ankolika De
• “Who is “I”? Subjectivity and Ethnography in HCI,” by Tejaswini Joshi, Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell, Heidi Biggs

These late-breaking works were also accepted:

• “A Preliminary Exploration of YouTubers’ Use of Generative AI in Content Creation,” by Yao Lyu, Jie Cai, Shuo Niu, He Zhang
• “A Situated Infrastructuring of WhatsApp for Business in India,” by Ankolika De
• “Content Moderation Justice and Fairness on Social Media: Comparisons Across Different Contexts and Platforms,” by Jie Cai, Azadeh Naderi, Aashka Patel, Donghee Yvette Wohn
• “How Does Conversation Length Impact User’s Satisfaction? A Case Study of Length-Controlled Conversations With LLM-Powered Chatbots,” by Shih-Hong Huang, Zeyu He, Chieh-Yang Huang, Ting-Hao “Kenneth” Huang, Ya-Fang Lin,
• “Managing Finances for Persons Living with Dementia: Current Practices and Challenges for Care Partners,” by Ling Qiu, Saeed Abdullah, Johnna Blair
• “SciCapenter: Supporting Caption Composition for Scientific Figures With Machine-Generated Captions and Ratings,” by Ting-Yao Hsu, C. Lee Giles, Chieh-Yang Huang, Shih-Hong Huang, Ting-Hao “Kenneth” Huang, Sungchul Kim, Ryan Rossi, Tong Yu
• “Understanding and Balancing Trade-Offs of Visibility in Support Requests,” by Jeongwon Jo, John M. Carroll, Jingyi Xie