UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) is well-represented at this year’s Association for Computing Machinery’s 2021 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), a top venue for human-computer interaction (HCI) research that will be held virtually Oct. 23-27.

Eleven papers that involve researchers at the College of IST were accepted to the conference, as well as one short paper that appears in the conference companion.

“The level of research showcased at CSCW highlights the importance that IST experts place on examining technology that is designed for and used by communities, networks and organizations,” said Andrea Tapia, associate dean for research at the College of IST. “These researchers are committed to exploring and identifying HCI issues that affect groups in a number of domains, and offer design improvement implications that lead to well-grounded solutions.”

College of IST research represented at CSCW2021 includes:

• “Alternatives to Agrilogistics: Designing for Ecological Thinking,” by doctoral students Heidi Biggs and Tejaswini Joshi; Jeffrey Bardzell, professor and associate dean of undergraduate and graduate studies; and Shaowen Bardzell, professor; along with Ries Murphy, user experience researcher at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
• “ChamberBreaker: Mitigating Echo Chamber Effects and Supporting Information Hygiene through a Gamified Inoculation System,” by Dongwon Lee, professor, and Aiping Xiong, assistant professor. Co-authors include Youngseung Jeong of Anjou University; and Bogoan Kim, doctoral student, and Kyungsik Han, assistant professor, of Hanyang University. Han earned a doctorate from the Penn State College of IST in 2015.
• “Designing for Independence for People with Visual Impairments,” by Jack Carroll, Distinguished Professor of Information Sciences and Technology. Co-authors include Sooyeon Lee, postdoctoral research associate at Rochester Institute of Technology and former doctoral student at the College of IST; and Madison Reddie, a master’s student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at Penn State in 2020.
• “Exploring Feelings of Student Community across a Geographically Distributed University,” by Sanjana Gautam, doctoral student, and Mary Beth Rosson, professor.
• “How advertiser-friendly is my video?: YouTuber’s Socioeconomic Interactions with Algorithmic Content Moderation,” by Renkai Ma, doctoral student, and Yubo Kou, assistant professor.
• “Local Community Support for Tangible Food Aid During COVID-19,” by doctoral students Tiffany Knearem and Jeongwon Jo, and Carroll. This was a short paper that appeared in the conference companion.
• “Punishment and Its Discontents: An Analysis of Permanent Ban in an Online Game Community,” by Kou.
• “Teacher-Guardian Collaboration for Emergency Remote Learning in the COVID-19 Crisis,” by Xinning Gui, assistant professor. Co-authors are Yao Li, assistant professor, and Yanlai Wu, doctoral student, both at the University of Central Florida.
• “The Expertise Involved in Deciding which HITs are Worth Doing on Amazon Mechanical Turk,” by Ben Hanrahan, assistant professor; Anna Squicciarini, associate professor; and JiaHua Ma, doctoral student. Co-authors are Anita Chen, researcher at Kigali Collaborative Research Centre who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Penn State; Ning Ma, postdoctoral research fellow at The University of British Columbia who earned master’s and doctoral degrees from the College of IST; and Saiph Savage, assistant professor at Northeastern University.
• “The Flaky Accretions of Infrastructure: Sociotechnical Systems, Citizenship, and the Water Supply,” by Tejaswini Joshi, Jeffrey Bardzell and Shaowen Bardzell.
• “With Help from Afar: Cross-Local Communication in an Online COVID-19 Pandemic Community,” by Kou, Gui and Carroll. Chun-Hua Tsai, assistant professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and former assistant research professor at the College of IST, was lead author on the paper.
• “Working Together in a PhamilySpace: Facilitating Collaboration on Healthy Behaviors Over Distance,” by Jomara Sandbulte, assistant professor at University of Minnesota who earned a doctorate in IST at Penn State in 2020; Tsai and Carroll.

Additionally, Shaowen Bardzell is a paper co-chair for CSCW2021. She was also recently elected to the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) as the Executive Vice President on the SIGCHI Executive Committee. ACM SIGCHI is the premier international society for all professionals, academics and students interested in human-computer interaction. SIGCHI co-sponsors CSCW.

“It’s exciting to see so many papers of a wide range of research topics accepted at the conference,” said Shaowen Bardzell, who serves as professor in charge of the human-computer interaction research area at the College of IST. “They showcase the breadth of the research being conducted at IST. It’s also a tangible proof of our HCI faculty’s leadership in CSCW and social computing.” 

CSCW is the premier venue for research in the design and use of technologies that affect groups, organizations, communities and networks. Bringing together top researchers and practitioners, CSCW explores the technical, social, material and theoretical challenges of designing technology to support collaborative work and life activities.