Enka Blanchard, Ted Selker, Alan T. Sherman, Levi Gabasova, Mehdi Bouhamidi, Ryan Robucci
We explore the ability of humans to compare strings, an error-prone activity which occurs in critical contexts (e.g., bank wire transfers), where it is not always possible to trust a machine to help. We hypothesize that understanding human cognitive and perceptual limitations can improve how people verify whether two character strings are identical. We vary the strings' relative positions and presentation formats to measure comparison speed and accuracy. We present results from two online experiments with 178 human subjects who compared pairs of strings to determine whether the two strings were identical. The strings varied by length (5 characters to small paragraphs), difference (matching versus making a random change or a hard-to-detect one), alignment (vertical versus horizontal), and presentation (Overlay versus Adjacent). Our experiments test whether, by encoding and memory tasks into perceptual tasks, overlay formats can offer advantages in speed and accuracy. Results show that overlay offers a substantially faster method, with improved accuracy for long strings. Nevertheless, mean error rates were at least 4 percent, indicating that even the improved approach may be insufficiently accurate for many verification tasks.
Generative AI is quickly becoming an integral part of people's everyday workflows. Early evidence has shown that while generative AI can increase individual-level productivity, it does so at the cost of collective diversity, potentially narrowing the set of ideas and perspectives produced. Our research stands in contrast to this concern: through two pre-registered randomized control trials, we show that incentives can moderate AI's homogenizing force in two creative writing tasks where participants can use AI interactively. Participants rewarded for originality relative to peers produce collectively more diverse writing than those rewarded for quality alone. These participants continued to engage with AI, but ultimately incorporated less AI-generated text verbatim. Our results reveal that the effects of generative AI depend not only on the technology itself, but also the behavioral strategies and incentive structures surrounding its use. We release a rich, anonymized dataset capturing fine-grained trajectories of human-AI co-creation across both studies.
Hita Kambhamettu, Alyssa Hwang, Philippe Laban, Andrew Head
AI answer engines are a relatively new kind of information search tool: rather than returning a ranked list of documents, they generate an answer to a search question with inline citations to sources. But reading the cited sources is costly, and citation links themselves offer little guidance about what evidence they contain. We present attribution gradients, a technique to boost the informativeness of citations by consolidating scent and information prey in place. Its first feature is bringing evidence counts, supporting/contradictory excerpts, links to sources, and contextual explanations into one place. Its second feature is the ability to unravel second-degree citations in place. In a lab study, we demonstrate usage of the full gradient in a critical reading task and its support for deep engagement that increased the depth of what readers took away from the sources versus a standard citation and document QA design.
Within the open model ecosystem, AI model marketplaces enable non-AI experts to create and distribute derivative AI models. These platforms establish RAI approaches that creators are expected to follow to prevent negative downstream effects from model deployment, yet such governance approaches often rely on creators' intrinsic motivation and integrity. Little is known about how individual creators conceptualize their accountability for derivative models and how these conceptualizations shape their RAI practices throughout the development cycle. Through semi-structured interviews with 19 creators of derivative image-generation models on open model marketplaces, we identify two distinct accountability logics underlying creators' development practices: commons-based peer production and personal creative property. Guided by these logics, creators engage with platform RAI approaches in ways that diverge from their intended purposes: they strategically repurpose attribution tools for model visibility rather than provenance transparency, displace platform authority in favor of community-based governance, restrict model access to manage downstream accountability costs, and treat RAI-related work as undervalued labor to be minimized. We discuss how self-regulatory use of RAI tools, shaped by individuals' perceptions, produces shortcomings, and how open model marketplaces might mitigate these limitations by structurally supporting creators' engagement with RAI practices.
Yiran Lin, Ye Deng, Ziqi Pan, Yongan Yu, Alexandra I. Cristea
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents are increasingly explored as collaborative learning partners in mathematics education, yet it remains unclear what makes an AI recognizable as a peer. This study examines how domain experts perceive and interact with an adaptive LLM-based peer agent combining a Big Five-informed persona with motivational state modulation for collaborative mathematics problem solving. Through thematic analysis of expert interviews, we identify conditions shaping peer perceptions, including emotional safety, shared control, and collaborative reasoning. Participants primarily judged the AI through its social behavior rather than mathematical capabilities. The AI was perceived more as a peer when it created a non-judgmental space, engaged in tentative reasoning, displayed appropriate imperfection, and respected participants' pace. Conversely, blind agreement and over-instruction reduced trust and shifted perceptions toward a tutor role. Based on these findings, we propose human-centered design dimensions for AI peer agents to guide future peer-oriented learning systems.
Aleksandr Chernysh, Mehedi Hasan Raju, Kamrul Hasan, Md Arif Shahriar, Proloy Karmakar, Isayas B. Adhanom, Oleg Komogortsev
Gaze research in virtual reality needs eye trackers of known error. Thirty participants completed the same protocol on the Meta Quest Pro (QP), HTC VIVE Pro Eye (PE) and HTC VIVE Focus Vision (FV); to our knowledge, this is the first evaluation of the FV eye tracker. In a random-saccade task, median participant mean error was 1.04° on QP, 1.50° on PE and 2.41° on FV, which remained least accurate after linear recalibration. In a later block with a darker background, PE error rose by 0.70°. FV samples were positively correlated: dispersion was 9.8 times the sample-to-sample root mean square. The device clocks showed losses that mean error hides. QP paused for up to 6.04 s, and FV skipped single samples. During instructed eye closures, QP flagged every sample valid while gaze moved 9.74°. Evaluations should report repeated timestamps, loss composition on the device clock and validity during eye closures.
The ability to navigate outdoors safely and independently is crucial yet challenging for people with low vision (PLV). While various augmented reality (AR) systems for low vision have been designed and evaluated in ideal lab environments, no research has investigated their real-world feasibility and challenges. We present NavSight, a mobile AR application that assists PLV in outdoor navigation by recognizing important outdoor objects (e.g., curb, vehicle) and rendering real-time visual augmentations. Through a seven-day diary study with 12 PLV in real-world settings, we characterize the impact of NavSight on scene perception, users' configuration strategies on what objects to augment and how to augment them across scenarios, how users made sense of and responded to recognition errors, and the social acceptability of using NavSight in public. We further identify environmental factors affecting recognition, such as weather conditions, lighting and shadows, and nonstandard road markings and textures, as well as usability issues in daily use. We discuss these real-world challenges and derive design implications for future AI-powered assistive AR systems for outdoor use.
Whether generative AI (GenAI) use helps or hinders critical thinking remains contested, and existing accounts emphasize exposure to the tool rather than how a person structures their engagement with it. Extending Transactive Memory Systems (TMS) theory to human-AI partnerships, we test a structural account of critical thinking in GenAI-assisted academic work among 891 college students in the United States and Türkiye. Self-appraised thinking ability and confidence in the partnership shaped how much practical experience a person built up with GenAI, but neither predicted critical thinking directly. That experience mattered only through two downstream behaviors, dividing and coordinating cognitive labor with the tool, and actively reworking its output rather than accepting it as given. A multigroup comparison found this structure largely invariant, with two theoretically interpretable exceptions. This study offers a structural, TMS-based account of critical thinking in GenAI-assisted work.
Human evaluation of AI-generated videos has so far relied on explicit human feedback, such as judgments or ratings. While these signals capture the conclusions viewers reach, they fail to offer insights into the perception that leads to them. This paper investigates eye tracking as a complementary human evaluation signal for AI-generated videos. We conducted two Visual Turing Test (VTT) experiments with a total of 90 participants on videos generated by latest generative models, in which participants watched each video twice and then gave their feedback. Across the experiments, we collected 4,286 valid eye-tracking trials on 438 videos. Our analysis indicates that gaze patterns offer informative evaluation signals that align with explicit human feedback. Building on the findings, we propose the first computational method GazeEval to predict the perceived visual realism of AI-generated videos from eye-tracking data. It achieves 71.3% accuracy in prediction, providing evidence that eye tracking data carries informative signals about how people evaluate a video. We release the study data to support further research on eye tracking for evaluating AI-generated video.
Prior research suggests that some dimensions of AI empathy may increase users' disclosure to chatbots, posing growing privacy risks as chatbots become more capable of empathic interaction. Yet this work often conceptualizes AI empathy narrowly, leaving users' own definitions and their broader privacy experiences unexplored. We interviewed 21 AI Chatbot users about what AI empathy meant to them and how it shaped their privacy attitudes, behaviors, and needs. Participants characterized empathy through five components--understanding, resonating, caring, expressing, and helping. Most participants viewed resonating and caring as essential components of human empathy but absent from AI empathy. Yet AI's contextual, in-depth understanding and helpfulness still encouraged highly sensitive disclosure. This highlights that AI empathy can endanger users' privacy without necessarily making AI seem human. Participants also desired varied forms and levels of empathy, each associated with distinct privacy needs. We offer actionable recommendations for designing privacy-enhancing mechanisms for empathic AI interactions.
To direct attention and communicate context, visualization designers often employ augmentations such as annotations, animated transitions, and stylistic layouts. While graphical perception principles can helpfully prescribe effective low-level representations of data, they lack guidance for augmentations that service higher-level communication goals. To bridge this gap, we contribute a design space that frames designer intent as viewer-oriented cognitive behaviors, grounding communicative aims in actionable visualization design techniques, including both visual encodings and augmentations. This design space consists of common augmentation tactics (annotation, animation, stylized encodings, etc.) that implement design strategies (spotlighting, sequencing, association, etc.) to achieve higher-level design goals (observe, interpret, introspect), often simultaneously. We demonstrate the analytic and generative value of our design space with examples across varied designer objectives. We discuss how our contributions help align designer intent with reader takeaways, pave the way for readers to learn more effectively, and enable future (semi-)automated systems to support visualization designers in achieving their communication goals.
We introduce idea traces, a novel thread-based representation of accretive content across scientific papers. Rather than capturing fixed themes from papers, idea traces surface similarities and deltas of faceted content that enable inspection of how ideas relate and evolve across the citation network. To extract traces, we contribute an LLM pipeline that deconstructs salient transitions between pairs of papers and collates the output into an idea dependency graph. We leverage idea traces in a visual system that supports idea-driven navigation starting from a seed paper, lifting the "plane" of synthesis from papers to ideas. To evaluate the usefulness and quality of generated ideas, we provide a case study that compares our approach with an LLM Q&A workflow, and interview 10 researchers who used our system and annotated 110 ideas. Experts found that our approach helped extract a useful space of connections that would have been difficult to make otherwise. Drawing on their feedback, we outline several promising directions for future research.
Context: The growing adoption of AI-assisted development tools is changing how software teams collaborate, share knowledge, and coordinate, yet its consequences for team social dynamics remain largely unexplored. Gap: It is unclear whether AI adoption is associated with an increase or reduction in community smells,socio-technical anti-patterns reflecting coordination and communication breakdowns,and through which mechanisms. Method: Grounded in Transactive Memory Systems (TMS) theory, we validate instruments for HumanAI and HumanHuman interaction along two TMS dimensions, Specialization and Coordination, and test five PLS-SEM models on survey data from 152 software professionals using AI tools. Community smell constructs were derived from the literature and validated through expert surveys and factor analysis. Results: AI adoption relates to community smells not in a single way, but through mechanisms depending on the work. In specialization work, AI is associated with higher knowledge-sharing peer interaction, which is in turn associated with fewer smells. In coordination work, AI is directly associated with higher communication quality, complementing rather than replacing human interaction. Contributions: We provide an empirically validated, TMS-grounded model showing that the AIcommunity-smell relationship is contingent on the type of collaboration, with a reusable instrument and evidence-based implications for research and practice.
Giuseppe Riva, Stefania La Rocca, Brenda K. Wiederhold, Andrea Gaggioli
Generative artificial intelligence is rapidly entering knowledge work, and its short-term productivity benefits are increasingly documented. Less is known about what happens, over time, to the knowledge, skills and judgment that remain in people and organizations. This integrative narrative review addresses that question through the construct of cognitive capital: the accumulated, renewable and depletable stock of knowledge, cognitive and metacognitive capabilities, and practices that enables an individual or an organization to learn, interpret information, exercise judgment, solve problems and adapt. We distinguish individual and organizational cognitive capital from the capability of the human-AI system, so that gains in joint performance and losses in human capability can be observed at the same time. Drawing on experimental, field and conceptual work, we propose four mechanisms through which interaction with AI affects cognitive capital: substitution of practice, scaffolding and feedback, metacognitive calibration, and organizational aggregation. Seven principles summarize the current evidence, including that assisted performance differs from retained competence, that the same technology can support or displace learning depending on design and use, and that individual gains can coexist with reduced collective diversity. For each mechanism we derive testable propositions, and we discuss five design levers for organizations as proposals to be validated rather than established practice. We conclude that cognitive capital offers a multilevel frame for governing AI adoption and outline a research agenda centered on longitudinal, multilevel measurement.
Tsz Lok Cheung, Jeff Kai-Tai Tang, Anthony Kong, Zackary P. T. Sin
Misplacing household objects disrupts daily routines, especially for elderly users. ItemCompass addresses this with a real-time, tag-free wearable AR system that builds a persistent digital twin of the home for natural language object retrieval. A custom eyewear node streams visual and inertial data to an edge server, where YOLOv11n detection, Siamese re-identification, and a Pedestrian Dead Reckoning engine log object locations as Spatial Anchors in InfluxDB. Voice queries are resolved by a local Faster-Whisper and Qwen2 LLM pipeline, delivering concise spoken and AR guidance on a heads-up display. Evaluation shows 0.40 m localization drift, 97.5% step precision, and mAP@0.5 of 0.874, with users rating Accuracy and Trust at 4.6/5.0. The system highlights always-on sensing, conversational spatial memory, and privacy-by-design for wearable computing.
Alexander Dregger, Barbarella Petz, Erik Kuhn, Pia Volk, Andreas Oberweis, Stefan Hillmann, Jannik Strötgen
Artificial personality shapes user experience (UX) in human-machine interaction, yet coherent theoretical frameworks and validated measurement instruments remain limited. This paper refines and empirically evaluates the Artificial Personality Model (APM), a hybrid framework integrating human-centred and machine-specific personality dimensions. Across three experiments (N = 395), the model was operationalised and evaluated using the Artificial Personality Questionnaire (APQ). Factor analyses revealed that some human personality dimensions (e.g., agreeableness, conscientiousness) are partially transferable, whereas others (e.g., extraversion) did not emerge as distinct dimensions. Additional machine-specific dimensions were identified. The APQ provided encouraging initial psychometric evidence, while the human-centred BFI-2 showed poor reliability and an uninterpretable factor structure in Experiment 3. Experimental manipulations demonstrated significant effects of artificial personality on user satisfaction, continuous use intention, and social presence. The findings contribute an empirically refined framework and a novel instrument for measuring perceived artificial personality, offering practical guidance for designing conversational agents.
This study aims to build effective drill software by combining a virtual simulation of a disaster with multiple agents capable of expressing emotions. We evaluated how the number of agents and their emotional and behavioral actions during evacuation influence users in a virtual space. The results showed that users tended to act more confidently when many agents evacuated with them, and that the evacuation route chosen by the agents influenced the users' decision-making. These findings indicate that users' evacuation behavior is shaped not only by the environment itself but also by the collective behavior of surrounding agents, underscoring the need to consider how agent behavior affects users' psychological states during training.
As Generative AI (GenAI) expands beyond individual workflows and becomes increasingly integrated intocollaborative creative work, its potential to address the fundamental challenge of building common groundamong creators with diverse expertise remains underexplored. Specifically, we lack empirical understandingof how GenAI can mediate collaboration asymmetries among heterogeneous creators. To address this gap,we conducted a multi-method study with narrative writers (N = 10) and visual designers (N = 10) in thecontext of game development. Our findings demonstrate that GenAI goes beyond individual assistance toserve as a collaborative mediator by aligning creative intent, sustaining shared understanding, and mitigatinginterpersonal friction among creators. At the same time, we highlight concerns that GenAI may reducecommunication among creators, undermine mutual trust, and reshape interpersonal dynamics and collaborativeprocesses. Based on these insights, we identify design opportunities for GenAI tools that nurture collaborativesynergy while preserving the creativity and values of human work.
Boyu Li, Zhe Lin, Eli Shechtman, Ding Li, Hongbo Fu, Yuqian Zhou
We present StreamStudio, a prototype system that explores a new authoring paradigm for streaming video generation. Instead of entering a prompt and waiting for a complete video before making changes, creators can interact with the generation as it unfolds: steering what comes next, returning to earlier moments, and exploring different continuations. In this way, StreamStudio shifts creative control from post-generation revision to continuous interaction with the generative process. Our contribution centers on this authoring paradigm and the interaction mechanisms that make streaming generation directly manipulable. StreamStudio is designed as a plug-and-play interface that can work with compatible generation and editing models, allowing its interaction model to evolve alongside advances in underlying video models. As streaming models become faster and easier to control in the future, such an interface may support more flexible and controllable video creation, including richer edits and multimodal interventions during generation.
Proactive agents must decide not only what to say but also whether and when to intervene. Many current systems rely on brittle heuristics or indiscriminate long reasoning, which offers little control over the benefit-burden tradeoff. We formulate the problem as cost-sensitive selective intervention and present PRISM, a novel framework that couples a decision-theoretic gate with a dual-process reasoning architecture. At inference time, the agent intervenes only when a calibrated probability of user acceptance exceeds a threshold derived from asymmetric costs of missed help and false alarms. Inspired by festina lente (Latin: "make haste slowly"), we gate by an acceptance-calibrated, cost-derived threshold and invoke a resource-intensive Slow mode with counterfactual checks only near the decision boundary, concentrating computation on ambiguous and high-stakes cases. Training uses gate-aligned, schema-locked distillation: a teacher running the full PRISM pipeline provides dense, executable supervision on unlabeled interaction traces, while the student learns a response policy that is explicitly decoupled from the intervention gate to enable tunable and auditable control. On ProactiveBench, PRISM reduces false alarms by 22.78% and improves F1 by 20.14% over strong baselines. These results show that principled decision-theoretic gating, paired with selective slow reasoning and aligned distillation, yields proactive agents that are precise, computationally efficient, and controllable. To facilitate reproducibility, we release our code, models, and resources at https://prism-festinalente.github.io/; all experiments use the open-source ProactiveBench benchmark.
Joseph Walusimbi, Ann Move Oguti, Joshua Benjamin Ssentongo, Keith Ainebyona
Artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) are transforming educational technology by enabling conversational tutoring, personalised explanations, and inquiry-driven learning. However, most AI-based learning systems rely on continuous internet connectivity and cloud-based computation, limiting their use in bandwidth-constrained environments. This paper presents Arapai, an offline-first large language model architecture designed for AI-assisted learning in low-connectivity settings. The system performs all inference locally using quantized language models and incorporates hardware-aware model selection to enable deployment on low-specification, CPU-only devices. By removing dependence on cloud infrastructure, the system provides curriculum-aligned explanations and structured academic support through natural-language interaction. To support learners at different educational stages, the system includes adaptive response levels that generate explanations at varying levels of complexity: Simple English, Lower Secondary, Upper Secondary, and Technical. The system was evaluated with 120 students and 9 instructors from secondary and tertiary institutions under limited-connectivity conditions. Results indicate stable operation on legacy hardware, acceptable response times of 1-3 seconds for typical queries, and positive user perceptions of its effectiveness in supporting self-directed learning.
A recurring design choice in building AI systems is whether, when a task is too hard for a model, to expand the model (make it larger, better-prompted, fine-tuned), or to decompose the task (extract the parts that admit a deterministic solution to a host, leaving the model only the irreducibly fuzzy residue). We make three claims. First, that many tasks commonly delegated whole to a model are in fact deterministic tasks with a small generative core. Second, and our central empirical result, that decomposing such a task yields a measurable and desirable property we call parity by construction: on the extracted sub-tasks the model-size performance curve becomes flat, because no model performs them at all. We measure this across nine models spanning a 494M-parameter local checkpoint to a frontier Opus-class model, a thirty-fold parameter range on the local family alone: once the host resolves the context, operation selection scores identically for all nine models and selector resolution for eight of nine, while the one task that does not decompose, labelling, remains sloped across the same range. Because the task leaves the model, a stock checkpoint suffices: no task-specific training and no fine-tuning. Third, that this is a general design discipline, not a domain trick: we show the same move recurring across physics setup, motion retargeting, and object-model editing, and in a Web-CLI tool family (same author, so not an independent replication). We give a method for locating the cut, the construction that makes a cut exist (a deterministic surface and a closed grammar over it), and a way to make the residue safe (resolve the deterministic context; verify the generative output), position the work against neuro-symbolic AI, tool-augmented language models, and generate-and-verify approaches, and are explicit about what is measured (one domain) versus illustrative (the rest).
Jiajun Zhu, Xinyu Cheng, Wenshuo Zhang, Huamin Qu, Yanna Lin
Academic writing is non-linear, iterative, and structure-driven, requiring authors to develop fragmented ideas into arguments with local coherence and global consistency. However, current AI-assisted tools primarily exchange linear prompts and free-form text, forcing authors to reconstruct generated logic and repeatedly verify its alignment with their structural intentions. We propose object-oriented writing (OOW), an OOD-inspired representation and interaction paradigm in which persistent writing objects serve as shared, manipulable referents for authors and AI. We instantiate OOW in LogicTree, an Overleaf-integrated prototype that combines a hierarchical object representation with a structure-grounded writing assistance module for author-initiated generation and issue-grounded revision and a structural logical review module for inspecting local coherence and global consistency. A within-subjects study (N=12) provides initial evidence that, in controlled academic writing tasks, LogicTree helps users structure ideas, reduces workload, and improves measured logical quality compared with a conversational baseline.
Generative AI now produces images and poems that people cannot reliably distinguish from human-made work, so people often judge for themselves who made a work. We examine how these perceived-authorship judgments relate to aesthetic preference. In a public online AI Art Turing Test, 11,123 people judged whether each of 50 pictures (26 AI-generated) was made by a human and were asked for their favourite. Among the 9,152 respondents who judged their favourite, a picture was 22.1 percentage points more likely to be judged human-made when it was the respondent's favourite, holding respondent and picture fixed. The association was similar for AI-generated and human-made favourites, was positive for all 50 pictures, and appeared under every reported detection strategy. Respondents most negative about AI art chose fewer AI-generated favourites (47% against 60% among the most positive) but more often believed them human-made, partly because others also judged those pictures human. As a result, in every opinion group a third to two fifths of respondents named an AI-generated favourite they believed human-made. A reanalysis of a published experiment on AI-generated poetry, in which 230 people rated each poem before judging its authorship, found the same pattern, although the AI poems were rated higher. When provenance is hidden, liking and perceived human authorship travel together, consistent with aesthetic response serving as evidence of a human maker and with beliefs about the maker shaping enjoyment. The findings qualify research on bias against AI art, which typically uses explicit labels, and inform AI disclosure policy.
Victor Nikhil Antony, Zhili Gong, Yoonjae Kim, Chien-Ming Huang
We present M, an open-source, low-cost tabletop social robot platform aimed at lowering barriers to social robotics research by making robots easier to reproduce, modify, and deploy in real-world settings. M combines a modular mechanical design, multimodal sensing, and expressive yet mechanically simple actuation architecture with a ROS2-native software package that cleanly separates perception, expression control, and data management. The platform includes a simulation environment with interface equivalence to hardware to support easy sim-to-real transfer of interaction behaviors. We demonstrate extensibility through additional sensing/actuation modules and provide example interaction templates for storytelling and two-way conversational coaching. Lastly, we report real-world use of M in interaction design and week-long in-home deployments, showing how M can serve as a practical platform for longitudinal, reproducible social robotics research.
This paper develops a critical theoretical framework for understanding national Artificial Intelligence (AI) strategies through the lens of "Governance as Infrastructure." Integrating insights from Infrastructure Studies, Science and Technology Studies (STS), this paper employs Black Feminist Technoscience (BFTS) to reveal how AI governance infrastructures are assembled, maintained, and contested, and whose forms of knowledge, labour, and experience are rendered visible or invisible in these processes. We analyze the Canadian AI governance landscape through in-depth interviews with bureaucrats, civil society advocacy groups, academic researchers, and industry actors. Our inductive thematic analysis reveals how AI governance infrastructure enacts specific configurations of power, particularly through the politics of expertise; how actors navigate profound ambiguities related to AI's opacity, often involving strategic ignorance; and how mechanisms for justice and accountability struggle to address AI-related harms. We contend that a BFTS perspective highlights the limitations of current governance approaches and points toward alternative infrastructural designs prioritizing care, maintenance, participatory democracy, and adaptive temporalities to foster more equitable and accountable technology governance.
The written paper has long stood in as proof of work: a fluent, well-structured manuscript was taken as evidence that good research lay behind it. Generative AI has broken that link. Polished manuscripts now cost nothing to produce, submissions are outgrowing what reviewers can absorb, and venues are turning to AI for help. The logical endpoint is a loop where AI writes the papers and AI reviews them. We argue that this loop is survivable, but only if it is given a reward function, and that human reviewing effort should become that reward function. We propose that submissions should consist of a 1500-word brief plus an unlimited, machine-verifiable appendix. Human reviewers judge whether a pursuit is worthwhile, models verify the experimental record in the appendix, and human curation decides where the field goes next.
Recommendation-driven platforms can reshape not only what users see, but also who becomes visible and how community boundaries are negotiated. We examine Xiaohongshu discussions surrounding a perceived World Cup-related audience influx to understand how users attributed community change and how those explanations related to boundary-management strategies. We analyzed 262 comments from eight high-engagement threads using researcher-led thematic analysis, structured coding, and permutation-based association analysis. Users described personalization as both social separation and a boundary that could fail, interpreted platform growth through audience acquisition and commercialization, and contested whether gender should define community membership. Among 70 comments with explicit attributions and strategies, attribution and strategy were strongly associated (Cramer's V = .583): algorithmic attributions concentrated in technical boundary management, while social-actor attributions more often aligned with social enforcement or normative socialization. These findings connect causal sensemaking with boundary management and show how audience restructuring can create governance consequences on recommendation-driven platforms.
General-purpose smart-home technologies are increasingly present in family life, yet how they support or disrupt autistic children and families with autistic children remains underexamined. We conducted a multi-source qualitative study drawing on five caregiver interviews, Xiaohongshu (also known internationally as RedNote) posts explicitly situated in autism contexts, and contextual posts from Xiaohongshu and Weibo. We find that families create support for autistic children by adapting environmental outputs, prompts, and interaction channels, while sensory intensity, communicative rules, and opaque operating states can turn the same technologies into barriers. Support also depends on continuing family work, including translation, configuration, modification, maintenance, and boundary-setting. Remote monitoring enables conditional independence while generating tensions among safety, privacy, and control. We contribute three concepts, including relational fit, family work as support infrastructure, and monitored independence, for understanding accessible domestic technology. We derive design implications for adjustable interaction, legible and recoverable failure, lower-burden configuration, and negotiable monitoring.
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems often perform less accurately for speakers of regional dialects, but less is known about how users respond to these limitations and how regional voices produced by voice assistants (VAs) are evaluated through a sociolinguistic lens. This study investigates these issues among speakers of Newcastle English (Geordies), examining both linguistic accommodation to voice technologies and perceptions of regional versus mainstream-accented VA voices. Participants interacted with a simulated VA that spoke either Newcastle English or Standard Southern British English (SSBE). They subsequently completed semi-structured interviews about their experiences with the experimental VA and voice technologies, language use, accent attitudes, and place orientation. The findings reveal a two-way process of sociolinguistic bias. The Geordie VA was associated with familiarity, warmth, personality, and local belonging, but also with concerns about professionalism and authority, whereas the SSBE voice was perceived as more neutral, clear, and credible. Participants also reported adapting their speech when voice technologies failed to recognise them, most commonly by shifting to a more mainstream accent, enunciating more clearly, and speaking more slowly. These strategies are similar to accommodation in human-human interaction and reflect users' perceptions of what technologies can recognise, also known as perceived intelligibility pressures. Overall, the findings demonstrate that voice technologies can reproduce existing accent biases both by encouraging users to suppress regional features and by activating established social stereotypes through synthetic voices. The study positions sociolinguistics as a bridge between understanding human-AI interaction and designing inclusive technologies around users' own linguistic priorities.