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As mental health chatbots proliferate to address the global treatment gap, a critical question emerges: How do we design for relational safety the quality of interaction patterns that unfold across conversations rather than the correctness…
With the widespread adoption of advanced generative models such as Gemini and GPT, there has been a notable increase in the incorporation of such models into sociotechnical systems, categorized under AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS). Despite their…
Approaches to improving multilingual language understanding often struggle with significant performance gaps between high-resource and low-resource languages. While there are efforts to align the languages in a single latent space to…
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can profoundly affect reciprocal social communication, resulting in substantial and challenging impairments. One aspect is that for people with ASD conversations in everyday life are challenging due to…
Online harassment is a global problem. This article examines perceptions of harm and preferences for remedies associated with online harassment with nearly 4000 participants in 14 countries around the world. The countries in this work…
Gender bias in machine translation (MT) is recognized as an issue that can harm people and society. And yet, advancements in the field rarely involve people, the final MT users, or inform how they might be impacted by biased technologies.…
Speech is promising as an objective, convenient tool to monitor health remotely over time using mobile devices. Numerous paralinguistic features have been demonstrated to contain salient information related to an individual's health.…
Current AI approaches have frequently been used to help personalize many aspects of medical experiences and tailor them to a specific individuals' needs. However, while such systems consider medically-relevant information, they ignore…
Designing Conversational AI systems to support older adults requires more than usability and reliability, it also necessitates robustness in handling conversational breakdowns. In this study, we investigate how older adults navigate and…
Before being deployed for user-facing applications, developers align Large Language Models (LLMs) to user preferences through a variety of procedures, such as Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference…
Goal-oriented conversational agents are becoming prevalent in our daily lives. For these systems to engage users and achieve their goals, they need to exhibit appropriate social behavior as well as provide informative replies that guide…
Large language models (LLMs) have become ubiquitous, thus it is important to understand their risks and limitations. Smaller LLMs can be deployed where compute resources are constrained, such as edge devices, but with different propensity…
Communicating the risks and benefits of AI is important for regulation and public understanding. Yet current methods such as technical reports often exclude people without technical expertise. Drawing on HCI research, we developed an Impact…
Conversational agents promise conversational interaction but fail to deliver. Efforts often emulate functional rules from human speech, without considering key characteristics that conversation must encapsulate. Given its potential in…
Misophonia, characterized by intense negative reactions to specific sounds or related visual cues, remains poorly recognized in clinical settings yet profoundly affects daily life. This study examines how individuals with misophonia…
Modern conversational agents such as Alexa and Google Assistant represent significant progress in speech recognition, natural language processing, and speech synthesis. But as these agents have grown more realistic, concerns have been…
A challenge in multiagent control systems is to ensure that they are appropriately resilient to communication failures between the various agents. In many common game-theoretic formulations of these types of systems, it is implicitly…
Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) is a field of research and practice that works with people who have a communication disability. One form AAC can take is a high-tech tool, such as a software-based communication system. Like…
Using observed language to understand interpersonal interactions is important in high-stakes decision making. We propose a causal research design for observational (non-experimental) data to estimate the natural direct and indirect effects…
Subtle patterns in users' think-aloud (TA) verbalizations (i.e., utterances) are shown to be telltale signs of user experience (UX) problems and used to build artificial intelligence (AI) models or AI-assisted tools to help UX evaluators…