Related papers: From Meme to Method: Rethinking Animal Adoption Pl…
Pet adoption processes often face inefficiencies, including limited accessibility, lack of real-time information, and mismatched expectations between shelters and adopters. To address these challenges, this study presents Shelter Soul, a…
Adoption processes in socio-technological systems have been widely studied both empirically and theoretically. The way in which social norms, behaviors, and even items such as books, music, or other commercial or technological product…
Millions of stray animals suffer on the streets or are euthanized in shelters every day around the world. In order to better adopt stray animals, scoring the pawpularity (cuteness) of stray animals is very important, but evaluating the…
On algorithmic social platforms, exchanging memes via direct messages (DMs) serves as phatic communication that affirms relationships, yet users often interpret these exchanges as signals shaping personalized recommendations, creating…
Although language model-based chat systems are increasingly used in daily life, most Americans remain non-adopters of chat-based LLMs -- as of June 2025, 66% had never used ChatGPT. At the same time, LLM development and evaluation rely…
Chatbots systems, despite their popularity in today's HCI and CSCW research, fall short for one of the two reasons: 1) many of the systems use a rule-based dialog flow, thus they can only respond to a limited number of pre-defined inputs…
The wider adoption of PETs has relied on usability studies, which focus mainly on an assessment of how a specified group of users interface, in particular contexts, with the technical properties of a system. While human centred efforts in…
Caseworkers in foster care systems match waiting children to adoptive homes. We use dynamic matching market design to characterize a class of mechanisms that incentivize expedient matches that homes can accept or decline. We design…
The survival of the domestic cat (Felis catus) in various ecosystems has become increasingly relevant due to its impact on wildlife, public health, and society. In countries like Mexico, social factors such as abandonment have led to the…
In animal behavioral biology, there are several cases in which an autonomous observing/training system would be useful. 1) Observation of certain species continuously, or for documenting specific events, which happen irregularly; 2)…
Street cats in urban areas often rely on human intervention for survival, leading to challenges in population control and welfare management. In April 2023, Hello Inc., a Chinese urban mobility company, launched the Hello Street Cat…
The propagation of online memes is initially influenced by meme creators and secondarily by meme consumers, whose individual sharing decisions accumulate to determine total meme propagation. We characterize this as a sender/receiver…
A model for the spreading of online information or "memes" on multiplex networks is introduced and analyzed using branching-process methods. The model generalizes that of [Gleeson et al., Phys.Rev. X., 2016] in two ways. First, even for a…
The observation and modeling of natural Complex Systems (CSs) like the human nervous system, the evolution or the weather, allows the definition of special abilities and models reusable to solve other problems. For instance, Genetic…
Rises in the number of animal abuse cases are reported around the world. While chatbots have been effective in influencing their users' perceptions and behaviors, little if any research has hitherto explored the design of chatbots that…
Designing systems for autonomous transport of groups of living agents has received a lot of attention in recent years due to a wealth of important potential applications. Biomimetic approaches are often sought, and a range of herding…
Diffusion models have emerged as a dominant approach for text-to-image generation. Key components such as the human preference alignment and classifier-free guidance play a crucial role in ensuring generation quality. However, their…
Crowdsourced mobile edge caching and sharing (Crowd-MECS) is emerging as a promising content delivery paradigm by employing a large crowd of existing edge devices (EDs) to cache and share popular contents. The successful technology adoption…
Adoption of innovations, products or online services is commonly interpreted as a spreading process driven to large extent by social influence and conditioned by the needs and capacities of individuals. To model this process one usually…
Online social networks have transformed the way in which humans communicate and interact, leading to a new information ecosystem where people send and receive information through multiple channels, including traditional communication media.…