Existing articulatory corpora based on real-time MRI and electromagnetic articulography capture tongue motion but lack traceable labels for the muscle-driven process underlying each configuration. We introduce a simulator-grounded construction framework, instantiated as 3DTongueQA. Controlled 11-D muscle activations are mapped by the ArtiSynth Badin finite-element model to fixed-topology tongue meshes, converted into reusable biomechanical records, and rendered as deterministic QA on simulator-defined muscle state, geometry, and target-directed change. From 295,157 screened configurations, 295,115 valid meshes yield 891,156 QA records per language. English and Korean naturalizations modify only surface form and are verified against the source records. A swappable SpiralNet++--Qwen3-8B baseline reaches $62.9\pm9.2$ Muscle EM, dropping to 2.2 under mesh shuffling; anchor-held-out training retains 80.4--98.6\% of full-inventory scores, while task-specific readouts reach $88.7\pm0.7$ Muscle EM and $93.3\pm1.0$ Direction EM. The results show geometry-grounded supervision supporting both unified language QA and structured prediction. Code is available at https://github.com/esh0504/muscle-grounded-qa .
As autonomous drone deployments scale from individual units to coordinated swarms, the human operator's role shifts from direct piloting to high-level supervision. Current interfaces often treat multi-drone control as a scaled-up version of single-drone operation. We instead investigate how reframing fleet supervision as spatial interaction can better support the spatial, temporal, and safety demands of complex missions. We present FleetScape, a Mixed Reality (MR) sandtable system that externalizes layered real-time mission, safety, and environmental data while enabling fluid transitions between manual intervention and autonomous supervision. We developed a high-fidelity building inspection simulation that generates and streams synchronized multi-drone and environmental data for MR visualizations. We used this prototype to conduct a user study with six experienced drone pilots managing fleets of up to 15 drones. Our findings show that FleetScape supports situational awareness through layered spatial representations and clarifies control mode transitions. However, a limit to situational awareness was observed as fleet size increases, leading to different supervisory strategies. Finally, we derive design implications for supporting scalable drone fleet supervision.
Peisen Xu, J\'er\'emie Garcia, Peter Cleveland et al.· 0 citations
Visualization researchers utilize workshops both for applied research and to engage different populations with visualization-based activities. While there are many benefits to running visualization workshops, their utility and impact rely on the presence of a researcher who has deep knowledge about visualization theory and practice. In this work, we introduce workshop-in-a-box as a design concept intended to challenge the researcher-centric approach to data physicalization workshops. Through a design study with a socially innovative organization, we deployed several data physicalization workshops that our collaborator ran instead of us. Based on this experience, along with two accompanying case studies that validate the concept, we present material and procedural considerations for how to put data physicalization workshops into a box and the implications it has for extending visualization research outside the bounds of academia.
Derya Akbaba, Camilla Svensson, Claudia Torelli et al.· 0 citations
The ethics of human-robot interaction (HRI) have been discussed extensively based on three traditional frameworks: deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics. We conducted a mixed within/between experiment to investigate Sparrow's proposed ethical asymmetry hypothesis in human treatment of robots. The moral permissibility of action (MPA) was manipulated as a subject grouping variable, and virtue type (prudence, justice, courage, and temperance) was controlled as a within-subjects factor. We tested moral stimuli using an online questionnaire with Perceived Moral Permissibility of Action (PMPA) and Perceived Virtue Scores (PVS) as response measures. The PVS measure was based on an adaptation of the established Questionnaire on Cardinal Virtues (QCV), while the PMPA was based on Malle et al. [39] work. We found that the MPA significantly influenced the PMPA and perceived virtue scores. The best-fitting model to describe the relationship between PMPA and PVS was cubic, which is symmetrical in nature. Our study did not confirm Sparrow's asymmetry hypothesis. The adaptation of the QCV is expected to have utility for future studies, pending additional psychometric property assessments.
Minyi Wang, Christoph Bartneck, Michael-John Turp et al.· 0 citations
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Oral presentation skills are a critical component of higher education, yet comprehensive datasets capturing real-world student performance across multiple modalities remain scarce. To address this gap, we present SOPHIAS (Student Oral Presentation monitoring for Holistic Insights & Analytics using Sensors), a 12-hour multimodal dataset containing recordings of 50 oral presentations delivered by 65 undergraduate and master's students at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, comprising 46 individual presentations with a mean presentation duration of 9 min 48 s (SD = 33 s) followed by a mean Q&A duration of 6 min 28 s (SD = 3 min 02 s), and 4 group presentations with a mean presentation duration of 14 min 11 s (SD = 1 min 40 s) followed by a mean Q&A duration of 8 min 22 s (SD = 1 min 21 s). SOPHIAS integrates eight timestamped sensor streams from high-definition webcams, ambient and webcam audio, eye-tracking glasses, smartwatch physiological sensors, and clicker, keyboard and mouse interactions. In addition, the dataset includes slides and rubric-based evaluations from teachers, peers, and self-assessments, along with timestamped contextual annotations. The dataset captures presentations conducted in real classroom settings, preserving authentic student behaviors, interactions, and physiological responses. SOPHIAS enables the exploration of relationships between multimodal behavioral and physiological signals and presentation performance, supports the study of peer-assessment and provides a benchmark for developing automated feedback and Multimodal Learning Analytics tools. The dataset is available for research, including both academic and legitimate commercial research and development, under controlled access through Science Data Bank, subject to approval of a Data Usage Agreement (DUA), with code provided through GitHub.
Algorithmic fairness research comes almost entirely out of North America and Western Europe, so we know little about how people elsewhere judge the algorithms they already rely on every day. We asked people in Bangladesh directly: a bilingual (Bangla and English) survey of 199 participants rated fairness across three everyday scenarios -- ride-sharing prices that shift with context, AI beauty filters that reshape appearance, and large language models that handle cultural values differently than a human would.
Four patterns stood out. Context changes the verdict even when the outcome doesn't: a 20% price surge during a medical emergency feels less fair than the identical surge on a casual trip (2.00 vs. 2.17 on a 5-point scale, Wilcoxon p = .006), a small effect uneven across income groups (largest among middle-income participants). People already view surge pricing critically in general; context sharpens the judgment rather than creating it. Demand for transparency, consent, and real user control is close to universal: 85.7% to 90.3% of participants want these protections regardless of gender, income, or prior awareness of algorithmic bias. Beauty-filter harm tracks with self-image more than with social pressure people can easily name; feeling personally affected predicts reduced self-confidence tightly (R^2 = .30, p < .001), though the scale's direction is inferred from context rather than guaranteed by labeled anchors. And among participants who noticed specific instances of LLM cultural bias, many could not say why when asked to elaborate -- recognizing bias and being able to articulate it are different skills.
Outcome-only fairness metrics would miss every one of these patterns.
Ahmed Abdal Shafi Rasel, Ahmed Mustafa Amlan, Tasmim Shajahan Mim· 0 citations
Polis is a popular democratic innovation tool that allows asynchronous citizen engagement through atomic statements: short statements that together describe a complex question, inviting the citizen to vote Agree or Disagree on each. This paper uses 119 conversations with 100 or more participants and an extensive data export, drawn from a wider set of 271 collected processes.
The paper asks what determines the output of such a process. Three parties shape the result. The developer of the platform has made important design choices that restrict the outcome: the number of groups the platform is able to report (restricted to 2--5) and which statements are prioritized.
The convener defines the assignment: the initial statements that set the tone, the policy that accepts or rejects new statements and who can be invited. Finally, the participant works within these boundaries. With access to less than half of the generated statements, they end up responding to more statements when their conversation seems to have an achievable number of statements to complete, than when they are presented with more statements.
Due to choices such as warm path clustering, the exported resulting clustering cannot be reproduced based on the voting data. Conveners may want to re-analyse their own conversations once the process is closed, to consider the data in its entirety, and make their own analysis priorities explicit.
The integration of AI into qualitative design research presents a fundamental tension: how do we leverage AI while preserving the subjective, intuitive judgments that define design expertise? This paper examines this question through a case study of analyzing 20 user responses about video conferencing platforms for educational contexts. We argue that AI sensemaking tools risk flattening the rich data patterns, amplifying contradictory textures of user feedback into sterile categories thereby transforming design research from an interpretive craft into a mechanical sorting exercise (rigid and formal). Through comparative analysis of AI-assisted sensemaking versus human-centered approaches to the same dataset, we identify when algorithmic efficiency enhances understanding and when it diminishes the designer's interpretive agency (uncovering hidden needs, critical enquiry, what if enquiries, making decisions, having trade-offs). We present a framework for augmented sensemaking that positions AI as an instrument for amplifying human judgment rather than replacing it. Our findings suggest that the most valuable role for AI in design research is not to eliminate subjectivity, but to make it more intentional, reflective, and accountable.
Anchoring - the choice of frame of reference for mixed reality (MR) interface elements - is a critical design decision involving trade-offs between accessibility, interaction comfort, and visual interference. Despite its importance, user preferences for anchoring across different mobility contexts and interface properties remain poorly understood, as prior work has largely focused on specific tasks or fixed interface configurations. We address this through a mixed-methods user study in which participants configure anchoring strategies across different mobility conditions and interface types. Combining behavioral analysis with structured qualitative inquiry, we analyze how participants select and reason about anchoring modes. Our results show a clear transition from world-anchored interfaces in stationary contexts to body-anchored interfaces during locomotion. However, no single body anchor consistently dominates, highlighting the personal nature of anchoring strategies. Our qualitative analysis reveals the factors users consider in their anchoring decision, including interface accessibility, stability during interaction, visual clutter, and individual mental models. These findings inform the design of adaptive and controllable MR interfaces and highlight the importance of supporting user customization.
Jo\~ao Belo, Sina Elahimanesh, Anna Maria Feit· 0 citations
Learning to Defer (LtD) extends supervised learning by allowing a Machine Learning (ML) model to defer harder or less confident decisions to a human expert. Despite being geared for human-AI collaboration, LtD strategies neglect the potential negative interference of human cognitive biases. Our contribution is twofold. First, we demonstrate that standard LtD strategies show class-dependent sampling bias in classification tasks in practice, and thus may disproportionately defer the minority classes when applied to imbalanced datasets. Second, we show that such asymmetries in task delegation may trigger human biases, ultimately leading to poorer downstream decision making. Specifically, we conduct a user study ($N=226$) where participants complete a classification task on a set of deferred items, with conditions presenting different levels of class imbalance. Our results show that participants exposed to a highly imbalanced rejection set achieved lower classification accuracy in the majority class compared to those exposed to a more balanced set, regardless of which class constituted the majority. Exploratory analyses suggest that this may be an instance of the Test-taker's effect, which stems from a mismatch between the actual distribution of classes and the participants' expectations about that distribution. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings for the deployment of LtD algorithms.
Dario Pesenti, Alessandro Bogani, Stefano Teso et al.· 0 citations
Creative professionals rarely design for themselves--they design for audiences whose preferences they must anticipate. Yet current text-to-image exploration tools derive diversity entirely from the designer's own input--their prompts, their chosen dimensions, their search queries--confining exploration to what the designer already knows to look for. We present FocusGen, an interactive system that introduces external perspectives into visual design exploration through a "virtual focus group" of simulated persona agents. In contrast to prior persona systems in which multiple agents converge as critics on a single evolving artifact, FocusGen uses personas as parallel generators: each agent--constructed from demographic data, a procedurally generated backstory, and aesthetic preferences elicited through interviews--independently drives an iterative generation loop that produces its own visual concept, transforming one design brief into a spectrum of audience-conditioned directions. With real human participants, we confirm that the iterative refinement loop produces outputs people prefer over zero-shot generation. With synthetic agents at scale, we show that persona conditioning yields higher visual diversity than a generic-assistant baseline--measured by CLIP distance and corroborated by human perceptual judgments--and that open-ended preference interviews yield more diverse outputs than structured ones for both human and synthetic cohorts, while also revealing that agent cohorts recover only part of the diversity of comparable human cohorts. A qualitative study with 16 creative professionals suggests FocusGen helps designers discover unanticipated directions, overcome fixation, and probe audience contexts--while surfacing stereotyping risks that we analyze. We position FocusGen as a divergence scaffold for early-stage ideation rather than a substitute for audience research.
Jaewon Choi, Helena Vasconcelos, Hyun Lee et al.· 0 citations
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly equipped with augmented reasoning capabilities to generate rationales that support human decision-making. Yet these text-dense rationales often impose substantial cognitive burdens. Building on a formative co-design study that identified user preferences for non-linear reasoning representations, we developed Graphionale as a testbed for empirically studying argument-map-style rationale visualization. This system transforms linear LLM rationales into interactive, multi-level graphs. It explicitly structures logical relationships (e.g., conclusions, premises, support, and objections), while further extracting entities and relations within each statement to construct condensed node-link representations. We conduct a large-scale online user study (N = 204) to examine when graphical rationales are more effective than textual ones, across varying task modality (verbal vs. visual reasoning), rationale format (textual vs. graphical), and question difficulty (easy vs. hard). Our results show that graphical rationales do not help uniformly: they improve trust calibration for verbal reasoning yet feel more cognitively demanding and less satisfying; for visual reasoning, they impair calibration yet feel more engaging and helpful. In each modality, the format that better supports calibrated decisions is not the one users prefer, highlighting that matching rationale format to task modality is key to effective AI explanation design. Our findings contribute empirical design knowledge about when and how graphical rationales support human decision making, and inform the next-generation reasoning-aware AI interfaces.
Xinru Wang, Zhexuan Ma, Ming Yin et al.· 0 citations
Known for his clear and elegant writing style, Bertsekas shaped fields from control and optimization to large-scale computation and artificial intelligence.
The professor of physics and inaugural director of the NSF AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions will lead LNS and continue his research in particle physics.
