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Jun 04, 2024
Much of the research in social computing analyzes data from social media platforms, which may inherently carry biases. An overlooked source of such bias is the over-representation of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) populations, which might not accurately mirror the global demographic diversity. We evaluated the dependence on WEIRD populations in research presented at the AAAI ICWSM conference; the only venue whose proceedings are fully dedicated to social computing research. We did so by analyzing 494 papers published from 2018 to 2022, which included full research papers, dataset papers and posters. After filtering out papers that analyze synthetic datasets or those lacking clear country of origin, we were left with 420 papers from which 188 participants in a crowdsourcing study with full manual validation extracted data for the WEIRD scores computation. This data was then used to adapt existing WEIRD metrics to be applicable for social media data. We found that 37% of these papers focused solely on data from Western countries. This percentage is significantly less than the percentages observed in research from CHI (76%) and FAccT (84%) conferences, suggesting a greater diversity of dataset origins within ICWSM. However, the studies at ICWSM still predominantly examine populations from countries that are more Educated, Industrialized, and Rich in comparison to those in FAccT, with a special note on the 'Democratic' variable reflecting political freedoms and rights. This points out the utility of social media data in shedding light on findings from countries with restricted political freedoms. Based on these insights, we recommend extensions of current "paper checklists" to include considerations about the WEIRD bias and call for the community to broaden research inclusivity by encouraging the use of diverse datasets from underrepresented regions.
Evaluating Fairness in Self-supervised and Supervised Models for Sequential Data
Jan 03, 2024Self-supervised learning (SSL) has become the de facto training paradigm of large models where pre-training is followed by supervised fine-tuning using domain-specific data and labels. Hypothesizing that SSL models would learn more generic, hence less biased, representations, this study explores the impact of pre-training and fine-tuning strategies on fairness (i.e., performing equally on different demographic breakdowns). Motivated by human-centric applications on real-world timeseries data, we interpret inductive biases on the model, layer, and metric levels by systematically comparing SSL models to their supervised counterparts. Our findings demonstrate that SSL has the capacity to achieve performance on par with supervised methods while significantly enhancing fairness--exhibiting up to a 27% increase in fairness with a mere 1% loss in performance through self-supervision. Ultimately, this work underscores SSL's potential in human-centric computing, particularly high-stakes, data-scarce application domains like healthcare.
Dream Content Discovery from Reddit with an Unsupervised Mixed-Method Approach
Jul 09, 2023
Dreaming is a fundamental but not fully understood part of human experience that can shed light on our thought patterns. Traditional dream analysis practices, while popular and aided by over 130 unique scales and rating systems, have limitations. Mostly based on retrospective surveys or lab studies, they struggle to be applied on a large scale or to show the importance and connections between different dream themes. To overcome these issues, we developed a new, data-driven mixed-method approach for identifying topics in free-form dream reports through natural language processing. We tested this method on 44,213 dream reports from Reddit's r/Dreams subreddit, where we found 217 topics, grouped into 22 larger themes: the most extensive collection of dream topics to date. We validated our topics by comparing it to the widely-used Hall and van de Castle scale. Going beyond traditional scales, our method can find unique patterns in different dream types (like nightmares or recurring dreams), understand topic importance and connections, and observe changes in collective dream experiences over time and around major events, like the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent Russo-Ukrainian war. We envision that the applications of our method will provide valuable insights into the intricate nature of dreaming.
Beyond Accuracy: A Critical Review of Fairness in Machine Learning for Mobile and Wearable Computing
Mar 27, 2023
The field of mobile, wearable, and ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) is undergoing a revolutionary integration of machine learning. Devices can now diagnose diseases, predict heart irregularities, and unlock the full potential of human cognition. However, the underlying algorithms are not immune to biases with respect to sensitive attributes (e.g., gender, race), leading to discriminatory outcomes. The research communities of HCI and AI-Ethics have recently started to explore ways of reporting information about datasets to surface and, eventually, counter those biases. The goal of this work is to explore the extent to which the UbiComp community has adopted such ways of reporting and highlight potential shortcomings. Through a systematic review of papers published in the Proceedings of the ACM Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT) journal over the past 5 years (2018-2022), we found that progress on algorithmic fairness within the UbiComp community lags behind. Our findings show that only a small portion (5%) of published papers adheres to modern fairness reporting, while the overwhelming majority thereof focuses on accuracy or error metrics. In light of these findings, our work provides practical guidelines for the design and development of ubiquitous technologies that not only strive for accuracy but also for fairness.
Toward Human-Centered Responsible Artificial Intelligence: A Review of CHI Research and Industry Toolkits
Feb 26, 2023
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to advance rapidly, it becomes increasingly important to consider AI's ethical and societal implications. In this paper, we present a bottom-up mapping of the current state of research in Human-Centered Responsible AI (HCR-AI) by thematically reviewing and analyzing 27 CHI research papers and 19 toolkits from industry and academia. Our results show that the current research in HCR-AI places a heavy emphasis on explainability, fairness, privacy, and security. We also found that there is space to research accountability in AI and build usable tools for non-experts to audit AI. While the CHI community has started to champion the well-being of individuals directly or indirectly impacted by AI, more research and toolkits are still required to address the long-term effects of AI on individuals, societies, and natural resources (human flourishing and sustainability).
Human-Centered Responsible Artificial Intelligence: Current & Future Trends
Feb 16, 2023
In recent years, the CHI community has seen significant growth in research on Human-Centered Responsible Artificial Intelligence. While different research communities may use different terminology to discuss similar topics, all of this work is ultimately aimed at developing AI that benefits humanity while being grounded in human rights and ethics, and reducing the potential harms of AI. In this special interest group, we aim to bring together researchers from academia and industry interested in these topics to map current and future research trends to advance this important area of research by fostering collaboration and sharing ideas.
Epidemic Dreams: Dreaming about health during the COVID-19 pandemic
Feb 02, 2022
The continuity hypothesis of dreams suggests that the content of dreams is continuous with the dreamer's waking experiences. Given the unprecedented nature of the experiences during COVID-19, we studied the continuity hypothesis in the context of the pandemic. We implemented a deep-learning algorithm that can extract mentions of medical conditions from text and applied it to two datasets collected during the pandemic: 2,888 dream reports (dreaming life experiences), and 57M tweets mentioning the pandemic (waking life experiences). The health expressions common to both sets were typical COVID-19 symptoms (e.g., cough, fever, and anxiety), suggesting that dreams reflected people's real-world experiences. The health expressions that distinguished the two sets reflected differences in thought processes: expressions in waking life reflected a linear and logical thought process and, as such, described realistic symptoms or related disorders (e.g., nasal pain, SARS, H1N1); those in dreaming life reflected a thought process closer to the visual and emotional spheres and, as such, described either conditions unrelated to the virus (e.g., maggots, deformities, snakebites), or conditions of surreal nature (e.g., teeth falling out, body crumbling into sand). Our results confirm that dream reports represent an understudied yet valuable source of people's health experiences in the real world.
Anticipatory Detection of Compulsive Body-focused Repetitive Behaviors with Wearables
Jun 21, 2021
Body-focused repetitive behaviors (BFRBs), like face-touching or skin-picking, are hand-driven behaviors which can damage one's appearance, if not identified early and treated. Technology for automatic detection is still under-explored, with few previous works being limited to wearables with single modalities (e.g., motion). Here, we propose a multi-sensory approach combining motion, orientation, and heart rate sensors to detect BFRBs. We conducted a feasibility study in which participants (N=10) were exposed to BFRBs-inducing tasks, and analyzed 380 mins of signals under an extensive evaluation of sensing modalities, cross-validation methods, and observation windows. Our models achieved an AUC > 0.90 in distinguishing BFRBs, which were more evident in observation windows 5 mins prior to the behavior as opposed to 1-min ones. In a follow-up qualitative survey, we found that not only the timing of detection matters but also models need to be context-aware, when designing just-in-time interventions to prevent BFRBs.
The Healthy States of America: Creating a Health Taxonomy with Social Media
Mar 01, 2021
Since the uptake of social media, researchers have mined online discussions to track the outbreak and evolution of specific diseases or chronic conditions such as influenza or depression. To broaden the set of diseases under study, we developed a Deep Learning tool for Natural Language Processing that extracts mentions of virtually any medical condition or disease from unstructured social media text. With that tool at hand, we processed Reddit and Twitter posts, analyzed the clusters of the two resulting co-occurrence networks of conditions, and discovered that they correspond to well-defined categories of medical conditions. This resulted in the creation of the first comprehensive taxonomy of medical conditions automatically derived from online discussions. We validated the structure of our taxonomy against the official International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-11), finding matches of our clusters with 20 official categories, out of 22. Based on the mentions of our taxonomy's sub-categories on Reddit posts geo-referenced in the U.S., we were then able to compute disease-specific health scores. As opposed to counts of disease mentions or counts with no knowledge of our taxonomy's structure, we found that our disease-specific health scores are causally linked with the officially reported prevalence of 18 conditions.
Jane Jacobs in the Sky: Predicting Urban Vitality with Open Satellite Data
Jan 28, 2021
The presence of people in an urban area throughout the day -- often called 'urban vitality' -- is one of the qualities world-class cities aspire to the most, yet it is one of the hardest to achieve. Back in the 1970s, Jane Jacobs theorized urban vitality and found that there are four conditions required for the promotion of life in cities: diversity of land use, small block sizes, the mix of economic activities, and concentration of people. To build proxies for those four conditions and ultimately test Jane Jacobs's theory at scale, researchers have had to collect both private and public data from a variety of sources, and that took decades. Here we propose the use of one single source of data, which happens to be publicly available: Sentinel-2 satellite imagery. In particular, since the first two conditions (diversity of land use and small block sizes) are visible to the naked eye from satellite imagery, we tested whether we could automatically extract them with a state-of-the-art deep-learning framework and whether, in the end, the extracted features could predict vitality. In six Italian cities for which we had call data records, we found that our framework is able to explain on average 55% of the variance in urban vitality extracted from those records.