Projects

Community Oversight of Privacy and Security (CO-oPS)

We explore the concept of community oversight in helping people collectively make privacy and security decisions. CO-oPS is a mobile app that allows a small community of users to share their Android app and permission decisions, allowing them to learn from each other's decisions.

Contact: Heather Lipford

Making & Accessibility: A Systematic Literature Review

The making phenomenon has shown great potential in the design and fabrication of assistive devices and the empowerment of makers with disabilities using modern fabrication tools (e.g., 3D printers, laser cutters, CNC machines), small computing/electronics (e.g., Arduino, Raspberry Pi, sensors), and related crafting techniques. To better understand the relationship between people with disabilities and making, we conducted a systematic literature review and highlighted important aspects and trends in recent research with different communities, and the adopted methods for inclusive design, development, and evaluation

Contact: David Wilson, Saquib Sarwar

Publication: Systematic Literature Review on Making and Accessibility (ASSETS 2022)

User Interface Security Assessment (UISA) Method

The User Interface Security Assessment (UISA) is a method for developers and designers to assess the security implications of interface designs. The method allows stakeholders to consider and measure usable security of an application, to prioritize or characterize design changes.

Contact: Heather Lipford

Security Adoption Process Model

The Security Adoption Process Model (SAPM) is a data-derived model of each of six steps that are common to people's narratives of secuirty awareness and action (seen left), along with each step's associated social influences (left), and obstacles to moving forward (not pictured). The ultimate goal is to help designers and researchers to identify needs of specific users and target interventions by step of adoption, rather than defaulting to “one size fits all” strategies. We are now designing experiments and field studies that are guided by this model and the associated step -classification algorithm.

Contact: Cori Faklaris

Metaphorical Design for Embodied and Mobile Interaction

Well known metaphors play an explanatory role in human-computer interaction (HCI) and support users in understanding an unfamiliar object with references to a familiar object, for example the desktop metaphor. Metaphor can also support designers in forming and exploring new concepts during the process of designing. We developed metaphorical concepts for embodied and mobile interaction designs that can support designers and establish new design spaces: interactive system as device, interactive system as robot, and interactive system as friend. These metaphors provide a tool for designers to explore designs that engage users' existing mental models from previous HCI experiences. We expand on each metaphor using analogical reasoning to define exploratory design spaces for embodied and mobile interaction.

Contact: Mary Lou Maher

Gauging Public Opinion with Stance Detection in Twitter Data

Stance detection on social media platforms in general, and on Twitter in particular, has received substantial attention in recent years as an approach to determine the standpoint of users towards a target of interest such as a person or a topic from Twitter data. While interviewing, surveying, and polling a representative population of the public can provide reliable data for the analysis of public opinion, these methods suffer from various limitation such as they are costly and cannot be collected retrospectively. On the other hand, detecting and analyzing social media trends through Natural Language Processing approaches such as text classification can offer a valuable alternative, or a complement, for gathering, analyzing, monitoring, and understanding public opinion on emerging issues. For more information, contact Ali Almadan (aalmadan@uncc.edu)

Pique: Personalized Curiosity Engine

Pique builds a representation of the learner’s interests and knowledge, and uses this to recommend sequences of learning content to increase motivation and learning in a surprise walk manner. The core of the recommender is a computational model of novelty. This project provides the computational models for a small business project called SmartGirlsHQ.

Contact: Mary Lou Maher (m.maher@uncc.edu)

Siddiqui, S.; Maher, M.; Najjar, N.; Mohseni, M. and Grace, K. (2022). Personalized Curiosity Engine (Pique): A Curiosity Inspiring Cognitive System for Student Directed Learning. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU, pages 17-28. DOI: 10.5220/0010883200003182 (Best Paper Award). https://www.scitepress.org/PublicationsDetail.aspx?ID=cA8cJ/6ctDw=&t=1

SerenCat: A Serendipity Recommender in Libraries

Serendipity is a concept associated with unexpected discoveries that are valuable. However, most existing recommendation and information retrieval algorithms, including those used by common search tools and social media, do not include serendipity as an element they use to choose which content to show. Instead, the criteria used to build and evaluate these algorithms rewards choices that reinforce what people already know or believe, rather than promoting unexpected, serendipitous discoveries. This NSF-funded project's goal is to make progress on how to predict and foster serendipity when people interact with information online. One key challenge is how to measure potential serendipity; to do this, we will create measures that capture important subcomponents of serendipity such as surprise, value, and curiosity. Another is how to develop algorithms that promote serendipity while still addressing people's needs for relevant information; toward this, we will create algorithms that balance relevance and serendipity over time and that develop better models of the values and curiosity of the people who use them. Doing this promises to make contributions to the study of recommender systems, information retrieval, and human-computer interaction, along with developing real tools to support serendipity and knowledge discovery in libraries.

Contact for more information: Xi (Sunshine) Niu (xniu2@uncc.edu)

Understanding Student Risks and Success: Interactive Learning Analytics with Storytelling

Learning Analytics (LAs) has had a growing interest by academics, researchers and administrators motivated by the use of data to identify and intervene with students at risk of under-performance or discontinuation. Effective presentation of interactive visualizations for decision support is a major issue when dealing with large volumes of data as in LAs. Typically the data is presented in dashboard interfaces using charts and graphs. This project claims that storytelling is a complement to the presentation of the aggregate analysis and dashboard style of visualization. In addition, this project develops Finding Interesting stoRies about STudents (FIRST) system. FIRST is an interface built for academic advisors and instructors that combines interactive storytelling and aggregate analytics of student data. FIRST allows advisors to modify and explore an unsupervised temporal data model developed to describe and identify clusters of students that are predominantly associated with success or risk. The storytelling part of FIRST presents a selected individual student's story to the advisors. These stories are automatically generated giving advisors the ability to understand and interpret individual student’s performance beyond the aggregate analysis.

Contact for more information: Mary Lou Maher (m.maher@uncc.edu)

Informing end-users' security and privacy perceptions, concerns, behaviors, and needs in the smart home

Smart homes are more connected than ever before, with a variety of commercial internet of things devices available. The use of these devices introduces new security and privacy risks in the home and needs for helping users to understand and mitigate those risks by providing them some level of control over their data. For doing so, it is necessary to have a thorough understanding of smart home users' security and privacy perceptions, behaviors, preferences, and needs, which is still lacking in the literature. In this project, we examine the current state of end-user knowledge of smart home devices data practices, available privacy controls, and their security and privacy concerns and behaviors. The goal is to identify gaps in the current privacy control and awareness mechanisms by comparing those against end-users perceptions, concerns, and needs and provide guidelines for designing such mechanisms to assist users in making better security and privacy decisions in the smart home.

Find more about the project here

ESIDE: Educational Security in the IDE

ESIDE is a proof-of-concept Eclipse plug-in for Java, which integrates secure programming support and education into the IDE. ESIDE works in the background and provides instructional intervention the moment students write insecure code. In this way, ESIDE enhances the students' learning experience as they can directly apply the secure programming lessons they learned in the classroom to their coding practices.

ESIDE works by scanning a selected project for code patterns that match predefined heuristic rules of security vulnerabilities. Though there have been many code-related vulnerabilities in Java, currently ESIDE includes only a few of the most common, namely vulnerabilities caused by the lack of input validation, output encoding, and dynamic SQL statements. If left unresolved, these code patterns can lead to real and common security vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL Injection.

Find more about the project here and here

CCI Makerspace

The CCI Makerspace is run by HCI faculty Dr. Wilson. The space is equipped with 3D printers, laser cutter, sewing machines, and electronics and is open to students from all disciplines. It is not only a site for HCI research to occur in the form of novel interactive technologies (such as in the Interaction Design Studio class), but it is also the object of HCI research related to Maker culture, Maker mindset, and learning experiences that happen around making.

Here

Statement Making

Statement Making is a campus-wide community event that culminates in a digital fabrication fashion show where participants "make a statement" through wearable technology. The event has been run for three consecutive years, lead by an HCI researcher in collaboration with the student manager of the UNCC Arts Fab Lab. Participation ranges from technological innovation, interaction design, raising awareness about a matter of concern, exploring technological advances in sustainable clothing fabrication, and personal expression such as through cosplay. As HCI researchers, we are interested in the impact of such an event on campus maker culture and empowering individuals.

Here

Makerspace Normative Theory Project

Driven by an ethnographic account of the lack of guidance for makerspace leaders and a desire to address some of the well-known critiques of the making phenomenon as technosolutionist, this research project asks what should be happening in the making world? As makerspace leaders ourselves, what should we be fostering or cultivating? If we extend HCI's commitment to making as a site of democratization and participation in technological production, how do we ensure that the output of the making phenomenon is humane? Through a series of empirical studies, we investigate the nature of mindsets and practices that live in the maker world but resemble in some way sensitivities of the HCI world. These studies, combined with a theoretical investigation of the values in making and HCI, are contributing to our developing normative theory of making. The theory will provide much needed guidance for future researchers, leaders, and makers to generate versions of making that mitigate the critiques and fulfill the promises of democratization and participation.

For more information, contact Johanna Okerlund (jokerlun@uncc.edu)

Interaction Design to Increase User Experience in Human-AI Co-Creative Systems

Human-AI co-creativity involves humans and AI collaborating on a shared creative product as partners. In a creative collaboration, interaction dynamics, such as communication, turn-taking and contribution type, are the driving forces of the co-creative process. Therefore the interaction model is an essential component in co-creative systems. There is relatively little research about interaction design in the co-creativity field, which is reflected in a lack of focus on interaction design in many existing co-creative systems. This project explores the importance of interaction design and develops tools to design effective interaction in co-creative systems. This project also investigates the impact of different interaction designs on user experience in Human-AI Co-creative systems.

Contact: Jeba Rezwana (jrezwana@uncc.edu)

NatureNet

NatureNet is a citizen science system designed for collecting biodiversity data from parks, creeks, backyards, and other natural settings. Users are encouraged to participate in the design of the system in addition to collecting data about the environment at the park. NatureNet is developed as a platform spanning both desktop and mobile devices, including a website, iOS app, and an Android app. Supporting these systems allows people to contribute regardless of the devices that they have available.

Contact: Mary Lou Maher

NatureNet

DInKs

DInKs, Digital Interactive Keys, which re-conceptualizes the traditional QWERTY keyboard style interaction as input and output using tangible digital devices along with a larger display device. DInKs are a creativity support tool that is made familiar by providing keyboard-like input. However, the user experience is changed to include interactive content on the keys and composition as physical movement of the keys. Since the Keys of DInKs are programmable, the possible applications for creative composition are unlimited, for example, DInKs can be programmed for the creative composition of elements that include letters, words, images, shapes, and sounds.

Contact: Mary Lou Maher

DlnKs

The Impact of Ads on User Attention During Permission Authorization

Advertisements are an integral part of websites and play an important role in generating revenue. Many websites also present users with permission authorization windows. For instance, Facebook’s third-party application authorization window is displayed when playing a game on various gaming websites. Although researchers have investigated the impact of advertisements on user frustration and their ability to process content, the extent to which advertisements distract the users during permission authorization has not been explored. This paper investigates the impact of advertisement’s presence and its content type on user’s attention during permission authorization. We conducted a between-subjects experiment on the mockup of a popular gaming website that contained banner advertisements. The control group was presented with no advertisements above the permission authorization dialog. Whereas, the treatment group was presented with static or animated advertisements. Eye-gaze tracking was performed while participants interacted with the applications. We observed that the presence of animated advertisements that contain sound significantly distracted participants away from the permission authorization window. Our findings suggest that increasing the number of distraction elements (e.g., animation and sound) increases the likelihood of users ignoring text on important windows such as permission authorization windows.

Contact: Elham Al Qahtani (ealqahta@uncc.edu)

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