Assistant Professor Yun Huang presented her research at the 22nd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2019), which was held November 9-13 in Austin, Texas. CSCW is the premier venue for experts from industry and academia to explore the technical, social, material, and theoretical challenges of designing technology to support collaborative work and life activities.
Huang presented the paper, "Higher Education Check-Ins: Exploring the User Experience of Hybrid Location Sensing," in which she and Syracuse University graduate students explored how university students apply automatic (enabled by Bluetooth Low Energy beacon) and manual location-sharing services to conduct check-ins for an academic purpose, such as students sharing class attendance with their instructor. According to Huang, their findings showed that several social, technological, and psychological factors impacted the students' use of different check-in mechanisms. Using the check-in system that was designed and developed by Huang's research team, students became punctual for their classes; some showed up earlier to leave a good impression on their instructor; and they felt a greater sense of responsibility for taking their class attendance. The research showed how a collaborative system had the potential of promoting students' sense of belonging on campus.
Huang also presented outcomes of recent research collaborations at two CSCW preconference workshops, "The Future of Work(places)" and "Good Systems: Ethical AI for CSCW."
"One workshop was with scholars Dede Ma and Pengyi Zhang from Peking University in China on emotional experiences of ridesharing drivers," Huang said. "The other was a workshop with Yi-Chieh Lee, a computer science PhD student at Illinois, and Naomi Yamashita of NTT Communication Science Laboratories, on ethical concerns of self-disclosure in chatbot AI interaction."
Huang's research areas include social computing, human-computer interaction, mobile computing, and crowdsourcing. Before joining Illinois, she was a faculty member in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University and a postdoc fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her PhD from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. She earned her bachelor's degree from the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University, in Beijing, China.