Investigating Feature-Level Social Media Use and Mental Health and Well-Being

Maladaptive use of smartphones and social media is a growing issue that has received considerable attention from researchers both to map out its psychological and behavioural processes, and to develop interventions to help users regulate their use at either the device or app level. However, heterogeneous findings about the relationships between maladaptive use, mental health conditions, well-being, and patterns of smartphone use suggest the need for more nuanced examinations of feature-level usage patterns. In this project we aim to develop a nuanced understanding of the feature-level patterns of maladaptive social media use, which can contribute to new approaches to interventions and ultimately improve users' well-being.

Rethinking Human-Computer Interaction's Role in Capitalism and Technology Hype Cycles

The history of information technology development has been characterized by consecutive waves of boom and bust, as new technologies come to market, fuel surges of investment, and then stabilize towards maturity. However, in recent decades, the acceleration of such technology hype cycles has resulted in the prioritization of massive capital generation at the expense of longterm sustainability, resulting in a cascade of negative social, political, and environmental consequences. Despite the negative impacts of this pattern, academic research, and in particular HCI research, is not immune from such hype cycles, often contributing substantial amounts of literature to the discourse surrounding a wave of hype. Through a critique of technology hype cycles and an examination of research practices that can resist them, we aim to rethink HCI's role in unsustainable capitalist systems of production.

AI as Extraherics: Fostering Higher-order Thinking Skills in Human-AI Interaction

Project led by Koji Yatani: As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies continue to evolve, concerns have arisen about over-reliance on AI, which may lead to human deskilling and diminished cognitive engagement. Over-reliance on AI can also lead users to accept information given by AI uncritically, resulting in negative consequences, such as being misled by hallucinated content. We introduce extraheric AI, a concept for human-AI interaction that fosters users' higher-order thinking during task completion. Unlike dominant human-AI interaction designs, which temporarily replace or increase human cognition, extraheric AI fosters cognitive engagement by posing questions or providing alternative perspectives to users, rather than direct answers. We aim to ensure that human cognitive skills remain a crucial element in AI-integrated environments, promoting a balanced partnership between humans and AI.

SoundTraveller: Interactive Timbre Exploration Support for Sound Authoring with Synthesizers

Timbre exploration and creation are key tasks in electronic music composition. Modern synthesizers can produce thousands of unique timbres, but this complexity hinders musicians’ ability to explore these timbres effectively. We developed SoundTraveller, an interactive timbre exploration system aimed at fostering electronic musicians’ creative processes. SoundTraveller allows the user to explore the timbral space using two modes: evolutionary and morphing, with which they can generate hundreds of unique timbres without the need to edit individual parameters. By abstracting away from technical parameters and providing flexible timbre explorations, SoundTraveller offers users new and inspiring ways of exploring timbre, supporting their creativity in electronic music composition. But our results also suggest that the entangled nature of SoundTraveller shifted the balance of agency between the user and system, pointing towards the complex nature of shared agency in creativity support systems.

Other Selected Publications