Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Abdallah El Ali

Publications and source records attributed to Abdallah El Ali.

28 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Trusting the Search: Unraveling Human Trust in Health Information from Google and ChatGPT

People increasingly rely on online sources for health information seeking due to their convenience and timeliness, traditionally using search engines like Google as the primary search agent. Recently, the emergence of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made Large Language Model (LLM) powered conversational agents such as ChatGPT a viable alternative for health information search. However, while trust is crucial for adopting the online health advice, the factors influencing people's trust judgments in health information provided by LLM-powered conversational agents remain unclear. To address this, we conducted a mixed-methods, within-subjects lab study (N=21) to explore how interactions with different agents (ChatGPT vs. Google) across three health search tasks influence participants' trust judgments of the search results as well as the search agents themselves. Our key findings showed that: (a) participants' trust levels in ChatGPT were significantly higher than Google in the context of health information seeking; (b) there is a significant correlation between trust in health-related information and trust in the search agent, however only for Google; (c) the type of search tasks did not affect participants' perceived trust; and (d) participants' prior knowledge, the style of information presentation, and the interactive manner of using search agents were key determinants of trust in the health-related information. Our study taps into differences in trust perceptions when using traditional search engines compared to LLM-powered conversational agents. We highlight the potential role LLMs play in health-related information-seeking contexts, where they excel as stepping stones for further search. We contribute key factors and considerations for ensuring effective and reliable personal health information seeking in the age of generative AI.

cs.HC↗

ShareYourReality: Investigating Haptic Feedback and Agency in Virtual Avatar Co-embodiment

Virtual co-embodiment enables two users to share a single avatar in Virtual Reality (VR). During such experiences, the illusion of shared motion control can break during joint-action activities, highlighting the need for position-aware feedback mechanisms. Drawing on the perceptual crossing paradigm, we explore how haptics can enable non-verbal coordination between co-embodied participants. In a within-subjects study (20 participant pairs), we examined the effects of vibrotactile haptic feedback (None, Present) and avatar control distribution (25-75%, 50-50%, 75-25%) across two VR reaching tasks (Targeted, Free-choice) on participants Sense of Agency (SoA), co-presence, body ownership, and motion synchrony. We found (a) lower SoA in the free-choice with haptics than without, (b) higher SoA during the shared targeted task, (c) co-presence and body ownership were significantly higher in the free-choice task, (d) players hand motions synchronized more in the targeted task. We provide cautionary considerations when including haptic feedback mechanisms for avatar co-embodiment experiences.

cs.HC↗

Transparent AI Disclosure Obligations: Who, What, When, Where, Why, How

Advances in Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) are resulting in AI-generated media output that is (nearly) indistinguishable from human-created content. This can drastically impact users and the media sector, especially given global risks of misinformation. While the currently discussed European AI Act aims at addressing these risks through Article 52's AI transparency obligations, its interpretation and implications remain unclear. In this early work, we adopt a participatory AI approach to derive key questions based on Article 52's disclosure obligations. We ran two workshops with researchers, designers, and engineers across disciplines (N=16), where participants deconstructed Article 52's relevant clauses using the 5W1H framework. We contribute a set of 149 questions clustered into five themes and 18 sub-themes. We believe these can not only help inform future legal developments and interpretations of Article 52, but also provide a starting point for Human-Computer Interaction research to (re-)examine disclosure transparency from a human-centered AI lens.

cs.HC↗

User Experience Design Professionals' Perceptions of Generative Artificial Intelligence

Among creative professionals, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has sparked excitement over its capabilities and fear over unanticipated consequences. How does GenAI impact User Experience Design (UXD) practice, and are fears warranted? We interviewed 20 UX Designers, with diverse experience and across companies (startups to large enterprises). We probed them to characterize their practices, and sample their attitudes, concerns, and expectations. We found that experienced designers are confident in their originality, creativity, and empathic skills, and find GenAI's role as assistive. They emphasized the unique human factors of "enjoyment" and "agency", where humans remain the arbiters of "AI alignment". However, skill degradation, job replacement, and creativity exhaustion can adversely impact junior designers. We discuss implications for human-GenAI collaboration, specifically copyright and ownership, human creativity and agency, and AI literacy and access. Through the lens of responsible and participatory AI, we contribute a deeper understanding of GenAI fears and opportunities for UXD.

cs.CY↗

PhysioCHI: Towards Best Practices for Integrating Physiological Signals in HCI

Recently, we saw a trend toward using physiological signals in interactive systems. These signals, offering deep insights into users' internal states and health, herald a new era for HCI. However, as this is an interdisciplinary approach, many challenges arise for HCI researchers, such as merging diverse disciplines, from understanding physiological functions to design expertise. Also, isolated research endeavors limit the scope and reach of findings. This workshop aims to bridge these gaps, fostering cross-disciplinary discussions on usability, open science, and ethics tied to physiological data in HCI. In this workshop, we will discuss best practices for embedding physiological signals in interactive systems. Through collective efforts, we seek to craft a guiding document for best practices in physiological HCI research, ensuring that it remains grounded in shared principles and methodologies as the field advances.

cs.HC↗

Designing for Affective Augmentation: Assistive, Harmful, or Unfamiliar?

In what capacity are affective augmentations helpful to humans, and what risks (if any) do they pose? In this position paper, we outline three works on affective augmentation systems, where our studies suggest these systems have the ability to influence our cognitive, affective, and (social) bodily perceptions in perhaps unusual ways. We provide considerations on whether these systems, outside clinical settings, are assistive, harmful, or as of now largely unfamiliar to users.

cs.HC↗

Towards SocialVR: Evaluating a Novel Technology for Watching Videos Together

Social VR enables people to interact over distance with others in real-time. It allows remote people, typically represented as avatars, to communicate and perform activities together in a join shared virtual environment, extending the capabilities of traditional social platforms like Facebook and Netflix. This paper explores the benefits and drawbacks provided by a lightweight and low-cost Social VR platform (SocialVR), in which users are captured by several cameras and reconstructed in real-time. In particular, the paper contributes with (1) the design and evaluation of an experimental protocol for Social VR experiences; (2) the report of a production workflow for this new type of media experiences; and (3) the results of experiments with both end-users (N=15 pairs) and professionals (N=25) to evaluate the potential of the SocialVR platform. Results from the questionnaires and semi-structured interviews show that end-users rated positively towards the experiences provided by the SocialVR platform, which enabled them to sense emotions and communicate effortlessly. End-users perceived the photo-realistic experience of SocialVR similar to face-to-face scenarios and appreciated this new creative medium. From a commercial perspective, professionals confirmed the potential of this communication medium and encourage further research for the adoption of the platform in the commercial landscape

cs.MM↗

Measuring, Understanding, and Classifying News Media Sympathy on Twitter after Crisis Events

This paper investigates bias in coverage between Western and Arab media on Twitter after the November 2015 Beirut and Paris terror attacks. Using two Twitter datasets covering each attack, we investigate how Western and Arab media differed in coverage bias, sympathy bias, and resulting information propagation. We crowdsourced sympathy and sentiment labels for 2,390 tweets across four languages (English, Arabic, French, German), built a regression model to characterize sympathy, and thereafter trained a deep convolutional neural network to predict sympathy. Key findings show: (a) both events were disproportionately covered (b) Western media exhibited less sympathy, where each media coverage was more sympathetic towards the country affected in their respective region (c) Sympathy predictions supported ground truth analysis that Western media was less sympathetic than Arab media (d) Sympathetic tweets do not spread any further. We discuss our results in light of global news flow, Twitter affordances, and public perception impact.

cs.SI↗

VapeTracker: Tracking Vapor Consumption to Help E-cigarette Users Quit

Despite current controversy over e-cigarettes as a smoking cessation aid, we present early work based on a web survey (N=249) that shows that some e-cigarette users (46.2%) want to quit altogether, and that behavioral feedback that can be tracked can fulfill that purpose. Based on our survey findings, we designed VapeTracker, an early prototype that can attach to any e-cigarette device to track vaping activity. We discuss our future research on vaping cessation, addressing how to improve our VapeTracker prototype, ambient feedback mechanisms, and the future inclusion of behavior change models to support quitting e-cigarettes.

cs.HC↗