arXiv subjects

David T. Lee

Publications and source records attributed to David T. Lee.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

From Anonymous Shapes to Named Places: A Tool for Braille and Place-Semantic Annotation of Tactile Maps

On a 3D-printed tactile map, a building felt under the finger is an anonymous shape: touch alone cannot tell which footprint is which, and a spoken description cannot reliably point to one shape at one place. We present a web-based tool that lets a sighted helper click to add on-shape Braille labels to an already-generated map model, downstream of the geometry generator so that whoever knows the reader and the local Braille standard does the labeling. The tool offers click-based OpenStreetMap matching, hand-editable abbreviation that shrinks a name to fit a footprint, and print-safe dot geometry with a review step that catches anomalies before printing. We demonstrate it on five printed maps of different place types, from a downtown core to a college campus and a small dining mall. In formative sessions in which ten BLV readers compared an unlabeled print with an annotated one, four read Braille fluently, so we treat Braille as one output among several rather than the only one. The tool's core is the link between coordinates, geometry, and a place's semantics, which can drive an audio readout or a non-Braille code. The tool is available at https://leolee7.github.io/Annotate_Braille/.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Dynamic Surveys: Using LLMs to Blend Qualitative Depth,Quantitative Structure, and Collaborative Interaction

Surveys are a powerful tool for collecting data and eliciting insights on social phenomena, and are critical in product design, marketing, scientific research. However, traditional open-ended and closed-ended question formats limit researchers' ability to capture data that combines both the richness of qualitative insights and the analytical rigor of quantitative data. To address these problems, we propose Dynamic Surveys, a survey platform that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to dynamically cluster qualitative responses in real time and to elicit quantitative ratings and rankings on those clusters and qualitative reflections on how their views compare to broader respondent trends, especially helpful in early-stage or exploratory research settings. This process generates a report showing survey creators and respondents the clustered responses as well as each cluster's rank, rating distribution, and follow-up reflections. To evaluate Dynamic Surveys, we conducted two field studies with 93 participants over a 2-month period. In the first study, 52 students provided input for a career workshop, while in the second, 41 students gave feedback on gaps in their academic curriculum. Of these, 44 respondents filled out a survey on their experience using Dynamic Surveys. We also shared the generated report with 4 individuals who were interested in the insights for their work, and interviewed them to understand their perspectives on the results and any contextual risks they saw in the platform design. Our findings suggest that Dynamic Surveys not only provide richer and deeper insights into responses compared with traditional survey tools, but also increase engagement and foster a sense of community. We discuss broader implications for the design of survey platforms that blend qualitative depth with quantitative structure, facilitating richer insights and offering more collaborative interactions.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Touching Space: Accessible Map Exploration Through Conversational Audio-Haptic Interaction

Most existing assistive navigation tools focus on providing real-time guidance for Blind and Low-Vision (BLV) people, but few support building a holistic spatial understanding of unfamiliar environments before travel. Such cognitive map construction (e.g., knowing that a fountain is south of a tower and west of a hotel) is important for pre-travel planning, yet remains underexplored in prior work. To address this gap, we present Touching Space, an end-to-end system that retrieves map data for a target place and loads it into a frontend interface for exploration. The system combines haptic and audio feedback: users explore spatial layouts through touch and ask spoken questions to a conversational agent during exploration. Touching Space contributes a conversational interface that supports BLV users in building cognitive maps on commodity hardware.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

A Task-Interdependency Model of Complex Collaboration Towards Human-Centered Crowd Work

Models of crowdsourcing and human computation often assume that individuals independently carry out small, modular tasks. However, while these models have successfully shown how crowds can accomplish significant objectives, they can inadvertently advance a less than human view of crowd workers and fail to capture the unique human capacity for complex collaborative work. We present a model centered on interdependencies -- a phenomenon well understood to be at the core of collaboration -- that allows one to formally reason about diverse challenges to complex collaboration. Our model represents tasks as an interdependent collection of subtasks, formalized as a task graph. We use it to explain challenges to scaling complex collaborative work, underscore the importance of expert workers, reveal critical factors for learning on the job, and explore the relationship between coordination intensity and occupational wages. Using data from O*NET and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we introduce an index of occupational coordination intensity to validate our theoretical predictions. We present preliminary evidence that occupations with greater coordination intensity are less exposed to displacement by AI, and discuss opportunities for models that emphasize the collaborative capacities of human workers, bridge models of crowd work and traditional work, and promote AI in roles augmenting human collaboration.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2016

Towards large-scale deliberative decision-making: small groups and the importance of triads

Though deliberation is a critical component of democratic decision-making, existing deliberative processes do not scale to large groups of people. Motivated by this, we propose a model in which large-scale decision-making takes place through a sequence of small group interactions. Our model considers a group of participants, each having an opinion which together form a graph. We show that for median graphs, a class of graphs including grids and trees, it is possible to use a small number of three-person interactions to tightly approximate the wisdom of the crowd, defined here to be the generalized median of participant opinions, even when agents are strategic. Interestingly, we also show that this sharply contrasts with small groups of size two, for which we prove an impossibility result. Specifically, we show that it is impossible to use sequences of two-person interactions satisfying natural axioms to find a tight approximation of the generalized median, even when agents are non-strategic. Our results demonstrate the potential of small group interactions for reaching global decision-making properties.

cs.GT↗