arXiv subjects

Karla Badillo-Urquiola

Publications and source records attributed to Karla Badillo-Urquiola.

15 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Bringing Religious Values Into Design: How Theologians and Engineers See the Same Patterns Differently

Religious and spiritual (R/S) principles are having an increasing influence on human-centered technology design in both academia and industry. These efforts may provoke questions of reflexivity especially when designing for principles one may be newly exposed to. We explore how different perspectives may impact designing for R/S values by interviewing eight software engineers with little religious affiliation and eight theologians with academic expertise in Catholic Social Teaching (CST) -- the theological tradition underpinning Pope Leo XIV's AI encyclical Magnifica Humanitas -- about how principles of CST translate to technology designs. We found that software engineers and theologians frequently responded similarly. The differences in their responses suggested that while software engineers did not misunderstand the principles, theologians had a broader understanding. Our results suggest that differences in both experience with values and professional domain can impact how values are translated into designs.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Lost in Translation: How Universal Ethical Values Fail to Translate Across Global Contexts

AI ethics frameworks treat values such as fairness, transparency, and accountability as universal and uniformly operationalizable across contexts. We examined how 14 experts across 10 countries made sense of AI in practice, reinterpreted core values, and envisioned governance alternatives. We found that AI deployment is characterized by structurally unequal conditions, marked by infrastructural constraints, extractive practices, and a "mystification" of technology, which fundamentally shape perceptions of risks and opportunities. Our findings reveal that experts reinterpret values to fit local moral logics: privacy as collective and relational rather than individual; transparency as trust-building accountability rather than technical disclosure; and fairness as equity in access and representation rather than parity in outcomes. We identify these as translation gaps between encoded global frameworks and situated local practices. Finally, we propose pathways toward plural governance that redistributes epistemic authority and treats ethical negotiation as an ongoing, context-sensitive process rather than a settled technical standard.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Participation and Power: A Case Study of Using Ecological Momentary Assessment to Engage Adolescents in Academic Research

Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) is widely used to study adolescents' experiences; yet, how the design of EMA platforms shapes engagement, research practices, and power dynamics in youth studies remains under-examined. We developed a youth-centered EMA platform prioritizing youth engagement and researcher support, and evaluated it through a case study on a longitudinal investigation with adolescent twins focused on mental health and sleep behavior. Interviews with the research team examined how the platform design choices shaped participant onboarding, sustained engagement, risk monitoring, and data interpretation. The app's teen-centered design and gamified features sustained teen engagement, while the web portal streamlined administrative oversight through a centralized dashboard. However, technical instability and rigid data structures created significant hurdles, leading to privacy concerns among parents and complicating the researchers' ability to analyze raw usage metadata. We provide actionable interaction design guidelines for developing EMA platforms that prioritize youth agency, ethical practice, and research goals.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

A System of Care, Not Control: Co-Designing Online Safety and Wellbeing Solutions with Guardians ad Litem for Youth in Child Welfare

Current online safety technologies overly rely on parental mediation and often fail to address the unique challenges faced by youth in the Child Welfare System (CWS). These youth depend on a complex ecosystem of support, including families, caseworkers, and advocates, to safeguard their wellbeing. Within this network, Guardians ad Litem (GALs) play a unique role as court-appointed advocates tasked with ensuring the best interests of youth. Yet little is known about how GALs perceive and support youths' online safety. To address this gap, we conducted a two-part workshop with 10 GALs to explore their perspectives on online safety and collaboratively envision technology-based solutions tailored to the needs of youth in the CWS. Our findings revealed that GALs struggle to support youth with online safety challenges due to limited digital literacy, inconsistency of institutional support, lack of collaboration among stakeholders, and complexity of family dynamics. While GALs recognized the need for some oversight of youth online activities, they emphasized designing systems that support online safety beyond control or restriction by fostering stability, trust, and meaningful interactions, both online and offline. GALs emphasized the importance of developing tools that enable ongoing communication, therapeutic support, and coordination across stakeholders. Proposed design concepts focused on strengthening youth agency and cross-stakeholder collaboration through virtual avatars and mobile apps. This work provides actionable design concepts for strengthening relationships and communication across care network. It also redefines traditional approaches to online safety, advocating for a holistic, multi-stakeholder online safety paradigm for youth in the CWS.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Red Teaming LLMs as Socio-Technical Practice: From Exploration and Data Creation to Evaluation

Recently, red teaming, with roots in security, has become a key evaluative approach to ensure the safety and reliability of Generative Artificial Intelligence. However, most existing work emphasizes technical benchmarks and attack success rates, leaving the socio-technical practices of how red teaming datasets are defined, created, and evaluated under-examined. Drawing on 22 interviews with practitioners who design and evaluate red teaming datasets, we examine the data practices and standards that underpin this work. Because adversarial datasets determine the scope and accuracy of model evaluations, they are critical artifacts for assessing potential harms from large language models. Our contributions are first, empirical evidence of practitioners conceptualizing red teaming and developing and evaluating red teaming datasets. Second, we reflect on how practitioners' conceptualization of risk leads to overlooking the context, interaction type, and user specificity. We conclude with three opportunities for HCI researchers to expand the conceptualization and data practices for red-teaming.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

'Teens Need to Be Educated on the Danger': Digital Access, Online Risks, and Safety Practices Among Nigerian Adolescents

Adolescents increasingly rely on online technologies to explore their identities, form social connections, and access information and entertainment. However, their growing digital engagement exposes them to significant online risks, particularly in underrepresented contexts like West Africa. This study investigates the online experiences of 409 secondary school adolescents in Nigeria's Federal Capital Territory (FCT), focusing on their access to technology, exposure to risks, coping strategies, key stakeholders influencing their online interactions, and recommendations for improving online safety. Using self-administered surveys, we found that while most adolescents reported moderate access to online technology and connectivity, those who encountered risks frequently reported exposure to inappropriate content and online scams. Blocking and reporting tools were the most commonly used strategies, though some adolescents responded with inaction due to limited resources or awareness. Parents emerged as the primary support network, though monitoring practices and communication varied widely. Guided by Protection Motivation Theory (PMT), our analysis interprets adolescents' online safety behaviors as shaped by both their threat perceptions and their confidence in available coping strategies. A thematic analysis of their recommendations highlights the need for greater awareness and education, parental mediation, enhanced safety tools, stricter age restrictions, improved content moderation, government accountability, and resilience-building initiatives. Our findings underscore the importance of culturally and contextually relevant interventions to empower adolescents in navigating the digital world, with implications for parents, educators, designers, and policymakers.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Online Safety for All: Sociocultural Insights from a Systematic Review of Youth Online Safety in the Global South

Youth online safety research in HCI has historically centered on perspectives from the Global North, often overlooking the unique particularities and cultural contexts of regions in the Global South. This paper presents a systematic review of 66 youth online safety studies published between 2014 and 2024, specifically focusing on regions in the Global South. Our findings reveal a concentrated research focus in Asian countries and predominance of quantitative methods. We also found limited research on marginalized youth populations and a primary focus on risks related to cyberbullying. Our analysis underscores the critical role of cultural factors in shaping online safety, highlighting the need for educational approaches that integrate social dynamics and awareness. We propose methodological recommendations and a future research agenda that encourages the adoption of situated, culturally sensitive methodologies and youth-centered approaches to researching youth online safety regions in the Global South. This paper advocates for greater inclusivity in youth online safety research, emphasizing the importance of addressing varied sociocultural contexts to better understand and meet the online safety needs of youth in the Global South.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

How the Internet Facilitates Adverse Childhood Experiences for Youth Who Self-Identify as in Need of Services

Youth implicated in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, as well as those with an incarcerated parent, are considered the most vulnerable Children in Need of Services (CHINS). We identified 1,160 of these at-risk youth (ages 13-17) who sought support via an online peer support platform to understand their adverse childhood experiences and explore how the internet played a role in providing an outlet for support, as well as potentially facilitating risks. We first analyzed posts from 1,160 youth who self-identified as CHINS while sharing about their adverse experiences. Then, we retrieved all 239,929 posts by these users to identify salient topics within their support-seeking posts: 1) Urges to self-harm due to social drama, 2) desire for social connection, 3) struggles with family, and 4) substance use and sexual risks. We found that the internet often helped facilitate these problems; for example, the desperation for social connection often led to meeting unsafe people online, causing additional trauma. Family members and other unsafe people used the internet to perpetrate cyberabuse, while CHINS themselves leveraged online channels to engage in illegal and risky behavior. Our study calls for tailored support systems that address the unique needs of CHINS to promote safe online spaces and foster resilience to break the cycle of adversity. Empowering CHINS requires amplifying their voices and acknowledging the challenges they face as a result of their adverse childhood experiences.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Design Patterns for the Common Good: Building Better Technologies Using the Wisdom of Virtue Ethics

Virtue ethics is a philosophical tradition that emphasizes the cultivation of virtues in achieving the common good. It has been suggested to be an effective framework for envisioning more ethical technology, yet previous work on virtue ethics and technology design has remained at theoretical recommendations. Therefore, we propose an approach for identifying user experience design patterns that embody particular virtues to more concretely articulate virtuous technology designs. As a proof of concept for our approach, we documented seven design patterns for social media that uphold the virtues of Catholic Social Teaching. We interviewed 24 technology researchers and industry practitioners to evaluate these patterns. We found that overall the patterns enact the virtues they were identified to embody; our participants valued that the patterns fostered intentional conversations and personal connections. We pave a path for technology professionals to incorporate diverse virtue traditions into the development of technologies that support human flourishing.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Human Perception of LLM-generated Text Content in Social Media Environments

Emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), and more specifically Large Language Models (LLMs) have provided malicious actors with powerful tools for manipulating digital discourse. LLMs have the potential to affect traditional forms of democratic engagements, such as voter choice, government surveys, or even online communication with regulators; since bots are capable of producing large quantities of credible text. To investigate the human perception of LLM-generated content, we recruited over 1,000 participants who then tried to differentiate bot from human posts in social media discussion threads. We found that humans perform poorly at identifying the true nature of user posts on social media. We also found patterns in how humans identify LLM-generated text content in social media discourse. Finally, we observed the Uncanny Valley effect in text dialogue in both user perception and identification. This indicates that despite humans being poor at the identification process, they can still sense discomfort when reading LLM-generated content.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

SaludConectaMX: Lessons Learned from Deploying a Cooperative Mobile Health System for Pediatric Cancer Care in Mexico

We developed SaludConectaMX as a comprehensive system to track and understand the determinants of complications throughout chemotherapy treatment for children with cancer in Mexico. SaludConectaMX is unique in that it integrates patient clinical indicators with social determinants and caregiver mental health, forming a social-clinical perspective of the patient's evolving health trajectory. The system is composed of a web application (for hospital staff) and a mobile application (for family caregivers), providing the opportunity for cooperative patient monitoring in both hospital and home settings. This paper presents the system's preliminary design and usability evaluation results from a 1.5-year pilot study. Our findings indicate that while the hospital web app demonstrates high completion rates and user satisfaction, the family mobile app requires additional improvements for optimal accessibility; statistical and qualitative data analysis illuminate pathways for system improvement. Based on this evidence, we formalize suggestions for health system development in LMICs, which HCI researchers may leverage in future work.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

CoCo Matrix: Taxonomy of Cognitive Contributions in Co-writing with Intelligent Agents

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in employing intelligent agents in writing. Previous work emphasizes the evaluation of the quality of end product-whether it was coherent and polished, overlooking the journey that led to the product, which is an invaluable dimension of the creative process. To understand how to recognize human efforts in co-writing with intelligent writing systems, we adapt Flower and Hayes' cognitive process theory of writing and propose CoCo Matrix, a two-dimensional taxonomy of entropy and information gain, to depict the new human-agent co-writing model. We define four quadrants and situate thirty-four published systems within the taxonomy. Our research found that low entropy and high information gain systems are under-explored, yet offer promising future directions in writing tasks that benefit from the agent's divergent planning and the human's focused translation. CoCo Matrix, not only categorizes different writing systems but also deepens our understanding of the cognitive processes in human-agent co-writing. By analyzing minimal changes in the writing process, CoCo Matrix serves as a proxy for the writer's mental model, allowing writers to reflect on their contributions. This reflection is facilitated through the measured metrics of information gain and entropy, which provide insights irrespective of the writing system used.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

User or Labor: An Interaction Framework for Human-Machine Relationships in NLP

The bridging research between Human-Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing is developing quickly these years. However, there is still a lack of formative guidelines to understand the human-machine interaction in the NLP loop. When researchers crossing the two fields talk about humans, they may imply a user or labor. Regarding a human as a user, the human is in control, and the machine is used as a tool to achieve the human's goals. Considering a human as a laborer, the machine is in control, and the human is used as a resource to achieve the machine's goals. Through a systematic literature review and thematic analysis, we present an interaction framework for understanding human-machine relationships in NLP. In the framework, we propose four types of human-machine interactions: Human-Teacher and Machine-Learner, Machine-Leading, Human-Leading, and Human-Machine Collaborators. Our analysis shows that the type of interaction is not fixed but can change across tasks as the relationship between the human and the machine develops. We also discuss the implications of this framework for the future of NLP and human-machine relationships.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2021

A Framework of High-Stakes Algorithmic Decision-Making for the Public Sector Developed through a Case Study of Child-Welfare

Algorithms have permeated throughout civil government and society, where they are being used to make high-stakes decisions about human lives. In this paper, we first develop a cohesive framework of algorithmic decision-making adapted for the public sector (ADMAPS) that reflects the complex socio-technical interactions between \textit{human discretion}, \textit{bureaucratic processes}, and \textit{algorithmic decision-making} by synthesizing disparate bodies of work in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Science and Technology Studies (STS), and Public Administration (PA). We then applied the ADMAPS framework to conduct a qualitative analysis of an in-depth, eight-month ethnographic case study of the algorithms in daily use within a child-welfare agency that serves approximately 900 families and 1300 children in the mid-western United States. Overall, we found there is a need to focus on strength-based algorithmic outcomes centered in social ecological frameworks. In addition, algorithmic systems need to support existing bureaucratic processes and augment human discretion, rather than replace it. Finally, collective buy-in in algorithmic systems requires trust in the target outcomes at both the practitioner and bureaucratic levels. As a result of our study, we propose guidelines for the design of high-stakes algorithmic decision-making tools in the child-welfare system, and more generally, in the public sector. We empirically validate the theoretically derived ADMAPS framework to demonstrate how it can be useful for systematically making pragmatic decisions about the design of algorithms for the public sector.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

A Human-Centered Review of the Algorithms used within the U.S. Child Welfare System

The U.S. Child Welfare System (CWS) is charged with improving outcomes for foster youth; yet, they are overburdened and underfunded. To overcome this limitation, several states have turned towards algorithmic decision-making systems to reduce costs and determine better processes for improving CWS outcomes. Using a human-centered algorithmic design approach, we synthesize 50 peer-reviewed publications on computational systems used in CWS to assess how they were being developed, common characteristics of predictors used, as well as the target outcomes. We found that most of the literature has focused on risk assessment models but does not consider theoretical approaches (e.g., child-foster parent matching) nor the perspectives of caseworkers (e.g., case notes). Therefore, future algorithms should strive to be context-aware and theoretically robust by incorporating salient factors identified by past research. We provide the HCI community with research avenues for developing human-centered algorithms that redirect attention towards more equitable outcomes for CWS.

cs.CY↗