arXiv subjects

Osnat Mokryn

Publications and source records attributed to Osnat Mokryn.

15 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

From 911 to Hospital: Challenges and Opportunities for AI Integration in Emergency Medical Services

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly introduced into healthcare settings, yet its integration into fast-paced, high-pressure domains such as Emergency Medical Services (EMS) remains limited. EMS work unfolds across distinct stages, each characterized by different information needs, constraints, and forms of collaboration. Designing effective AI support requires understanding how AI interventions align with, or disrupt, EMS work across its different stages. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 25 EMS clinicians across the United States to examine how existing technologies currently support emergency services workflows and how they envision opportunities for, and concerns about, future AI-based support across different stages of emergency response. Our analysis reveals the cognitive, social, and procedural factors that enable EMS team coordination, which is grounded in situational awareness across distributed roles. EMS clinicians expressed significant concerns about how AI integration threatens this coordination mechanism across multiple dimensions: legal and privacy issues, technical reliability, contextual sensitivity, professional autonomy, and workflow friction. We propose five design principles for AI systems that augment distributed cognition and situational awareness, enabling EMS teams to deliver effective care under extreme constraints.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

DiSCo: Making Absence Visible in Intelligent Summarization Interfaces

Intelligent interfaces increasingly use large language models to summarize user-generated content, yet these summaries emphasize what is mentioned while overlooking what is missing. This presence bias can mislead users who rely on summaries to make decisions. We present Domain Informed Summarization through Contrast (DiSCo), an expectation-based computational approach that makes absences visible by comparing each entity's content with domain topical expectations captured in reference distributions of aspects typically discussed in comparable accommodations. This comparison identifies aspects that are either unusually emphasized or missing relative to domain norms and integrates them into the generated text. In a user study across three accommodation domains, namely ski, beach, and city center, DiSCo summaries were rated as more detailed and useful for decision making than baseline large language model summaries, although slightly harder to read. The findings show that modeling expectations reduces presence bias and improves both transparency and decision support in intelligent summarization interfaces.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Making Absence Visible: The Roles of Reference and Prompting in Recognizing Missing Information

Interactive systems that explain data, or support decision making often emphasize what is present while overlooking what is expected but missing. This presence bias limits users' ability to form complete mental models of a dataset or situation. Detecting absence depends on expectations about what should be there, yet interfaces rarely help users form such expectations. We present an experimental study examining how reference framing and prompting influence people's ability to recognize expected but missing categories in datasets. Participants compared distributions across three domains (energy, wealth, and regime) under two reference conditions: Global, presenting a unified population baseline, and Partial, showing several concrete exemplars. Results indicate that absence detection was higher with Partial reference than with Global reference, suggesting that partial, samples-based framing can support expectation formation and absence detection. When participants were prompted to look for what was missing, absence detection rose sharply. We discuss implications for interactive user interfaces and expectation-based visualization design, while considering cognitive trade-offs of reference structures and guided attention.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Interpretable Transformation and Analysis of Timelines through Learning via Surprisability

The analysis of high-dimensional timeline data and the identification of outliers and anomalies is critical across diverse domains, including sensor readings, biological and medical data, historical records, and global statistics. However, conventional analysis techniques often struggle with challenges such as high dimensionality, complex distributions, and sparsity. These limitations hinder the ability to extract meaningful insights from complex temporal datasets, making it difficult to identify trending features, outliers, and anomalies effectively. Inspired by surprisability -- a cognitive science concept describing how humans instinctively focus on unexpected deviations - we propose Learning via Surprisability (LvS), a novel approach for transforming high-dimensional timeline data. LvS quantifies and prioritizes anomalies in time-series data by formalizing deviations from expected behavior. LvS bridges cognitive theories of attention with computational methods, enabling the detection of anomalies and shifts in a way that preserves critical context, offering a new lens for interpreting complex datasets. We demonstrate the usefulness of LvS on three high-dimensional timeline use cases: a time series of sensor data, a global dataset of mortality causes over multiple years, and a textual corpus containing over two centuries of State of the Union Addresses by U.S. presidents. Our results show that the LvS transformation enables efficient and interpretable identification of outliers, anomalies, and the most variable features along the timeline.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2025

Fanfiction in the Age of AI: Community Perspectives on Creativity, Authenticity and Adoption

The integration of Generative AI (GenAI) into creative communities, like fanfiction, is reshaping how stories are created, shared, and valued. This study investigates the perceptions of 157 active fanfiction members, both readers and writers, regarding AI-generated content in fanfiction. Our research explores the impact of GenAI on community dynamics, examining how AI affects the participatory and collaborative nature of these spaces. The findings reveal responses ranging from cautious acceptance of AI's potential for creative enhancement to concerns about authenticity, ethical issues, and the erosion of human-centered values. Participants emphasized the importance of transparency and expressed worries about losing social connections. Our study highlights the need for thoughtful AI integration in creative platforms using design interventions that enable ethical practices, promote transparency, increase engagement and connection, and preserve the community's core values.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Generative AI in the Software Engineering Domain: Tensions of Occupational Identity and Patterns of Identity Protection

The adoption of generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) in organizational settings calls into question workers' roles, and relatedly, the implications for their long-term skill development and domain expertise. In our qualitative study in the software engineering domain, we build on the theoretical lenses of occupational identity and self-determination theory to understand how and why software engineers make sense of GAI for their work. We find that engineers' sense-making is contingent on domain expertise, as juniors and seniors felt their needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness to be differently impacted by GAI. We shed light on the importance of the individual's role in preserving tacit domain knowledge as engineers engaged in sense-making that protected their occupational identity. We illustrate how organizations play an active role in shaping workers' sense-making process and propose design guidelines on how organizations and system designers can facilitate the impact of technological change on workers' occupational identity.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

AI-Augmented Brainwriting: Investigating the use of LLMs in group ideation

The growing availability of generative AI technologies such as large language models (LLMs) has significant implications for creative work. This paper explores twofold aspects of integrating LLMs into the creative process - the divergence stage of idea generation, and the convergence stage of evaluation and selection of ideas. We devised a collaborative group-AI Brainwriting ideation framework, which incorporated an LLM as an enhancement into the group ideation process, and evaluated the idea generation process and the resulted solution space. To assess the potential of using LLMs in the idea evaluation process, we design an evaluation engine and compared it to idea ratings assigned by three expert and six novice evaluators. Our findings suggest that integrating LLM in Brainwriting could enhance both the ideation process and its outcome. We also provide evidence that LLMs can support idea evaluation. We conclude by discussing implications for HCI education and practice.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

Assessing individual risk and the latent transmission of COVID-19 in a population with an interaction-driven temporal model

Interaction-driven modeling of diseases over real-world contact data has been shown to promote the understanding of the spread of diseases in communities. This temporal modeling follows the path-preserving order and timing of the contacts, which are essential for accurate modeling. Yet, other important aspects were overlooked. Various airborne pathogens differ in the duration of exposure needed for infection. Also, from the individual perspective, Covid-19 progression differs between individuals, and its severity is statistically correlated with age. Here, we enrich an interaction-driven model of Covid-19 and similar airborne viral diseases with (a) meetings duration and (b) personal disease progression. The enriched model enables predicting outcomes at both the population and the individual levels. It further allows predicting individual risk of engaging in social interactions as a function of the virus characteristics and its prevalence in the population. We further showed that the enigmatic nature of asymptomatic transmission stems from the latent effect of the network density on this transmission and that asymptomatic transmission has a substantial impact only in sparse communities.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2022

Exploring the effects of activity-preserving time dilation on the dynamic interplay of airborne contagion processes and temporal networks using an interaction-driven model

Contacts' temporal ordering and dynamics are crucial for understanding the transmission of infectious diseases. We introduce an interaction-driven model of an airborne disease over contact networks. We demonstrate our interaction-driven contagion model, instantiated for COVID-19, over history-maintaining random temporal networks and real-world contacts. We use it to evaluate temporal, spatiotemporal, and spatial social distancing policies. We find that a spatial distancing policy is mainly beneficial at the early stages of a disease. We then continue to evaluate temporal social distancing, that is, timeline dilation that maintains the activity potential. We expand our model to consider the exposure to viral load, which we correlate with meetings' duration. Using real-life contact data, we demonstrate the beneficial effect of timeline dilation on overall infection rates. Our results demonstrate that given the same transmission level, there is a decrease in the disease's infection rate and overall prevalence under timeline dilation conditions. We further show that slow-spreading pathogens (i.e., require more prolonged exposure to infect) spread roughly at the same rate as fast-spreading ones in highly active communities. This is surprising since slower pathogens follow paths that include longer meetings, while faster pathogens can potentially follow paths that include shorter meetings, which are more common. Our results demonstrate that the temporal dynamics of a community have a more significant effect on the spread of the disease than the characteristics of the spreading processes.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2022

Analysis of the competition among viral strains using a temporal interaction-driven contagion model

The temporal dynamics of social interactions were shown to influence the spread of disease. Here, we model the conditions of progression and competition for several viral strains, exploring various levels of cross-immunity over temporal networks. We use our interaction-driven contagion model and characterize, using it, several viral variants. Our results, obtained on temporal random networks and on real-world interaction data, demonstrate that temporal dynamics are crucial to determining the competition results. We consider two and three competing pathogens and show the conditions under which a slower pathogen will remain active and create a second wave infecting most of the population. We then show that when the duration of the encounters is considered, the spreading dynamics change significantly. Our results indicate that when considering airborne diseases, it might be crucial to consider the duration of temporal meetings to model the spread of pathogens in a population.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2022

Domain-based Latent Personal Analysis and its use for impersonation detection in social media

Zipf's law defines an inverse proportion between a word's ranking in a given corpus and its frequency in it, roughly dividing the vocabulary into frequent words and infrequent ones. Here, we stipulate that within a domain an author's signature can be derived from, in loose terms, the author's missing popular words and frequently used infrequent-words. We devise a method, termed Latent Personal Analysis (LPA), for finding domain-based attributes for entities in a domain: their distance from the domain and their signature, which determines how they most differ from a domain. We identify the most suitable distance metric for the method among several and construct the distances and personal signatures for authors, the domain's entities. The signature consists of both over-used terms (compared to the average), and missing popular terms. We validate the correctness and power of the signatures in identifying users and set existence conditions. We then show uses for the method in explainable authorship attribution: we define algorithms that utilize LPA to identify two types of impersonation in social media: (1) authors with sockpuppets (multiple) accounts; (2) front users accounts, operated by several authors. We validate the algorithms and employ them over a large scale dataset obtained from a social media site with over 4000 users. We corroborate these results using temporal rate analysis. LPA can further be used to devise personal attributes in a wide range of scientific domains in which the constituents have a long-tail distribution of elements.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

Size Agnostic Change Point Detection Framework for Evolving Networks

Changes in the structure of observed social and complex networks' structure can indicate a significant underlying change in an organization, or reflect the response of the network to an external event. Automatic detection of change points in evolving networks is rudimentary to the research and the understanding of the effect of such events on networks. Here we present an easy-to-implement and fast framework for change point detection in temporal evolving networks. Unlike previous approaches, our method is size agnostic, and does not require either prior knowledge about the network's size and structure, nor does it require obtaining historical information or nodal identities over time. We use both synthetic data derived from dynamic models and two real datasets: Enron email exchange and Ask-Ubuntu forum. Our framework succeeds with both precision and recall and outperforms previous solutions

cs.SI↗

arXiv2013

The Role of Trends in Evolving Networks

Modeling complex networks has been the focus of much research for over a decade. Preferential attachment (PA) is considered a common explanation to the self organization of evolving networks, suggesting that new nodes prefer to attach to more popular nodes. The PA model results in broad degree distributions, found in many networks, but cannot explain other common properties such as: The growth of nodes arriving late and Clustering (community structure). Here we show that when the tendency of networks to adhere to trends is incorporated into the PA model, it can produce networks with such properties. Namely, in trending networks, newly arriving nodes may become central at random, forming new clusters. In particular, we show that when the network is young it is more susceptible to trends, but even older networks may have trendy new nodes that become central in their structure. Alternatively, networks can be seen as composed of two parts: static, governed by a power law degree distribution, and a dynamic part governed by trends, as we show on Wiki pages. Our results also show that the arrival of trending new nodes not only creates new clusters, but also has an effect on the relative importance and centrality of all other nodes in the network. This can explain a variety of real world networks in economics, social and online networks, and cultural networks. Products popularity, formed by the network of people's opinions, exhibit these properties. Some lines of products are increasingly susceptible to trends and hence to shifts in popularity, while others are less trendy and hence more stable. We believe that our findings have a big impact on our understanding of real networks.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2010

On the Dynamics of IP Address Allocation and Availability of End-Hosts

The availability of end-hosts and their assigned routable IP addresses has impact on the ability to fight spammers and attackers, and on peer-to-peer application performance. Previous works study the availability of hosts mostly by using either active pinging or by studying access to a mail service, both approaches suffer from inherent inaccuracies. We take a different approach by measuring the IP addresses periodically reported by a uniquely identified group of the hosts running the DIMES agent. This fresh approach provides a chance to measure the true availability of end-hosts and the dynamics of their assigned routable IP addresses. Using a two month study of 1804 hosts, we find that over 60% of the hosts have a fixed IP address and 90% median availability, while some of the remaining hosts have more than 30 different IPs. For those that have periodically changing IP addresses, we find that the median average period per AS is roughly 24 hours, with a strong relation between the offline time and the probability of altering IP address.

cs.NI↗

arXiv1999

Distributed Algorithms in Multihop Broadcast Networks

Broadcast networks are often used in modern communication systems. A common broadcast network is a single hop shared media system, where a transmitted message is heard by all neighbors, such as some LAN networks. In this work we consider a more complex environment, in which a transmitted message is heard only by a group of neighbors, such as Ad-Hoc networks, satellite and radio networks, as well as wireless multistation backbone system for mobile communication. It is important to design efficient algorithms for such environments. Our main result is a new Leader Election algorithm, with O(n) time complexity and O(n*lg(n)) message transmission complexity. Our distributed solution uses a propagation of information with feedback (PIF) building block tuned to the broadcast media, and a special counting and joining approach for the election procedure phase. The latter is required for achieving the linear time. It is demonstrated that the broadcast model requires solutions which are different from the known point-to-point model.

cs.DC↗