arXiv subjects

Sang Won Lee

Publications and source records attributed to Sang Won Lee.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

How do Software Engineering Candidates Prepare for Technical Interviews?

To obtain employment, aspiring software engineers must complete technical interviews -- a hiring process which involves candidates writing code while communicating to an audience. However, the complexities of tech interviews are difficult to prepare for and seldom faced in computing curricula. To this end, we seek to understand how candidates prepare for technical interviews, investigating the effects of preparation methods and the role of education. We distributed a survey to candidates (n = 131) actively preparing for technical interviews. Our results suggest candidates rarely train in authentic settings and courses fail to support preparation efforts -- leading to stress and unpreparedness. Based on our findings, we provide implications for stakeholders to enhance tech interview preparation for candidates pursuing software engineering roles.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Advancing Human-Machine Teaming: Concepts, Challenges, and Applications

Human-Machine Teaming (HMT) is revolutionizing collaboration across domains such as defense, healthcare, and autonomous systems by integrating AI-driven decision-making, trust calibration, and adaptive teaming. This survey presents a comprehensive taxonomy of HMT, analyzing theoretical models, including reinforcement learning, instance-based learning, and interdependence theory, alongside interdisciplinary methodologies. Unlike prior reviews, we examine team cognition, ethical AI, multi-modal interactions, and real-world evaluation frameworks. Key challenges include explainability, role allocation, and scalable benchmarking. We propose future research in cross-domain adaptation, trust-aware AI, and standardized testbeds. By bridging computational and social sciences, this work lays a foundation for resilient, ethical, and scalable HMT systems.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Understanding the Perceptions of Trigger Warning and Content Warning on Social Media Platforms in the U.S

The prevalence of distressing content on social media raises concerns about users' mental well-being, prompting the use of trigger warnings (TW) and content warnings (CW). However, inconsistent implementation of TW/CW across platforms and the lack of standardized practices confuse users regarding these warnings. To better understand how users experienced and utilized these warnings, we conducted a semi-structured interview study with 15 general social media users. Our findings reveal challenges across three key stakeholders: viewers, who need to decide whether to engage with warning-labeled content; posters, who struggle with whether and how to apply TW/CW to the content; and platforms, whose design features shape the visibility and usability of warnings. While users generally expressed positive attitudes toward warnings, their understanding of TW/CW usage was limited. Based on these insights, we proposed a conceptual framework of the TW/CW mechanisms from multiple stakeholders' perspectives. Lastly, we further reflected on our findings and discussed the opportunities for social media platforms to enhance users' TW/CW experiences, fostering a more trauma-informed social media environment.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

LLM Can be a Dangerous Persuader: Empirical Study of Persuasion Safety in Large Language Models

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled them to approach human-level persuasion capabilities. However, such potential also raises concerns about the safety risks of LLM-driven persuasion, particularly their potential for unethical influence through manipulation, deception, exploitation of vulnerabilities, and many other harmful tactics. In this work, we present a systematic investigation of LLM persuasion safety through two critical aspects: (1) whether LLMs appropriately reject unethical persuasion tasks and avoid unethical strategies during execution, including cases where the initial persuasion goal appears ethically neutral, and (2) how influencing factors like personality traits and external pressures affect their behavior. To this end, we introduce PersuSafety, the first comprehensive framework for the assessment of persuasion safety which consists of three stages, i.e., persuasion scene creation, persuasive conversation simulation, and persuasion safety assessment. PersuSafety covers 6 diverse unethical persuasion topics and 15 common unethical strategies. Through extensive experiments across 8 widely used LLMs, we observe significant safety concerns in most LLMs, including failing to identify harmful persuasion tasks and leveraging various unethical persuasion strategies. Our study calls for more attention to improve safety alignment in progressive and goal-driven conversations such as persuasion.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

CHOIR: Chat-based Helper for Organizational Intelligence Repository

Modern organizations frequently rely on chat-based platforms (e.g., Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord) for day-to-day communication and decision-making. As conversations evolve, organizational knowledge can get buried, prompting repeated searches and discussions. While maintaining shared documents, such as Wiki articles for the organization, offers a partial solution, it requires manual and timely efforts to keep it up to date, and it may not effectively preserve the social and contextual aspect of prior discussions. Moreover, reaching a consensus on document updates with relevant stakeholders can be time-consuming and complex. To address these challenges, we introduce CHOIR (Chat-based Helper for Organizational Intelligence Repository), a chatbot that integrates seamlessly with chat platforms. CHOIR automatically identifies and proposes edits to related documents, initiates discussions with relevant team members, and preserves contextual revision histories. By embedding knowledge management directly into chat environments and leveraging LLMs, CHOIR simplifies manual updates and supports consensus-driven editing based on maintained context with revision histories. We plan to design, deploy, and evaluate CHOIR in the context of maintaining an organizational memory for a research lab. We describe the chatbot's motivation, design, and early implementation to show how CHOIR streamlines collaborative document management.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Investigating Characteristics of Media Recommendation Solicitation in r/ifyoulikeblank

Despite the existence of search-based recommender systems like Google, Netflix, and Spotify, online users sometimes may turn to crowdsourced recommendations in places like the r/ifyoulikeblank subreddit. In this exploratory study, we probe why users go to r/ifyoulikeblank, how they look for recommendation, and how the subreddit users respond to recommendation requests. To answer, we collected sample posts from r/ifyoulikeblank and analyzed them using a qualitative approach. Our analysis reveals that users come to this subreddit for various reasons, such as exhausting popular search systems, not knowing what or how to search for an item, and thinking crowd have better knowledge than search systems. Examining users query and their description, we found novel information users provide during recommendation seeking using r/ifyoulikeblank. For example, sometimes they ask for artifacts recommendation based on the tools used to create them. Or, sometimes indicating a recommendation seeker's time constraints can help better suit recommendations to their needs. Finally, recommendation responses and interactions revealed patterns of how requesters and responders refine queries and recommendations. Our work informs future intelligent recommender systems design.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

PITCH: Productivity and Mental Well-being Coaching through Daily Conversational Interaction

Efficient task planning is essential for productivity and mental well-being, yet individuals often struggle to create realistic plans and reflect upon their productivity. Leveraging the advancement in artificial intelligence (AI), conversational agents have emerged as a promising tool for enhancing productivity. Our work focuses on externalizing plans through conversation, aiming to solidify intentions and foster focused action, thereby positively impacting their productivity and mental well-being. We share our plan of designing a conversational agent to offer insightful questions and reflective prompts for increasing plan adherence by leveraging the social interactivity of natural conversations. Previous studies have shown the effectiveness of such agents, but many interventions remain static, leading to decreased user engagement over time. To address this limitation, we propose a novel rotation and context-aware prompting strategy, providing users with varied interventions daily. Our system, PITCH, utilizes large language models (LLMs) to facilitate externalization and reflection on daily plans. Through this study, we investigate the impact of externalizing tasks with conversational agents on productivity and mental well-being, and the effectiveness of a rotation strategy in maintaining user engagement.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

TaleMate: Exploring the use of Voice Agents for Parent-Child Joint Reading Experiences

Joint reading is a key activity for early learners, with caregiver-child interactions such as questioning and feedback playing an essential role in children's cognitive and linguistic development. However, for some parents, actively engaging children in storytelling can be challenging. To address this, we introduce TaleMate a platform designed to enhance shared reading by leveraging conversational agents that have been shown to support children's engagement and learning. TaleMate enables a dynamic, participatory reading experience where parents and children can choose which characters they wish to embody. Moreover, the system navigates the challenges posed by digital reading tools, such as decreased parent-child interaction, and builds upon the benefits of traditional and digital reading techniques. TaleMate offers an innovative approach to fostering early reading habits, bridging the gap between traditional joint reading practices and the digital reading landscape.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Generating A Crowdsourced Conversation Dataset to Combat Cybergrooming

Cybergrooming emerges as a growing threat to adolescent safety and mental health. One way to combat cybergrooming is to leverage predictive artificial intelligence (AI) to detect predatory behaviors in social media. However, these methods can encounter challenges like false positives and negative implications such as privacy concerns. Another complementary strategy involves using generative artificial intelligence to empower adolescents by educating them about predatory behaviors. To this end, we envision developing state-of-the-art conversational agents to simulate the conversations between adolescents and predators for educational purposes. Yet, one key challenge is the lack of a dataset to train such conversational agents. In this position paper, we present our motivation for empowering adolescents to cope with cybergrooming. We propose to develop large-scale, authentic datasets through an online survey targeting adolescents and parents. We discuss some initial background behind our motivation and proposed design of the survey, such as situating the participants in artificial cybergrooming scenarios, then allowing participants to respond to the survey to obtain their authentic responses. We also present several open questions related to our proposed approach and hope to discuss them with the workshop attendees.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

NewsComp: Facilitating Diverse News Reading through Comparative Annotation

To support efficient, balanced news consumption, merging articles from diverse sources into one, potentially through crowdsourcing, could alleviate some hurdles. However, the merging process could also impact annotators' attitudes towards the content. To test this theory, we propose comparative news annotation, i.e., annotating similarities and differences between a pair of articles. By developing and deploying NewsComp -- a prototype system -- we conducted a between-subjects experiment(N=109) to examine how users' annotations compare to experts', and how comparative annotation affects users' perceptions of article credibility and quality. We found that comparative annotation can marginally impact users' credibility perceptions in certain cases. While users' annotations were not on par with experts', they showed greater precision in finding similarities than in identifying disparate important statements. The comparison process led users to notice differences in information placement/depth, degree of factuality/opinion, and empathetic/inflammatory language use. We discuss implications for the design of future comparative annotation tasks.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

Overview of the Observing System and Initial Scientific Accomplishments of the East Asian VLBI Network (EAVN)

The East Asian VLBI Network (EAVN) is an international VLBI facility in East Asia and is operated under mutual collaboration between East Asian countries, as well as part of Southeast Asian and European countries. EAVN currently consists of 16 radio telescopes and three correlators located in China, Japan, and Korea, and is operated mainly at three frequency bands, 6.7, 22, and 43 GHz with the longest baseline length of 5078 km, resulting in the highest angular resolution of 0.28 milliarcseconds at 43 GHz. One of distinct capabilities of EAVN is multi-frequency simultaneous data reception at nine telescopes, which enable us to employ the frequency phase transfer technique to obtain better sensitivity at higher observing frequencies. EAVN started its open-use program in the second half of 2018, providing a total observing time of more than 1100 hours in a year. EAVN fills geographical gap in global VLBI array, resulting in enabling us to conduct contiguous high-resolution VLBI observations. EAVN has produced various scientific accomplishments especially in observations toward active galactic nuclei, evolved stars, and star-forming regions. These activities motivate us to initiate launch of the 'Global VLBI Alliance' to provide an opportunity of VLBI observation with the longest baselines on the earth.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2022

Scrapbook: Screenshot-Based Bookmarks for Effective Digital Resource Curation across Applications

Modern knowledge workers typically need to use multiple resources, such as documents, web pages, and applications, at the same time. This complexity in their computing environments forces workers to restore various resources in the course of their work. However, conventional curation methods like bookmarks, recent document histories, and file systems place limitations on effective retrieval. Such features typically work only for resources of one type within one application, ignoring the interdependency between resources needed for a single task. In addition, text-based handles do not provide rich cues for users to recognize their associated resources. Hence, the need to locate and reopen relevant resources can significantly hinder knowledge workers' productivity. To address these issues, we designed and developed Scrapbook, a novel application for digital resource curation across applications that uses screenshot-based bookmarks. Scrapbook extracts and stores all the metadata (URL, file location, and application name) of windows visible in a captured screenshot to facilitate restoring them later. A week-long field study indicated that screenshot-based bookmarks helped participants curate digital resources. Additionally, participants reported that multimodal -- visual and textual -- data helped them recall past computer activities and reconstruct working contexts efficiently.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

OtherTube: Facilitating Content Discovery and Reflection by Exchanging YouTube Recommendations with Strangers

To promote engagement, recommendation algorithms on platforms like YouTube increasingly personalize users' feeds, limiting users' exposure to diverse content and depriving them of opportunities to reflect on their interests compared to others'. In this work, we investigate how exchanging recommendations with strangers can help users discover new content and reflect. We tested this idea by developing OtherTube -- a browser extension for YouTube that displays strangers' personalized YouTube recommendations. OtherTube allows users to (i) create an anonymized profile for social comparison, (ii) share their recommended videos with others, and (iii) browse strangers' YouTube recommendations. We conducted a 10-day-long user study (n=41) followed by a post-study interview (n=11). Our results reveal that users discovered and developed new interests from seeing OtherTube recommendations. We identified user and content characteristics that affect interaction and engagement with exchanged recommendations; for example, younger users interacted more with OtherTube, while the perceived irrelevance of some content discouraged users from watching certain videos. Users reflected on their interests as well as others', recognizing similarities and differences. Our work shows promise for designs leveraging the exchange of personalized recommendations with strangers.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2021

Designing Transparency Cues in Online News Platforms to Promote Trust: Journalists' & Consumers' Perspectives

As news organizations embrace transparency practices on their websites to distinguish themselves from those spreading misinformation, HCI designers have the opportunity to help them effectively utilize the ideals of transparency to build trust. How can we utilize transparency to promote trust in news? We examine this question through a qualitative lens by interviewing journalists and news consumers -- the two stakeholders in a news system. We designed a scenario to demonstrate transparency features using two fundamental news attributes that convey the trustworthiness of a news article: source and message. In the interviews, our news consumers expressed the idea that news transparency could be best shown by providing indicators of objectivity in two areas (news selection and framing) and by providing indicators of evidence in four areas (presence of source materials, anonymous sourcing, verification, and corrections upon erroneous reporting). While our journalists agreed with news consumers' suggestions of using evidence indicators, they also suggested additional transparency indicators in areas such as the news reporting process and personal/organizational conflicts of interest. Prompted by our scenario, participants offered new design considerations for building trustworthy news platforms, such as designing for easy comprehension, presenting appropriate details in news articles (e.g., showing the number and nature of corrections made to an article), and comparing attributes across news organizations to highlight diverging practices. Comparing the responses from our two stakeholder groups reveals conflicting suggestions with trade-offs between them. Our study has implications for HCI designers in building trustworthy news systems.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2021

NudgeCred: Supporting News Credibility Assessment on Social Media Through Nudges

Struggling to curb misinformation, social media platforms are experimenting with design interventions to enhance consumption of credible news on their platforms. Some of these interventions, such as the use of warning messages, are examples of nudges -- a choice-preserving technique to steer behavior. Despite their application, we do not know whether nudges could steer people into making conscious news credibility judgments online and if they do, under what constraints. To answer, we combine nudge techniques with heuristic based information processing to design NudgeCred -- a browser extension for Twitter. NudgeCred directs users' attention to two design cues: authority of a source and other users' collective opinion on a report by activating three design nudges -- Reliable, Questionable, and Unreliable, each denoting particular levels of credibility for news tweets. In a controlled experiment, we found that NudgeCred significantly helped users (n=430) distinguish news tweets' credibility, unrestricted by three behavioral confounds -- political ideology, political cynicism, and media skepticism. A five-day field deployment with twelve participants revealed that NudgeCred improved their recognition of news items and attention towards all of our nudges, particularly towards Questionable. Among other considerations, participants proposed that designers should incorporate heuristics that users' would trust. Our work informs nudge-based system design approaches for online media.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

Darwin's Neural Network: AI-based Strategies for Rapid and Scalable Cell and Coronavirus Screening

Recent advances in the interdisciplinary scientific field of machine perception, computer vision, and biomedical engineering underpin a collection of machine learning algorithms with a remarkable ability to decipher the contents of microscope and nanoscope images. Machine learning algorithms are transforming the interpretation and analysis of microscope and nanoscope imaging data through use in conjunction with biological imaging modalities. These advances are enabling researchers to carry out real-time experiments that were previously thought to be computationally impossible. Here we adapt the theory of survival of the fittest in the field of computer vision and machine perception to introduce a new framework of multi-class instance segmentation deep learning, Darwin's Neural Network (DNN), to carry out morphometric analysis and classification of COVID19 and MERS-CoV collected in vivo and of multiple mammalian cell types in vitro.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2020

ScreenTrack: Using a Visual History of a Computer Screen to Retrieve Documents and Web Pages

Computers are used for various purposes, so frequent context switching is inevitable. In this setting, retrieving the documents, files, and web pages that have been used for a task can be a challenge. While modern applications provide a history of recent documents for users to resume work, this is not sufficient to retrieve all the digital resources relevant to a given primary document. The histories currently available do not take into account the complex dependencies among resources across applications. To address this problem, we tested the idea of using a visual history of a computer screen to retrieve digital resources within a few days of their use through the development of ScreenTrack. ScreenTrack is software that captures screenshots of a computer at regular intervals. It then generates a time-lapse video from the captured screenshots and lets users retrieve a recently opened document or web page from a screenshot after recognizing the resource by its appearance. A controlled user study found that participants were able to retrieve requested information more quickly with ScreenTrack than under the baseline condition with existing tools. A follow-up study showed that the participants used ScreenTrack to retrieve previously used resources and to recover the context for task resumption.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2019

Computer-mediated Empathy

While novel social networks and emerging technologies help us transcend the spatial and temporal constraints inherent to in-person communication, the trade-off is a loss of natural expressivity. While empathetic interaction is already challenging in in-person communication, computer-mediated communication makes such empathetically rich communication even more difficult. Are technology and intelligent systems opportunities or threats to more empathic interpersonal communication? Realizing empathy is suggested not only as a way to communicate with others but also to design products for users and facilitate creativity. In this position paper, I suggest a framework to breakdown empathy, introduce each element, and show how computing, technologies, and algorithms can support (or hinder) certain elements of the empathy framework.

cs.HC↗