ALT Urban screens have become a global feature of the media city, yet their developmental paths are not universal. This paper argues that the evolution of urban screens in China constitutes a distinct paradigm of media urbanism, termed Chineseness, understood here not as cultural essence but as a relational, historically situated configuration of three linked elements: deep-rooted lineages of public communication; state-steered technological leapfrogging driven by industrial policy and mega-events; and a regulatory paradox that enables spectacular scale while tightening operational control. Drawing on a five-stage genealogy (1990-present), a chronology of representative screens, and five paradigmatic cases, the study shows how this configuration produces temporal-spatial compression, the coexistence of multiple technological generations, and privileges collective witnessing over device-centric interactivity. The paper contributes a documented genealogy of Chinese urban screens, develops te

ALT Visual search is ubiquitous in daily life, from locating keys in a messy apartment to finding a tool in a cluttered workshop or an application icon on a desktop screen. While visual attention is to a large extent driven by image content, research in psychology indicates that user cognitive states have a significant influence on attention allocation. A promising way to access information about cognitive states is via Electroencephalography (EEG) recordings. Despite this potential, previous works in computational attention modeling have largely disregarded EEG, and related studies in psychology operate with abstract, simplistic stimuli, or even artificially guided search procedures. We bridge this gap with two contributions. First, we present EEGaze 140, the largest publicly available multimodal dataset of free visual search with realistic stimuli. The dataset contains synchronized EEG and eye tracking recordings from 36 participants across 140 naturalistic scenes, covering two scenarios

ALT Interactive technology is increasingly built for speed, and generative AI now answers before a question is fully formed. Yet the capacity to pause, interpret and decide for oneself is central to wellbeing, learning and meaningful use. HCI has named paradigms for sensing emotion, changing behavior, calming attention and tracking the self. However, none of them takes human reflection, and the slowing down it requires, as its organizing aim. This article defines that paradigm, reflective computing, and derives it from what thirty years of designs lack. We analyzed 134 interactive systems from 17 ACM venues (1996-2026) in two phases. First, an abductive gap analysis read every system against reflection theory, and seven recurring gaps defined seven dimensions, namely tempo agency, invitational form, interpretive openness, reflective depth, temporal span, protected idleness and ethical non-extraction. Second, two independent coders scored every system with a codebook (Krippendorff's alpha 0

ALT People who are blind or have low vision (BLV) are largely excluded from 3D modeling tools that rely on visual representations of geometry. Natural language descriptions offer a potential path to accessibility, but it is unclear whether language alone can support the deep spatial understanding that editing, not just browsing, requires. Advances in generative AI offer the promise of automatic model description, yet descriptions suited to BLV modelers are structurally distinct from alt-text and from existing 3D model captioning datasets, and the domain-specific requirements for generating them are not well understood. We address this through two coordinated studies: an autoethnographic pilot in which the blind first author worked with 12 sighted participants to develop a taxonomy of descriptive strategies, and a Wizard-of-Oz main study that applied those strategies as idealized scripts with 10 BLV participants. We identify a systematic use-to-editing gap: descriptions that support accurat

ALT Across multiple waves of computing, public trust in new technology has followed the emergence of governance mechanisms that made dominant risks legible and manageable. Generative AI shifts this pattern: these systems synthesize across heterogeneous sources, and users increasingly experience them as reasoning systems. The central question changes from "did it perform correctly?" to "can we trust how it arrived at its conclusion?" This paper introduces Filtered Decision Logs (FDLs), a user-facing transparency mechanism that makes decision formation visible without exposing raw chain-of-thought. FDLs pair each response with (i) a concise decision rationale, (ii) influence-ordered supporting data points derived from tool outputs, and (iii) relevance indicators showing which sources most shaped the conclusion. To operationalize evidence selection, we propose a trace-based method that reconstructs observability telemetry into a provenance tree and ranks evidence using four deterministic sema

ALT Urban heritage tours are often delivered through fixed scripts, leaving limited room for visitors' situated questions, language preferences, or requests for evidence. We present ECHOES, an adaptive LLM-powered AR glasses docent for evidence-grounded interpretation of historical buildings. Specifically, the agent adapts along three dimensions: it modifies response structure according to the type of visitor question (identification, architectural detail, evidence-seeking, or route inquiry); it accumulates session-level interest signals from repeated questions and expressed curiosity to shape later explanations; and it tracks language preference and retrieval context across turns to maintain conversational continuity. The core of ECHOES is an LLM agent initialized as a source-aware urban heritage docent that realizes this adaptation through dialogue and preference context maintained across the session. Around this agent, ECHOES integrates visual site grounding, a self-built historical kno

ALT Direct messaging is often employed by social media content creators to directly interact with followers. Those creators attempt to engage with followers in private communication, but they often encounter a large volume of messages. Through formative interviews with 15 creators, we found that creators frequently experience fatigue from writing suitable content, as they moderate audience expectations while concurrently integrating their media personas into responses. To explore how AI can address these challenges, we designed a system providing personalized, AI-generated response suggestions tailored to creators' writing styles to maintain their media personas. In a comparison study with 13 creators that examines how the system affects response behaviors, creators valued the system's ability to soften potential impoliteness and anticipated higher response rates, helping them maintain a professional image. However, creators reported additional labor in verifying the authenticity of AI out

ALT Users are increasingly delegating tasks to AI agents, allowing agents to perform long-running, multi-step workflows on their behalf. However, agents may perform these tasks in ways that depart from users' expectations for how they should be carried out, leading to what we call agentic delegation failures. We leverage a large corpus of 163,487 Reddit posts, describing AI agent use, to develop MANDATE: a taxonomy of 23 failure categories organized into seven groups. A follow-up study with 73 AI agent users examined the relationship between prevalence and perceptions of severity and noticeability, finding that failures rated as more severe are considered harder to notice, and that prior experience with a failure is associated with greater noticeability. Finally, we assess the maturity of research on each failure and identify commonly encountered failures that have received little attention (e.g., agents running without making progress). Our findings inform opportunities to make delegation

ALT Conversational AI systems are increasingly used to fulfill both functional and affective needs, yet how users perceive the AI-adoption effects varies. Existing research tends to treat these two needs as binary categories and to classify users by a single dominant need. However, this approach fails to capture users who engage with AI for both affective and functional purposes simultaneously, leaving it unclear how these needs combine in real-world AI use. To capture the multifaceted nature of users' AI engagement, we developed the AI-Support measurement with 1,090 participants, grounded in social support theory, which evaluates four dimensions of perceived AI support: emotional/esteem, social companionship, informational, and instrumental support. This study provided (1) an AI-Support Scale developed to measure the perceived support types from human-AI interaction, (2) evidence that users might adopt AI with a high level of both functional and affective use, and (3) exploratory indicato

ALT In this paper, we introduce a new framework for characterizing the user skills required for chart authoring. Despite growing attention to authoring systems, we lack a conceptual framework that characterizes the diverse and multifaceted skills involved and helps identify opportunities for system design and development. Our initial investigation revealed that skill is a complex and elusive concept, and that existing theories on skills from other disciplines are too high-level to capture the importance of tasks and tools in data visualizations. To address this gap, we formulate the CAPED framework that characterizes skill as the ability to create a chart involving five dimensions pertinent to tasks and tools: input data, output chart, paradigm, abstraction, and expression. We demonstrate the framework's descriptive power by highlighting different skills involved in similar authoring situations and identifying the types of knowledge associated with chart authoring. We further present examp

ALT Individuals are increasingly using AI for psychological support. One specific paradigm, AI-mediated cognitive reframing (AIM-CR), uses AI to automatically reframe users' negative thoughts ("I failed...") into more adaptive perspectives ("I am learning..."). While prior work suggests that AIM-CR tools reduce users' negative emotions, the complexities of AI automatically modifying users' personal narratives remain underexplored. In this work, we investigated these complexities through a mixed-methods study in which 28 participants engaged with an AIM-CR tool that reframed narratives about their stressors. Our findings suggest that participants had mixed perceptions of AIM-CR: although reframing reduced negative emotions for most participants, participants felt less ownership of, and less authenticity in, the reframed narratives. Participants perceived AIM-CR as a validating "mirror," as "another self" that could motivate or alienate them, or as an external social actor. These perceptions

ALT Speech and language technologies have expanded access to communication, but the support they provide is often fixed. The same linguistic or visual aid may help one user and hinder another, or become less useful as task demands change. This project proposes a framework for adapting language presentation to individual abilities and ongoing interaction. It separates access to a message from the estimation of user needs and from the selection of support, including sentence segmentation, pictograms, and optional spoken output. Behavioral feedback provides the primary evidence for adaptation; electroencephalography is considered an additional, uncertainty-aware source of information rather than a direct measure of comprehension. We specify a staged evaluation comparing fixed, behavior-adaptive, and neuroadaptive interfaces. The central question is whether neural information improves comprehension and communication efficiency beyond a strong behavioral baseline.

ALT Sensory augmentation (SA) can extend how people perceive and engage with public environments through the body, offering opportunities to support shared multimodal experiences between deaf and hearing visitors. Designing such systems requires understanding which combinations of tactile stimuli and body locations users perceive as acceptable. We examined the perceived acceptability of fictitious yet feasible SA configurations in a museum use-case. Using a modified technology acceptance model, we surveyed 307 deaf and hearing participants about tactile stimulus types and body locations. The results showed significant effects of stimulus type and body location on acceptance, but no interactions with hearing status. Participants generally preferred temperature-based stimuli, subtle movement, texture, and tickling over vibration, and distal over proximal body locations. These findings suggest that tactile SA design should be guided primarily by embodied and contextual factors rather than hea

ALT Communicative visualizations can support multiple chart-grounded takeaways, including divergent or conflicting ones; we refer to this variation as interpretive ambiguity. Such ambiguity can undermine a visualization's communicative goal when the supported takeaways diverge from its intended message. Evaluating visualizations with target audiences can surface this variation, but such evaluations can be costly and difficult to scale. In this work, we explore persona-conditioned Vision Language Models (VLMs) as a complementary evaluation tool for interpretive ambiguity. For a given visualization, our pipeline uses topic-relevant personas to elicit candidate contextual takeaways supported by interpretations of perceived visual patterns, such as trends and clusters. We derive a Target–Pattern–Scope framework for comparing these interpretations, use LLM judges to assign Compatible, Disjoint, or Opposing ambiguity labels to statement pairs, and summarize their distribution in an ambiguity pro

ALT Decoding simultaneous and proportional finger kinematics from high-density surface electromyography (HD sEMG) remains challenging. Although data-driven methods have shown promising performance for finger movement decoding, their limited physiological interpretability remains a relevant limitation. This study proposes and evaluates a spiking neural network (SNN) that incorporates spinal-inspired structures and mechanisms to predict multi-joint finger kinematics from HD sEMG signals. The spinal-inspired SNN includes a spike-encoding computational model with input-noise variability, a phenomenological representation of Henneman's size principle, and excitation/inhibition (E/I) balance. HD sEMG and kinematic data were collected from 23 healthy participants performing grasping tasks under different elbow and wrist postures. Performance was assessed using six prediction metrics and compared against six baseline machine learning and deep learning methods. The proposed method showed a large an

ALT People have long dreamed of an assistant that is always there to guide them and remind what they forget, from new dishes to lost keys. Powered by multimodal large language models (MLLMs), egocentric AI assistants on wearable devices are bringing this dream within reach: they see what the user sees and give instructions for user's physical work when necessary. However, testing such assistance is challenging and usually requires real people. The expensive and rare real interaction data leaves a key question unanswered: Can today's MLLMs truly help people in physical world? To answer this question, we propose InteractiveWorld, the first verifiable environment for closed-loop interaction between human and AI assistant. Unlike existing robot-centric simulators, InteractiveWorld lets the assistant guide a human agent who observes the scene, understands instructions, and acts independently. It thus realistically simulates how AI assistant collaborates with human: the assistant instructs, the

ALT Agentic driving brings goal-directed reasoning, memory, tools, and adaptive interaction into automated vehicles. A vehicle can clarify a request, explain a maneuver, or prepare a driver to take control, then adapt its next action to the response. These capabilities make the vehicle an active participant in shaping the human behavior it observes. We examine how agentic interaction affects driver-state inference, trust and reliance, and human intervention in conditional automation. Established findings on attention, takeover prediction, trust-aware planning, and adaptive warnings provide useful foundations, but their applicability depends on how observations are elicited and how assistance changes the driving task. We distinguish what remains applicable, what changes under flexible interaction, and what remains unresolved across these three areas. The analysis identifies three research priorities: establishing the effects of interventions, jointly designing interaction and driving polici

ALT Many agent tasks recur with new data or small changes, yet agents regenerate their reasoning and actions on each run, producing different results. Distilling a prior run into a skill helps the agent avoid earlier mistakes, but it still re-runs the full process each time, so runs can vary and incur that cost. We compile a successful agent run into a reusable neuro-symbolic program (NSP) with a set of guidelines we call FlashScript. Actions and data transformations become code, instance-specific values become parameters, and decisions that need model judgment become LLM calls. We identify three layers where these calls belong and three techniques that replace most of them with code. The compilation does not remove nondeterminism; it localizes it, so the deterministic program and its neural calls can be reviewed and tested separately. Across 120 WorkBench analytics tasks with Claude Haiku 4.5, the NSPs were correct and made identical tool calls on every run, using about 70 times fewer inp

ALT Life experiences can shape policy attitudes, but we only live one life. Citizens may therefore fail to support policies addressing risks they have never personally experienced. Narratives can make such risks immediate and personal, but personalized stories remain difficult to produce at scale. Here we ask whether AI can make distant scenarios feel concrete by simulating a participant's life as if that scenario occurred. We present the As-If Machine (AIM), a multi-agent system through which people co-write personalized counterfactual narratives—stories about their own lives under different policy futures. In two pre-registered and quota-matched experiments on science funding (N=1,007) and satellite cybersecurity (N=894), we compared AIM with two controls: reading an expert-written vignette on the same topic and co-writing with AIM about an unrelated topic. AIM increased psychological closeness—how close a risk feels to the self—by nearly identical margins in the two domains (0.36 and 0.

ALT Embodied conversational AI can be persuasive, but can it motivate people to develop sustainable behavioral tendencies and increase pro-environmental attitudes? We conducted a randomized experiment (N = 576) comparing four embodied avatars–a beluga whale, Greta Thunberg, Emma Watson, and a generic human–with a text chatbot and no-intervention control. All embodied conditions increased immediate sustainable product selection relative to the control (beta =.401-.609, all q <=.0126) and chatbot (beta =.398-.604, all q <=.007), without differing significantly from one another. Only the Beluga condition increased immediate pro-environmental attitudes relative to the control after correction. Among 287 returners assessed two months later, following an intermediate assigned-condition session, Beluga also showed significantly higher pre-booster sustainable product choice compared to the control (beta =.657, q =.0176). Although it did not significantly outperform other embodied agents, these fin