Publications

@inproceedings{fang_social_2025,

title = {Social Simulation for Everyday Self-Care: Design Insights from Leveraging VR, AR, and LLMs for Practicing Stress Relief},

author = {A. Fang and H. Chhabria and A. Maram and H. Zhu},

url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-105005770377&doi=10.1145%2f3706598.3713115&partnerID=40&md5=87d43f04dfd3231cb189fa89570824c5},

doi = {10.1145/3706598.3713115},

isbn = {979-840071394-1 (ISBN)},

year  = {2025},

date = {2025-01-01},

booktitle = {Conf Hum Fact Comput Syst Proc},

publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},

abstract = {Stress is an inevitable part of day-to-day life yet many find themselves unable to manage it themselves, particularly when professional or peer support are not always readily available. As self-care becomes increasingly vital for mental well-being, this paper explores the potential of social simulation as a safe, virtual environment for practicing in-the-moment stress relief for everyday social situations. Leveraging the immersive capabilities of VR, AR, and LLMs to create realistic interactions and environments, we developed eight interactive prototypes for various social stress related scenarios (e.g. public speaking, interpersonal conflict) across design dimensions of modality, interactivity, and mental health guidance in order to conduct prototype-driven semi-structured interviews with 19 participants. Our qualitative findings reveal that people currently lack effective means to support themselves through everyday stress and perceive social simulation - even at low immersion and interaction levels - to fill a gap for practical, controlled training of mental health practices. We outline key design needs for developing social simulation for self-care needs, and identify important considerations including risks of trauma from hyper-realism, distrust of LLM-recommended timing for mental health recommendations, and the value of accessibility for self-care interventions. © 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).},

keywords = {design, Design insights, Language Model, Large language model, large language models, Mental health, Peer support, Professional supports, Self-care, Social simulations, Speed dating, Virtual environments, Virtual Reality, Well being},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{park_coexplorer_2024,

title = {CoExplorer: Generative AI Powered 2D and 3D Adaptive Interfaces to Support Intentionality in Video Meetings},

author = {G. W. Park and P. Panda and L. Tankelevitch and S. Rintel},

url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85194194151&doi=10.1145%2f3613905.3650797&partnerID=40&md5=19d083f7aee201cc73fe0c2386f04bb6},

doi = {10.1145/3613905.3650797},

isbn = {979-840070331-7 (ISBN)},

year  = {2024},

date = {2024-01-01},

booktitle = {Conf Hum Fact Comput Syst Proc},

publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},

abstract = {Current online meeting technologies lack holistic support for reducing the effort of planning and running meetings. We present CoExplorer2D and CoExplorerVR, generative AI (GenAI)-driven technology probes for exploring the significant transformative potential of GenAI to augment these aspects of meetings. In each system, before the meeting, these systems generate tools that allow synthesis and ranking of attendees' key issues for discussion, and likely phases that a meeting would require to cover these issues. During the meeting, these systems use speech recognition to generate 2D or VR window layouts with appropriate applications and files for each phase, and recognize the attendees' progress through the meeting's phases. We argue that these probes show the potential of GenAI to contribute to reducing the effort required for planning and running meetings, providing participants with a more engaging and effective meeting experiences. © 2024 Association for Computing Machinery. All rights reserved.},

keywords = {Adaptive interface, Adaptive user interface, design, Effectiveness, Facilitation, Generative AI, Goal, Goals, Intent recognition, Meeting, meetings, planning, Probes, Speech recognition, User interfaces, Video conferencing, Videoconferencing, Virtual Reality, Windowing},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}