A new paper by lab members Alyx Burns, Dr. Cindy Xiong, and Dr. Narges Mahyar was accepted for publication in TVCG. The paper, titled “Designing with Pictographs: Envision Topics without Sacrificing Understanding,” examines the effects of replacing abstract shapes in traditional charts and graphs with pictograph arrays. They found that the pictographs had no impact on participant understanding, but impacted participants’ experience.
You can find a PDF of the paper on our website.
This past June, Mahmood Jasim, Enamul Hoque, Ali Sarvghad and Narges Mahyar’s paper titled “CommunityPulse: Facilitating Community Input Analysis by Surfacing Hidden Insights, Reflections, and Priorities” received an Honorable Mention Award at DIS 2021. Congratulations to all of the authors on this achievement!
You can find a PDF of the paper here.
Alongside Daniel Haehn, Steven Franconeri, Jessica Hullman, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, and Hanspeter Pfister, Professor Narges Mahyar co-organized the Chart Question Answering Workshop as a part of the 2021 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference that took place in June 2021. You can find more information on the workshop and a video of its proceedings at the workshop’s website: https://cqaw.github.io/
Together with Kumiyo Nakakoji, Prof. Mahyar organized ACM Creativity & Cognition 2021 Conference. Their goal was to create an exciting, inclusive and diverse paper track, and had some amazing sessions with great moderation & participation from the audience!
You can now access all the conference proceedings online here.
Together with Jane Fountain (School for Public Policy) and Ethan Zuckerman (School for Public Policy), Professors Narges Mahyar and Ali Sarvghad were awarded a UMass ADVANCE Collaborative Research Seed Grant from the UMass Amherst Institute of Diversity Sciences. More information on the grant is available in an article from the School for Public Policy.
Carolina Aragón, Mahmood Jasim and Narges Mahyar recently had their paper “RisingEMOTIONS: Bridging Art and Technology to Increase Public Engagement with Climate Change” accepted to ACM Creativity & Cognition 2021. It will appear at the conference in June. Congratulations to all on a job well done!
Paper Abstract: In response to the threat posed by sea-level rise, coastal cities must rapidly adapt and transform vulnerable areas to protect endangered communities. As such, raising awareness and engaging affected communities in planning for adaptation strategies is critical. However,in the US, public engagement with climate change is low, especially among underrepresented populations. To address this challenge,we designed and implemented RisingEMOTIONS, a site-specific collaborative art installation situated in East Boston that combines public art with digital technology. The installation depicts the impacts of sea-level rise by visualizing local projected flood levels and the public’s emotions toward this threat. The community’s engagement with our project demonstrated the potential for public art to create interest and raise awareness of climate change. We discuss the potential for continued growth in the way that digital tools and public art can support equitable resilience planning through increased public engagement.
Recently, Mahmood Jasim, Enamul Hoque, Ali Sarvghad and Narges Mahyar had their paper “CommunityPulse: Facilitating Community Input Analysis by Surfacing Hidden Insights, Reflections, and Priorities” accepted to ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) 2021. Congratulations to all involved!
Paper Abstract: Increased access to online engagement platforms has created a shift in civic practice, enabling civic leaders to broaden their outreach tocollect a larger number of community input, such as comments and ideas. However, sensemaking of such input remains a challenge dueto the unstructured nature of text comments and ambiguity of human language. Hence, community input is often left unanalyzed andunutilized in policymaking. To address this problem, we interviewed 14 civic leaders to understand their practices and requirements.We identified challenges around organizing the unstructured community input and surfacing community’s reflections beyond binarysentiments. Based on these insights, we built CommunityPulse, an interactive system that combines text analysis and visualization toscaffold different facets of community input. Our evaluation with another 15 experts suggests CommunityPulse’s efficacy in surfacingmultiple facets such as reflections, priorities, and hidden insights while reducing the required time, effort, and expertise for communityinput analysis.
Prof. Mahyar and Prof. Sarvghad (CICS) were awarded an ADVANCE Collaborative Research Seed Grant on “MAPPING INSTABILITY: The Effects of the Pandemic on the Civic Life of a Small Town” with their collaborator Pari Riahi (Department of Architecture). More information on the grant is available here.
Led by: Mahmood Jasim
Online civic discussion platforms supplement face-to-face conversations while enabling a larger number of people to participate. To understand the public’s perspectives on civic issues, civic leaders are keen to learn people’s’ emotional stances. However, online platforms deprive the civic leaders of this vital insight due to the lack of appropriate mechanisms to convey non-verbal communications, including emotional responses. Moreover, discrete emotion categories are heavily dependent on the online discussion contexts and an agreed-upon set of emotions in the online civic discussion domain is still missing. The problem is exacerbated by the lack of consensus in ways to visualize emotions. In this work, our goal is to investigate and identify a set of emotions suitable for portraying emotional responses in online civic discussions, based on our interviews with civic leaders.
If you are interested in working on or learning more about this project, please contact Mahmood Jasim at mjasim@cs.umass.edu
Led by: Mahmood Jasim
CommunityPulse: Facilitating Community Input Analysis by Surfacing Hidden Insights, Reflections, and Priorities
Increased access to online engagement platforms has created a shift in civic practice, enabling civic leaders to broaden their outreach to collect a larger number of community input, such as comments and ideas. However, sensemaking of such input remains a challenge due to the unstructured nature of text comments and ambiguity of human language. Hence, community input is often left unanalyzed and unutilized in policymaking. To address this problem, we interviewed 14 civic leaders to understand their practices and requirements. We identified challenges around organizing the unstructured community input and surfacing community’s reflections beyond binary sentiments. Based on these insights, we built CommunityPulse, an interactive system that combines text analysis and visualization to scaffold different facets of community input. Our evaluation with another 15 experts suggests CommunityPulse’s efficacy in surfacing multiple facets such as reflections, priorities, and hidden insights while reducing the required time, effort, and expertise for community input analysis.
If you are interested in working on or learning more about this project, please contact Mahmood Jasim at mjasim@cs.umass.edu