Our paper on “Building Community Resiliency through Immersive Communal Extended Reality (CXR)” was recently accepted to MDPI Multimodal Technologies and Interaction 2023.
Authors: Sharon Yavo-Ayalon, Swapna Joshi, Yuzhen (Adam) Zhang, Ruixiang (Albert) Han, Narges Mahyar, Wendy Ju.
You can find the paper here.
“CommunityBots: Creating and Evaluating A Multi-Agent Chatbot Platform for Public Input Elicitation” was accepted to CSCW 2023
Authors: Zhiqiu Jiang, Mashrur Rashik, Kunjal Panchal, Mahmood Jasim, Ali Sarvghad, Pari Riahi, Erica DeWitt, Fey Thurber, Narges Mahyar.
System Overview
This figure presents CommunityBots’ system overview. We use an example to guide through the process of user interactions with multiple chatbots: 1) The Household chatbot asks the user questions about their family life; 2) The user responds that they want to skip the current topic; 3) The Household chatbot receives user’s response “Skip this topic”; 4) The Household chatbot forwards the user’s response to Juji’s NLU module; 5a) Juji uses NLU to identify the user’s engagement level; 5b) NLU determines that the user doesn’t want to talk about the current topic and passes this conclusion to CommunityBot’s Topic-Switch Mechanism; 6) Topic-Switch Mechanism determines which topic to change the conversation to; 7) Since there are no remaining topics for the Household chatbot to converse, the Topic-Switch Mechanism asks the Chatbot-switch mechanism to switch from the Household chatbot to the next chatbot in queue; 8) Chatbot-switch mechanism determines that the next chatbot to converse with the user is the Work chatbot; 9) Juji notifies the Chatbot-switch mechanism about the Work chatbot invocations; 10) The Chatbot-switch mechanism fetches the questions related to the Work chatbot; 11a) The Chatbot-switch mechanism “wakes up” the Work chatbot on user’s screen and passes the next question to be asked; 11b) At the same time, the Chatbot-switch Mechanism puts the Household chatbot in a inactive state; 12) The question asked by the Work chatbot is displayed on user’s screen; 13) The user proceeds to talk to the new chatbot.
You can find the paper here.
“Mapping Instability: The Effects of the Pandemic on the Civic Life of a Small Town” was accepted to the Environments By Design: Health, Wellbeing And Place Conference 2022
Authors: Erica Dewitt, Zhiqiu Jiang, Mashrur Rashik, Kunjal Panchal, Mahmood Jasim, Fey Thurber, Cami Quinteros, Ali Sarvghad, Narges Mahyar, and Pari Riahi
You can find the paper here.
Led by: Brandon Reynante, Steven P. Dow, and Narges Mahyar
Related Papers:
“A Framework for Open Civic Design: Integrating Public Participation, Crowdsourcing, and Design Thinking”
Civic problems are often too complex to solve through traditional top-down strategies. Various governments and civic initiatives have explored more community-driven strategies where citizens get involved with defining problems and innovating solutions. While certain people may feel more empowered, the public at large often does not have accessible, flexible, and meaningful ways to engage. Prior theoretical frameworks for public participation typically offer a one-size-fits-all model based on face-to-face engagement and fail to recognize the barriers faced by even the most engaged citizens. In this article, we explore a vision for open civic design where we integrate theoretical frameworks from public engagement, crowdsourcing, and design thinking to consider the role technology can play in lowering barriers to large-scale participation, scaffolding problem-solving activities, and providing flexible options that cater to individuals’ skills, availability, and interests. We describe our novel theoretical framework and analyze the key goals associated with this vision: (1) to promote inclusive and sustained participation in civics; (2) to facilitate effective management of large-scale participation; and (3) to provide a structured process for achieving effective solutions. We present case studies of existing civic design initiatives and discuss challenges, limitations, and future work related to operationalizing, implementing, and testing this framework.
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
Led by: Mahmood Jasim CommunityClick: Capturing and Reporting Community Feedback from Town Halls to Improve Inclusivity CommunityClick: Towards Improving Inclusivity in Town Halls
Local governments still depend on traditional town halls for community consultation, despite problems such as a lack of inclusive participation for attendees and difficulty for civic organizers to capture attendees’ feedback in reports. Building on a formative study with 66 town hall attendees and 20 organizers, we designed and developed CommunityClick, a communitysourcing system that captures attendees’ feedback in an inclusive manner and enables organizers to author more comprehensive reports. During the meeting, in addition to recording meeting audio to capture vocal attendees’ feedback, we modify iClickers to give voice to reticent attendees by allowing them to provide real-time feedback beyond a binary signal. This information then automatically feeds into a meeting transcript augmented with attendees’ feedback and organizers’ tags. The augmented transcript along with a feedback-weighted summary of the transcript generated from text analysis methods is incorporated into an interactive authoring tool for organizers to write reports. From a field experiment at a town hall meeting, we demonstrate how CommunityClick can improve inclusivity by providing multiple avenues for attendees to share opinions. Additionally, interviews with eight expert organizers demonstrate CommunityClick’s utility in creating more comprehensive and accurate reports to inform critical civic decision-making. We discuss the possibility of integrating CommunityClick with town hall meetings in the future as well as expanding to other domains.
Our next step in this project is to virtualize the iClicker component to enable silent attendees to share their opinions during online meetings and discussions.
If you are interested in working on or learning more about this project, please contact Mahmood Jasim at mjasim@cs.umass.edu
Led by: Narges Mahyar UD Co-Spaces: A Table-Centred Multi-Display Environment for Public Engagement in Urban Design Charrettes Collaboration Tools To Support Informed Public Engagement
Project Video
UD Co-Spaces (Urban Design Collaborative Spaces) is an integrated multi-display tabletop centered urban design application that was developed and iteratively improved over five years to engage diverse stakeholders such as planners, designers, and the public in the task of generating and testing urban planning and design options. I Investigated the use of novel visualization and collaborative technologies to make data more accessible, understandable, and useful to enhance public engagement in community design and empower them to make well-informed data-driven and evidence-based decisions. Results of an observational study comparing UD Co-Spaces with the traditional paper-based approach indicated that groups using our system had more equity in terms of collaborative contributions and co-creation of plans, more parallel activities through the use of iPad applications, and more fine-grained discussions about features of the design such as look and alignment of buildings because of the 3D view and the real-time metrics.
Led by: Narges Mahyar ConsensUs: Visualizing Points of Disagreement for Multi-Criteria Collaborative Decision Making
Groups often face difficulty reaching consensus. For complex decisions with multiple latent criteria, discourse alone may impede groups from pinpointing fundamental disagreements. (How) can technology help groups reach better decisions together? To explore this, ConsensUs project explores a visulization approach for multi-criteria group decision making that highlights salient agreements and disagreements between group members.
Led by: Narges Mahyar Enabling Crowdsourced Visualizations to Support Large-Scale Civic Engagement
The internet has enabled decision makers in government to collect ideas, suggestions and opinions on civic-related issues. While such strategies typically succeed at collecting opinions from citizens, they often lack follow through in which citizens identify conflicts, empathize with other viewpoints, and collectively generate and act on negotiated solutions. To address these challenges, Citizensourcing project focuses on supporting large-scale civic engagement and extending current civic systems where citizens become “sensors” for reporting and collecting civic-related issues, but also participate in problem-solving processes.
Led by: Narges Mahyar
Website
We partnered with leading local organizations to drive collaboration, innovation and impact. In collaboration with City of San Diego, SCALE SD, the Design Forward Alliance, and the National Science Foundation, we launched Design for San Diego (D4SD), an online platform to engage the public in solving San Diego’s mobility challenges. The challenge is open to anyone from students and senior citizens to entrepreneurs and designers. D4SD creates unique opportunities for the public, government, academia, and industry to collaboratively design innovative civic solutions through a mixed engagement approach. Our project goal was to provide an equal voice for everyone to collaborate with other city innovators to solve the most pressing mobility-related issues in San Diego. In addition, during Fall 2010 Narges Mahyar co-taught a course called Civic Design at UCSD, where she taught the human-centered design principles and provided students with guidance and feedback on their D4SD projects.