Gary Hsieh

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Washington

Objective Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based approaches for extracting Social Drivers of Health (SDoH) from clinical notes offer healthcare systems an efficient way to identify patients’ social needs, yet we know little about the acceptability of this approach to patients and clinicians. We investigated patient and clinician acceptability through i...

Automated coaching messages for weight control can save time and costs, but their repetitive, generic nature may limit their effectiveness compared to human coaching. Large language model (LLM) based artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, like ChatGPT, could offer more personalized and novel messages to address repetition with their data-processing...

Trust is not just a cognitive issue but also an emotional one, yet the research in human-AI interactions has primarily focused on the cognitive route of trust development. Recent work has highlighted the importance of studying affective trust towards AI, especially in the context of emerging human-like LLM-powered conversational agents. However, th...

Trust is not just a cognitive issue but also an emotional one, yet the research in human-AI interactions has primarily focused on the cognitive route of trust development. Recent work has highlighted the importance of studying affective trust towards AI, especially in the context of emerging human-like LLMs-powered conversational agents. However, t...

Background Implementation strategies are strategies to improve uptake of evidence-based practices or interventions and are essential to implementation science. Developing or tailoring implementation strategies may benefit from integrating approaches from other disciplines; yet current guidance on how to effectively incorporate methods from other di...

Social media platform affordances allow users to interact with content and with each other in diverse ways. For example, on Twitter ¹ , users can like, reply, retweet, or quote another tweet. Though it’s clear that these different features allow various types of interactions, open questions remain about how these different affordances shape the con...

Social media platform affordances allow users to interact with content and with each other in diverse ways. For example, on Twitter 1 , users can like, reply, retweet, or quote another tweet. Though it's clear that these different features allow various types of interactions, open questions remain about how these different affordances shape the con...

Identifying patients' social needs is a first critical step to address social determinants of health (SDoH)-the conditions in which people live, learn, work, and play that affect health. Addressing SDoH can improve health outcomes, population health, and health equity. Emerging SDoH reporting requirements call for health systems to implement effici...

The format used to communicate probability—verbal versus numerical descriptors—can impact risk perceptions and behaviors. This issue is salient for the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), where concerns about vaccine-related risks may reduce uptake and verbal descriptors have been widely used by public health, news organizations and on social medi...

Despite the efficacy, safety, and availability of COVID-19 vaccines, a lack of awareness and trust of vaccine safety research remains an important barrier to public health. The goal of this research was to design and test online meta-summaries—transparent, interactive summaries of the state of relevant studies—to improve people’s awareness and opin...

Social media, blogs, podcasts, and other computer-mediated communication technology have become an integral way for the public to access and engage with research. However, despite the evolving challenges researchers face navigating these platforms, and the high stakes of online science communication, relatively little HCI research has focused on un...

Goal setting is critical to achieving desired changes in life. Many technologies support defining and tracking progress toward goals, but these are just some parts of the process of setting and achieving goals. People want to set goals that are more complex than the ones supported through technology. Additionally, people use goal-setting technologi...

Online sources such as social media have become increasingly important for the proliferation of science news, and past research has shown that reading user-generated comments after an article (i.e. in typical online news and blog formats) can impact the way people perceive the article. However, recent studies have shown that people are likely to re...

Depression is common but under-treated in patients with cancer, despite being a major modifiable contributor to morbidity and early mortality. Integrating psychosocial care into cancer services through the team-based Collaborative Care Management (CoCM) model has been proven to be effective in improving patient outcomes in cancer centers. However,...

Accessing patients' social needs is a critical challenge at emergency departments (EDs). However, most EDs do not have extra staff to administer screeners, and without personnel administration, response rates are low especially for low health literacy patients. To facilitate engagement with such low health literacy patients, we designed a chatbot -...

Online discussion websites, such as Reddit's r/science forum, have the potential to foster science communication between researchers and the general public. However, little is known about who participates, what is discussed, and whether such websites are successful in achieving meaningful science discussions. To find out, we conducted a mixed-metho...

Using scientific discoveries to inform design practice is an important, but difficult, objective in HCI. In this paper, we provide an overview of Translational Science in HCI by triangulating literature related to the research-practice gap with interview data from many parties engaged (or not) in translating HCI knowledge. We propose a model for Tr...

The process of settling in a new country can be extremely challenging, entailing various information needs to cope with rapid changes and adjustments to a new environment. Through interviews with 16 Korean immigrants in the United States, we explored their information behaviors in the settlement process. In line with prior work (Shoham & Strauss, 2...

In this paper we present ReactionBot, a system that attaches emoji based on users' facial expressions to text messages on Slack. Through a study of 16 dyads, we found that ReactionBot was able to help communicate participants' affect, reducing the need for participants to self-react with emoji during conversations. However, contrary to our hypothes...

Donation-based support for open, peer production projects such as Wikipedia is an important mechanism for preserving their integrity and independence. For this reason understanding donation behavior and incentives is crucial in this context. In this work, using a dataset of aggregated donation information from Wikimedia's 2015 fund-raising campaign...

In this chapter we discuss the use of external sources of data in designing conversational dialogues. We focus on applications in behavior change around physical activity involving dialogues that help users better understand their self-tracking data and motivate healthy behaviors. We start by introducing the areas of behavior change and personal in...

Mobile, wearable and other connected devices allow people to collect and explore large amounts of data about their own activities, behavior, and well-being. Yet, learning from-, and acting upon such data remain a challenge. The process of reflection has been identified as a key component of such learning. However, most tools do not explicitly desig...

Prior research has examined the use of Social Question and Answer (Q&A) websites for answer and help seeking. However, the potential for these websites to support domain learning has not yet been realized. Helping users write effective answers can be beneficial for subject area learning for both answerers and the recipients of answers. In this stud...

Conversational agents stand to play an important role in supporting behavior change and well-being in many domains. With users able to interact with conversational agents through both text and voice, understanding how designing for these channels supports behavior change is important. To begin answering this question, we designed a conversational a...

While numerous design methods used in industry help designers rapidly brainstorm design ideas, few help them to use theory in the design process. Behavior change theories can support such design activities as understanding, ideating, sketching, and prototyping. We present the Behavior Change Design Sprint (BCDS), a design process for applying behav...

Exercise plans help people implement behavior change. Crowd workers can help create exercise plans for clients, but their work may result in lower quality plans than produced by experts. We built CrowdFit, a tool that provides feedback about compliance with exercise guidelines and leverages strengths of crowdsourcing to create plans made by non-exp...

Healthcare providers (HCPs) caring for pregnant patients often need information on drug risks to the embryo or fetus, but such complex information takes time to find and is difficult to convey on an app. In this work, we first surveyed 167 HCPs to understand their current teratogen information-seeking practices to help inform our general design goa...

Despite much recent progress in conversational systems, the vision of a truly "intelligent" agent is still far from being realized. Part of the reason is that current applications focus on offering conversational alternatives to GUI supported tasks. In my research I am focusing on application of dialogue-based interaction in area of self-learning i...

Understanding whether and how motivation affects participation in online experiments is critical because who contributes and how they contribute can affect the validity of findings. Analyzing data from 7,674 participants across three different studies on the volunteer-based online experiment platform LabintheWild, we identified five motivation type...

Academic research can offer insights for HCI practitioners, yet past work shows that research findings are rarely used in industry. We interviewed 22 design practitioners to identify why they do not use academic research and why and how they use other resources at work. We contribute recommendations for the design of translational resources to brid...

Social systems and applications often rely on message triggers to promote, remind and even persuade people to perform certain actions. However, repeated exposure to these triggers can lead to boredom, annoyance and decreased engagement. While existing research suggests that diversification of trigger contents may mitigate these issues, no systemati...

Targeted responder model is a recent approach in providing initial treatment to cardiac arrest patients. In this model, a group of trained responders are dispatched via mobile devices to nearby cardiac arrests. While prior work shows that targeted responder programs are successful in reducing average response time, less than a quarter of the respon...

Full text can be found here: https://www.jmir.org/2016/11/e284/ Background Patients increasingly use online health communities to exchange health information and peer support. During the progression of health discussions, a change of topic—topic drift—can occur. Topic drift is a frequent phenomenon linked to incoherence and frustration in online co...

Many people struggle with efforts to make healthy behavior changes, such as healthy eating. Several existing approaches promote healthy eating, but present high barriers and yield limited engagement. As a lightweight alternative approach to promoting mindful eating, we introduce and examine crumbs: daily food challenges completed by consuming one f...

Designers often make use of social comparisons to motivate people to perform better. In this paper, we present the concept of closeness to comparison to improve the efficacy of social comparison feedback. Specifically, we test two design strategies related to closeness: (1) comparing users to a target described as a similarly experienced player and...

Despite the prevalence of theories and interventions related to behavior change, our knowledge on how intention for a target, or planned behavior, changes over time remains limited. This hinders our ability to consider the temporal aspect in our designs to support behavior change. To understand the effect of temporal distances on planned behaviors,...

Specific, achievable plans can increase people's commitment to behavior change and increase their likelihood of success. However, many people struggle to create such plans, and available plans often do not fit their individual constraints. We conducted a study with 22 participants exploring the creation of personalized plans by strangers and friend...

Designing effective incentives is a challenge across many social computing contexts, from attracting crowdworkers to sustaining online contributions. However, one aspect of incentivizing that has been understudied is its impact on participation bias, as different incentives may attract different subsets of the population to participate. In this pap...

The effort to increase Web organ donation registrations in Michigan by enhancing 2 types of university campaigns with social media strategies informed by social identity theory is the focus of this research. The two campaigns focused on either ingroup or rivalry outgroup social identification, and each was enhanced with individually focused social...

Recruiting qualified reviewers, though challenging, is crucial for ensuring a fair and robust scholarly peer review process. We conducted a survey of 307 reviewers of submissions to the International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011) to gain a better understanding of their motivations for reviewing. We found that encouragi...

Many online services serve diverse populations spanning many countries and cultures. Some of these services rely on user-generated ratings to curate and filter information, or to inform other users. However, little is known about how various cultural biases and cross-cultural differences affect such ratings. We studied how Indian and American worke...

The extended abstract describes the background, goals and organization of the Third International Symposium of Chinese CHI (Chinese CHI 2015) as one of the Asian symposia of CHI 2015.

E-petitioning has become one of the most important and popular forms of online activism. Although e-petition success is driven by user behavior, users have received relatively little study by HCI and social computing researchers. Drawing from theoretical and empirical work in analogous social computing systems, we identify two potentially competing...

Challenges of the local context such as encouraging civic engagement and facilitating collaboration to address local issues have motivated researchers and practitioners to explore the role of technologies in supporting life in cities, neighborhoods, and local communities. The goal of this workshop is to open a discussion on how to design, build and...

Background: Unhealthy infant feeding practices, such as a combination of formula feeding and early introduction of solids may lead to rapid or excessive weight gain in early infancy. Adolescent mothers' feeding behaviors are most directly related to infant weight gain in the first year of life. Compared to adult mothers, adolescent mothers are les...

This paper presents an experiment on the relationship between personal values and reading interests of online articles. Results suggest that individuals' values can predict their topical interests. For example, holding stronger universalism values predict interests towards environmental articles, whereas holding stronger achievement values predict...

The Personalization in Behavior Change Technologies workshop will focus on how to design, build and study persuasive technologies to adapt to meet the individualized needs of target users. The goal of this workshop is to connect the diverse group of behavior change researchers and practitioners interested in personalization to share their experienc...

The theory of values posits that each person has a set of values, or desirable and trans-situational goals, that motivate their actions. The Basic Human Values, a motivational construct that captures people's values, have been shown to influence a wide range of human behaviors. In this work, we analyze people's values and their word use on Reddit,...

Volunteer socializers are members of a community who voluntarily help newcomers become familiar with the popular practices and attitudes of the community. In this paper, we explore the social and psychological predictors of volunteer socializers on reddit, an online social news-sharing community. Through a survey of over 1000 reddit users, we found...

In this paper we explore how the decision of partaking in low-cost, low-risk online activism - slacktivism - \'14may affect subsequent civic action. Based on moral balancing and consistency effects, we designed an online experiment to test if signing or not signing an online petition increased or decreased subsequent contribution to a charity. We f...

Searching for health information online has become increasingly common, yet few studies have examined potential negative emotional effects of online health information search. We present results from an experiment manipulating the presentation of search results for common symptoms, which shows that the frequency and placement of serious illness men...

We conducted an experiment to study the effects of goal structure in multiplayer gaming (competition vs. cooperation) and relationship type between players (positive pre-existing relationship [friends] vs. no pre-existing relationship [strangers]) on player motivation (as indicated by perceived effort put into the task), goal commitment, and perfor...

Small point lights (e.g., LEDs) are used as indicators in a wide variety of devices today, from digital watches and toasters, to washing machines and desktop computers. Although exceedingly simple in their output - varying light intensity over time - their design space can be rich. Unfortunately, a survey of contemporary uses revealed that the voca...

Icons in graphical user interfaces convey information in a mostly universal fashion that allows users to immediately interact with new applications, systems and devices. In this paper, we define Kineticons - an iconographic scheme based on motion. By motion, we mean geometric manipulations applied to a graphical element over time (e.g., scale, rota...

This study explores whether certain contribution incentives for online user-generated content can undermine or enhance contributor's credibility. In an online experiment, we found that contributors who are rewarded with donations made in their names are perceived to be more credible than contributors who are financially compensated through revenue-...

Electronic commerce has enabled a number of online pay-for-answer services. However, despite commercial interest, we still lack a comprehensive understanding of how financial incentives support question asking and answering. Using 800 questions randomly selected from a pay-for-answer site, along with site usage statistics, we examined what factors...

Searching for information online has become an integral part of our everyday lives. However, sometimes we don't know the specific search terms to use, while other times, the specific information we're seeking hasn't been recorded online yet.

Community-based question and answer (Q&A) systems facilitate information exchange and enable the creation of reusable knowledge repositories. While these systems are growing in usage and are changing how people find and share information, current designs are inefficient, wasting the time and attention of their users. Furthermore, existing systems d...

Although peripheral displays have been a domain of inquiry for over a decade now, evaluation criteria and techniques for this area are still being created. Peripheral display evaluation is an acknowledged challenge in a field setting. This chapter first describes models and methods that have been tailored specifically to evaluating peripheral displ...

Searching for information online has become an integral part of our everyday lives. However, sometimes we don't know the specific search terms to use, while other times, the specific information we're seeking hasn't been recorded online yet.

There is a growing interest in applying market mechanisms to tackle everyday communication problems such as communication interruptions and communication overload. Prior analytic proofs have shown that a signaling and screening mechanism can make senders and recipients of messages better off. However, these proofs make certain assumptions that do n...

Experience sampling method (or ESM) is a common data collection method to understand user behavior and to evaluate ubiquitous computing technologies. However, ESM studies often demand too much time and commitment from participants, which leads to attrition and low compliance among participants. We introduce a new approach called experience sampling...

In this work, we introduce the use of tags to support the near synchronous use of instant messaging (IM). As a proof-of-concept, we developed a plug-in in Lotus Same- time, an enterprise IM client. Our plug-in supports tasks that do not need immediate attention and tasks that have deadlines. A trial deployment and survey shows that users can see th...

We describe the design of privacy controls and feedback mechanisms for contextual IM, an instant messaging service for disclosing contextual information. We tested our designs on IMBuddy, a contextual IM service we developed that discloses contextual information, including interruptibility, location, and the current window in focus (a proxy for the...

The article discusses a study on the use of instant messaging in terms of interruption of work, focusing on variable factors such as priority indicators, control of message timing and team affiliations. The study involved several college undergraduates in five experiments. It was determined that responses to team members were given higher priority...

We describe our current work in developing novel mechanisms for managing security and privacy in pervasive computing environments. More specifically, we have developed and evaluated three different applications, including a contextual instant messenger, a people finder application, and a phone-based application for access control. We also draw out...

We present a system for the peripheral display of digital handwritten notes, motivated by the joint observation that people seldom refer back to their notes and that these notes often contain useful information. We describe the user-led design of the system, incorporating interviews, paper prototypes, and interactive prototypes. A preliminary field...

In this report we detail our experience of designing and installing a large-screen public, interactive community board, the eyeCanvas, in a neighbourhood café and art gallery in San Francisco. Features of the community board include the ability to display content related to the café, including menus, nightly events and artists' work; the possibilit...

The elderly face serious social, environmental, and physical constraints that impact their well-being. Some of the most serious of these are shrinking social connections, limitations in building new relationships, and diminished health. To address these issues, we have designed an augmented dancing environment that allows elders to select dance seq...

We present a technique for evaluating the usability and e#ectiveness of ambient displays. Ambient displays are abstract and aesthetic peripheral displays portraying non-critical information on the periphery of a user's attention. Although many innovative displays have been published, little existing work has focused on their evaluation, in part bec...

Nutrition has a big impact on health, including major dis- eases such as heart disease, osteoporosis, and cancer. This paper presents an application designed to help people keep track of the nutrional content of foods they have eaten. Our work uses shopping receipts to generate suggestions about healthier food items that could help to supplement mi...

Nutrition has a big impact on health, including major diseases such as heart disease, osteoporosis, and cancer. This paper presents an application designed to help people keep track of the nutrional content of foods they have eaten. Our work uses shopping receipts to generate suggestions about healthier food items that could help to supplement miss...

We introduce the notion of function composition, an interaction technique employed in several graphical user interfaces (GUIs), for use in physical chaining applications. Allowing the user to perform function composition in systems utilizing tangible user interfaces (TUIs) for input allows for more efficient use of the interactive workspace and the...