Thomas Olsson

Tampere University | UTA

Uncivil online communication is a widely problematized cultural by-product of computer-mediated communication that, however, remains theoretically underexplained. While previous research shows that personal tendency for uncivil communication is partially influenced by individuals’ personality and empathy skills, the factors of inter-individual vari...

AI-based applications are increasingly used in knowledge-intensive expert work, which has led to a discussion regarding their trustworthiness, i.e., to which degree these applications are ethical and reliable. While trust in technology is an important aspect of using and accepting novel information systems, little is known about domain experts’ tru...

Organizations' decision-making processes are increasingly supported by novel AI applications. While intelligent systems appear promising for enhancing various professional tasks, domain experts' perceptions of the adoption and use of AI remain understudied. Following a human-centered design approach, this qualitative interview study (N=15) explores...

An online survey of 200 participants was conducted on the experiences of sharing material and immaterial artifacts, focusing on interaction with non-media content types. The survey included six categories of sharing: music preferences, travel plans, sports activities, apartments and vehicles, virtual items in online games, and dietary preferences....

Team assembly is a problem that demands trade-offs between multiple fairness criteria and computational optimization. We focus on four criteria: (i) fair distribution of workloads within the team, (ii) fair distribution of skills and expertise regarding project requirements, (iii) fair distribution of protected classes in the team, and (iv) fair di...

Uutisten verkkokommentoinnin kielteistä ilmapiiriä ja asiattomia kommentteja pidetään vakavana, julkisen keskustelun laatua heikentävänä ongelmana. Keskustelujen moderointia pidetään yleisesti hyvänä tapana puuttua asiattomuuksiin, mutta sen nykyiset keinot koetaan riittämättömiksi, olipa kyse tietokoneohjelmista tai ihmisten tekemästä moderointity...

Team assembly is a problem that demands trade-offs between multiple fairness criteria and computational optimization. We focus on four criteria: (i) fair distribution of workloads within the team, (ii) fair distribution of skills and expertise regarding project requirements, (iii) fair distribution of protected classes in the team, and (iv) fair di...

The practices of organizational talent acquisition are rapidly transforming as a result of the proliferation of information systems that support decision-making, ranging from applicant tracking systems to recruitment chatbots. As part of human resource management (HRM), talent acquisition covers recruitment and team-assembly activities and is alleg...

An online experiment investigated the perceived effects of a user interface (UI) intervention aiming to support online news commenters' emotion regulation. By describing the comment's tone to the user, the expected effect was activation of the implicit emotion regulation process of affect labeling (i.e. naming emotions). The perceived emotion- and...

Serendipity experiences are highly desirable in work life, considering both individuals’ learning and organizational innovation capacity. This study looks into information and social serendipity in the context of Twitter. While Twitter can be viewed as a fruitful platform for serendipity to emerge, there is little understanding of what technology c...

While HCI literature offers general frameworks for understanding user-centred quality, specific application areas may call for more detailed contextualisation of it. This paper focuses on socio-technical context of online news commenting by investigating speculative UI interventions intended to influence users’ emotions and social behaviour. To und...

Organizations’ hiring processes are increasingly shaped by various digital tools and e-recruitment systems. However, there is little understanding of the recruiters’ needs for and expectations towards new systems. This paper investigates recruitment chatbots as an emergent form of e-recruitment, offering a low-threshold channel for recruiter-applic...

Online news comments are a crucial part of how journalistic organizations engage their audiences. However, uncivil commenting has become a persistent problem that can have detrimental effects both to journalistic organizations and the people who participate in the discussions as journalists, moderators, and commenters. This chapter addresses the pr...

Emotions are an important element of human interactions, including those in social media. Despite the prominence of text-based messages in online communication, little is known about how the emotional tone of the messages affects the emotions of the recipients. With three experiments, the current study investigated these effects in the context of o...

Emotions are an important element of human interactions, including those in social media. Despite the prominence of text-based messages in online communication, little is known about how the emotional tone of the messages affects the emotions of the recipients. With three experiments, the current study investigated these effects in the context of o...

Social recommender systems, such as “Who to follow” on Twitter, utilize approaches that recommend friends of a friend or interest-wise similar people. Such algorithmic approaches have been criticized for resulting in filter bubbles and echo chambers, calling for diversity-enhancing recommendation strategies. Consequently, this article proposes a so...

Informaatioteknologian kehitys ja yhteiskunnan digitalisoituminen ovat kannustaneet tutkijoita eri tieteenaloilta tarkastelemaan erilaisten sosioteknisten järjestelmien ja digitalisoituvien käytäntöjen merkitystä yhteiskunnassa. Teknologiavälitteisyys muun muassa määrittää sosiaalista, poliittista ja kaupallista kanssakäymistä sekä muokkaa yhteisku...

This study investigates how the transition to remote work during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic is experienced by employees. We investigate to what extent perceived work stressors relate to psychological strain through perceptions of social support, work–life conflict, and adjustment to remote work. The findings expound the mechanisms underl...

Online news comments are intended to cultivate an interdependent relationship between news organizations and their audiences. However, uncivil online comments have become a persistent problem that requires constant intervention through moderation. In this paper, to better understand these interventions, we analyze interviews of eleven managers of o...

The team composition of a project team is an essential determinant of the success of innovation projects that aim to produce novel solution ideas. Team assembly is essentially complex and sensitive decision-making, yet little supported by information technology (IT). In order to design appropriate digital tools for team assembly, and team formation...

This forum provides a space to engage with the challenges of designing for intelligent algorithmic experiences. We invite articles that tackle the tensions between research and practice when integrating AI and UX design. We welcome interdisciplinary debate, artful critique, forward-looking research, case studies of AI in practice, and speculative d...

The COVID-19 crisis has disrupted when, where, and how employees work. Drawing on a sample of 5452 Finnish employees, this study explores the factors associated with employees’ abrupt adjustment to remote work. Specifically, this study examines structural factors (i.e., work independence and the clarity of job criteria), relational factors (i.e., i...

Serendipity refers to unexpected encounters with ideas or insights and their intentional application to achieve favorable outcomes. Despite extensive prior studies, the concept lacks theoretical logic and empirical validation regarding the role of an intentional act in the relationship between serendipitous encounters and their favorable outcomes....

Meeting other scholars at conferences is often a stochastic, intuition-driven process. Social recommender systems can support identifying new collaboration partners that one might not naturally choose. However, to boost the accumulation of social capital, such systems must be designed for diversifying social connections. This paper draws from the e...

The purpose of this research paper is to explore measuring metrics of weak ties in the online social media game community. Weak ties are able to obtain new information and new knowledge, efficiently disseminate simple and novel information, provide innovativeness and creativity. This research sheds the light on the measurement of weak ties especial...

Collocated interaction has received growing interest in both academic research and the design of information and communication technological applications. An emergent research topic within this area relates to technological enhancement of social interaction. Various envisioned systems aim beyond simply enabling interaction, to actively enhance—i.e....

Striving to operate in increasingly dynamic environments, organisations can be seen as fluid and communicative entities where traditional boundaries fade away and collaborations emerge ad hoc. To enhance fluidity, we conceptualise computational social matching as a research area investigating how to digitally support the development of mutually sui...

Serendipity refers to uncontrolled circumstances that lead to unexpected yet fortunate discoveries. The phenomenon has been studied extensively in relation to information retrieval. However, serendipity in the context of social encounters has been the subject of few empirical studies. In professional life, social serendipity might result in benefit...

Future PSM systems will require diversity-enhancing yet contextually sensitive designs.

Although the composition of individuals can strongly affect the success of professional collaboration, organizations often struggle with their so-called social matching decisions. For example, when recruiting new people to an organization, the decision-making is often reduced to intuitively matching individuals based on vague descriptions of projec...

Much of the research in wearable technology focuses on the primary user's experiences and interactions. However, many wearables are inherently social - even public - by nature as they are visible to nearby others. Wearables carry meanings about the wearer (e.g., lifestyle, attitudes, interests, social status). Some wearables are even designed to en...

The spread of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in all aspects of our lives increases the range and scale of potential issues with social acceptance. In the HCI community there is a growing interest and recognition of social acceptability issues with emerging technologies and novel interaction paradigms. This workshop builds on the...

The increasing amount of data in social media enables new advanced user modeling approaches. This paper focuses on user profiling for diversity-enhancing recommender systems for finding new followees on Twitter. By combining social network analysis with Latent Dirichlet Allocation based content analysis, we defined three egocentric structural posit...

Collaboration and social networking are increasingly important for academics, yet identifying relevant collaborators requires remarkable effort. While there are various networking services optimized for seeking similarities between the users, the scholarly motive of producing new knowledge calls for assistance in identifying people with complementa...

Actualizing positive social encounters remains both a key ends and means in many activities to foster a sense of community. Initiating encounters between strangers typically requires facilitative activities or artefacts, such as icebreakers or tickets-to-talk. However, there is little understanding of which designs are effective and why, and the br...

This workshop will discuss how different multimedia applications and interaction techniques have been employed to support public sociality---from collocated interactions to social awareness and feeling of community. Participants will discuss recent work and join hands-on design activities to envision new ways for potential users to discover and lea...

Encouraging social experiences and interactions between nearby strangers has received both research and commercial interest over the past years. This paper focuses on two design qualities that have previously been found successful in this area: playfulness and progression. Employing the research through design approach, we explore these as design p...

Knowledge work involves various so-called social matching decisions: who to recruit, who to pair up or team up, who to ask for consultancy, etc. Despite the scale of effects such decisions can have on organizations, social matching activities are little supported by technology. In this position paper, we describe an ongoing venture to develop the e...

Professional Social Matching (PSM) is an understudied area in human-computer interaction, referring to computer-supported networking, partnering, and grouping of people in professional contexts. We are working on a new type of PSM that aims to encourage new encounters in work life, particularly between seemingly different and yet complementary indi...

Grandparents and grandchildren that live apart often rely on communication technologies, such as messengers, video conferencing, and phone calls for maintaining relationships. While some of these systems are challenging for grandparents, others are less engaging for children. To facilitate communication, we developed StoryBox, a tangible device tha...

A central viewpoint to understanding the human aspects of interactive systems is the concept of technology acceptance. Actual, or imagined disapproval from other people can have a major impact on how information technological innovations are received, but HCI lacks comprehensive, up-to date, and actionable, articulations of "social acceptability"....

Wearable computing has a huge potential to shape the way we interact with mobile devices in the future. Interaction with mobile devices is still mainly limited to visual output and tactile finger-based input. Despite the visions of next-generation mobile interaction, the hand-held form factor hinders new interaction techniques becoming commonplace....

This paper offers three inspirational design patterns for sparking social play between unacquainted people in public and semi-public spaces. The intention is to support developers in appreciating and articulating possible approaches in creating physical or digital artefacts as interventions that encourage unacquainted people to play together in urb...

Pokémon GO, a location-based mobile game with millions of users, offers an opportunity to study how mobile technology can encourage collocated social interaction between people. Despite being predominantly a single-player game, Pokémon GO has been discussed to induce a variety of social interactions between the players. We conducted a qualitative o...

Online social networks have made sharing photos and other digital content a common activity. Recently, a range of novel online services and connected devices have expanded the set of "things" to share-ranging from new types of digital content like music preferences and workout data to physical things like household items ("sharing economy"). To und...

Positive face-to-face social encounters between strangers can strengthen the sense of community in modern urban environments. However, it is not always easy to initiate friendly encounters due to various inhibiting social norms. We present three inspirational design patterns for reducing inhibitions to interact with unfamiliar others. These abstrac...

Today, smart and connected wearable systems, such as on-body sensors and head-mounted displays, as well as other small form factor but powerful personal computers are rapidly pervading all areas of our life. Motivated by the opportunities that next-generation wearable intelligence is expected to provide, the goal of this work is to build a comprehe...

The popularity of social media and computer-mediated communication has resulted in high-volume and highly semantic data about digital social interactions. This constantly accumulating data has been termed as Big Social Data or Social Big Data, and various visions about how to utilize that have been presented. However, as relatively new concepts, th...

This paper presents the design and concept evaluation of Next2You, a proximity-based social mobile application that uses gamification, progressive disclosure and light-weight interactions to encourage interaction between people who are regularly within a close proximity of each other. The application aims to break the current norm of matching and i...

Encouraging social interaction between collocated strangers has become an increasingly popular topic in Computer Supported Collaborative Work research and interaction design. The research aims to foster more social interaction between collocated people to, e.g., produce positive new encounters and increase social awareness. To address these social...

This paper presents a conceptual design of a dynamic and personalizable knowledge workspace suitable for collabora- tion in academic contexts. The concept of such workspace is aimed to cater the needs of students – as knowledge workers – for flexibility in various types of group and individual knowledge tasks. The research is focused on revealing c...

Despite the ubiquity of short-range connectivity technologies and their use for pragmatic purposes, the opportunities they provide for playful interaction are not well understood. StreetPass feature on Nintendo 3DS handheld gaming devices is a rare world-wide example of exchanging playful content (e.g. avatars, messages, items) automatically betwee...

"Nearby strangers" provides an interestingly paradoxical space for interaction design. There are various social norms, cultural practices, and privacy concerns hindering interaction with nearby strangers, but by ignoring them, people constantly miss social opportunities. Technology enabling ad-hoc interactions between co-located people has been exp...

Today, direct contacts between users are being facilitated by the network-assisted device-to-device (D2D) technology, which employs the omnipresent cellular infrastructure for the purposes of control to facilitate advanced mobile social applications. Together with its undisputed benefits, this novel type of connectivity creates new challenges in co...

Today's mobile app economy has greatly expanded the types of " things " people can share – spanning from new types of digital content like physiological data (e.g., workouts) to physical things like apartments and work tools (" sharing economy "). To understand whether mobile platforms provide adequate support for such novel sharing services, we su...

Designing interactive technology with an aim to encourage social interaction between nearby strangers is challenging. While there are various social norms, cultural practices and privacy concerns that hinder interaction with strangers, ignoring the other people can be even more detrimental in the long term (e.g., leading to a low sense of community...

This chapter provides a multi-disciplinary overview of the research issues and achievements in the field of Big Data and its visualization techniques and tools. The main aim is to summarize challenges in visualization methods for existing Big Data, as well as to offer novel solutions for issues related to the current state of Big Data Visualization...

Wearable computing has a huge potential to shape the way we interact with mobile devices in the future. Interaction with mobile devices is still mainly limited to visual output and tactile finger-based input. Despite the visions of next-generation mobile interaction, the hand-held form factor hinders new interaction techniques becoming commonplace....

Mobile phones have become common tools for photography. Despite the fact that photos are social artifacts, mobile phones afford the act of photo taking only as an individual activity. Photo taking that involves more than one photographer has been envisioned to create positive outcomes and experiences. We implemented this vision with mobile camera p...

Driven by the unprecedented increase of mobile data traffic, device-to-device (D2D) communications technology is rapidly moving into the mainstream of fifth-generation (5G) networking landscape. While D2D connectivity has originally emerged as a technology enabler for public safety services, it is likely to remain in the heart of the 5G ecosystem b...

Network-assisted device-to-device (D2D) connectiv-ity is a next-generation wireless technology that facilitates direct user contacts in physical proximity while taking advantage of the flexible and ubiquitous control coming from the cellular infrastructure. This novel type of user interactions creates challenges in constructing meaningful proximity...

In collaboration between strangers, group formation and familiarization often take a lot of time. To facilitate this, icebreaking activities are commonly utilized, aiming at a positive and relaxing social atmosphere. To explore how interactive technology could serve as a tool in such social activity, we developed Who's Next, a multiplayer quiz-base...

Today, the rapid adoption of mobile social networking is changing how and where humans communicate. As a result, in recent years we have been increasingly moving from physical (e.g., face-to-face) to virtual interaction. However, there is also a new emerging category of social applications that take advantage of both worlds, that is, using virtual...

Many activities that have traditionally been performed with different dedicated physical artifacts are now done with personal mobile devices. Consequently, the privacy of mobile interfaces has hampered social observability and chances for serendipitous interactions. For example, reading an electronic newspaper with a mobile device does not allow th...

Mobile devices have become powerful in terms of computing and supporting various human activities. People have moved some of their activities that earlier have been done with dedicated artifacts to mobile devices. However, due to the rather private and personal interfaces of mobile devices, activities that earlier were easily observable by surround...