Related People
Hong Shen, Sarah Fox, Nikolas Martelaro, Wesley Hanwen Deng, Ken Holstein, Motahhare Eslami, Jason Hong, Geoff Kaufman, Erin Gatz, Yutong Chen, Alice Qian, Jodi Forlizzi, William Agnew, Sauvik Das, Franklin (Mingzhe) Li, Erica Cruz, Shivani Kapania, Cella Sum, Hirokazu Shirado, Luke Guerdan, Isadora Krsek, Laura Dabbish, Venkatesh Sivaraman, Adam Perer, Seyun Kim, Haiyi Zhu, Aaron Steinfeld
CMU at CSCW 2025
New social computing research explores communication, advocacy, ethics
Carnegie Mellon University authors contributed to 27 papers accepted to the 2025 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), held October 18-22, in Bergen, Norway.
Several CMU papers received special recognition from the conference, including 2 Best Paper Awards, 4 Honorable Mention Awards and 3 DEI Recognitions. Awards for Best Paper represent the top 1% of all submitted papers, while Honorable Mentions represent the next 3%. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Recognitions represent strong work that focuses on or serves minorities otherwise excluded individuals or populations, or intervenes in systemic structures of inequality. Jump down to view the list of papers with CMU authors.
The interdisciplinary areas of social computing and computer-supported cooperative work focus first on the sciences of how people work together and then explore how computing technology can be designed to facilitate that.
“CSCW has never been more relevant,” said Human-Computer Interaction Institute Assistant Professor Hong Shen. “So much of our work and organizing now happens through AI-mediated systems, and at CMU we treat CSCW as the place where human-centered AI, design, and social science come together. Our students are not just building new tools, they are working with communities and workers to surface risks and design more just futures of technology.”
This year, CMU work at CSCW explores a variety of topics, such as designing for data privacy, communicating properly, and facilitating equity and fairness in technology. Authors raise awareness of artificial intelligence (AI) risks, examine ethical systems, and advance advocacy and social justice work.
The population studied within CSCW papers also varies widely. From small teams to large online groups, researchers examine collaboration in virtual environments, community engaged research, and interactions within open source communities.
In addition to paper presentations, CMU researchers participated in workshops, special interest groups and the doctoral consortium. HCI PhD student Cella Sum was selected to participate in the Doctoral Consortium, where she presented “The Future of Labor: Centering Worker Resistance in Designing Just Futures of Work.” Alice Qian, also an HCI PhD student, facilitated a special interest group (SIG) with Shen on “The Work of AI Red Teaming: Automation and the Human Infrastructure.”
Accepted Papers
This collection of research from CMU reflects how deeply technology and society are connected today. The breadth of work at CSCW is not limited to writing code for coding’s sake, but rather, these human-centered studies involve going out for field studies, building new tools to solve a problem or gap, and looking at the big picture in critical analysis pieces.
This area of work is important because it bridges the gap between what technology can do and what we actually need it to do. These researchers work to ensure that as technology advances, it brings everyone – including bus drivers, nonprofit workers, community members, and people with disabilities – along with it.
A list of accepted papers with CMU contributing authors is available below. Award-winning papers are listed first, then the rest of the list is organized in alphabetical order by paper title.
Best Paper Award & DEI Recognition
Punctuated and Prolonged: A Workers’ Inquiry into Infrastructural Failures in Bus Transit
Hunter Akridge, Alice Xiaodi Tang, Nikolas Martelaro, Sarah E Fox
📄 Paper
Best Paper Award
WeAudit: Scaffolding User Auditors and AI Practitioners in Auditing Generative AI
Wesley Hanwen Deng, Claire Wang, Howard Ziyu Han, Jason I. Hong, Kenneth Holstein, Motahhare Eslami
WeAudit is a workflow and corresponding system that supports end users in auditing AI both individually and collectively by iteratively investigating, deliberating on, and reporting perceived harms and biases in generative AI (GenAI) systems.
In addition to the Best Paper award at CSCW 2025, WeAudit also received the 2025 Indigo Design Award and NY Product Design Awards. WeAudit has been used by more than 700 students across 15 classes at CMU to support students’ understanding of the societal impact of Generative AI. WeAudit has gained partnership and funding support from industries such as Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, and eBay.
📄 Paper
Honorable Mention Award
Hug Reports: Supporting Expression of Appreciation between Users and Contributors of Open Source Software Packages
Pranav Khadpe, Olivia Xu, Chinmay Kulkarni, Geoff Kaufman
Contributors to open source software packages often describe feeling discouraged by the lack of positive feedback from users. This paper describes a technology probe, Hug Reports, that provides users a communication affordance within their code editors, through which users can convey appreciation to contributors of packages they use.
📄 Paper
Honorable Mention Award
Supporting Industry Computing Researchers in Assessing, Articulating, and Addressing the Potential Negative Societal Impact of Their Work
Wesley Hanwen Deng, Solon Barocas, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan
📄 Paper
Honorable Mention Award & DEI Recognition
Towards Equitable Community-Industry Collaborations: Understanding the Experiences of Nonprofits' Collaborations with Tech Companies
Sheena Erete, Eric Corbett, Natasha Smith-Walker, Jay L. Cunningham, Erin Gatz, Tina M. Park, Tam Perry, Lauren Wilcox, Remi Denton
📄 Paper
Honorable Mention
The Balancing Act of Social Audio Facilitators: When Self-Promotion Overshadows Community Care
Nazanin Sabri, Yutong Chen, Marissa Lee, Steven P. Dow, Kristen Vaccaro, Mai ElSherief
📄 Paper
DEI Recognition
A Node on the Constellation: The Role of Feminist Makerspaces in Building and Sustaining Alternative Cultures of Technology Production
Erin Gatz, Yasmine Kotturi, Andrea Afua Kwamya, Sarah E Fox
📄 Paper
AURA: Amplifying Understanding, Resilience, and Awareness for RAI Content Workers
Alice Qian, Judith Amores, Hong Shen, Mary Gray, Mary P Czerwinski, Jina Suh
📄 Coverage from CSCW Medium Blog
📄 Paper
Collecting Qualitative Data at Scale with Large Language Models: A Case Study
Alejandro Cuevas (S3D), Jennifer Victoria Scurrell, Eva Maxfield Brown, Jason Entenmann, Madeleine I. G. Daepp
📄 Paper
Data Tactics in Worker Advocacy Research
Franchesca Spektor, Vera Khovanskaya, Jodi Forlizzi, Sarah E Fox
📄 Paper
Design(ing) Fictions for Collective Civic Reporting of Privacy Harms
Yuxi Wu, William Agnew, W. Keith Edwards, Sauvik Das
📄 Paper
Exploring the Impact of Emotional Voice Integration in Sign-to-Speech Translators for Deaf-to-Hearing Communication
Hyunchul Lim, Minghan Gao, Franklin Mingzhe Li, Nam Anh Dang, Ianip Sit, Michelle M Olson, Cheng Zhang
📄 Paper
Growing Together at Work: Cultivating a Mentorship Garden
Erica Principe Cruz, Cheng Yao Wang, William Moriarty, Blair MacIntyre, Fannie Liu
📄 Paper
"I'm categorizing LLM as a productivity tool": Examining ethics of LLM use in HCI research practices
Shivani Kapania, Ruiyi Wang, Toby Jia-Jun Li, Tianshi Li, Hong Shen
📄 Paper
Improving User Behavior Prediction: Leveraging Annotator Metadata in Supervised Machine Learning Models
Lynnette Hui Xian Ng (S3D), Kokil Jaidka, Kai Yuan Tay, Hansin Ahuja, Niyati Chhaya
📄 Paper
“It’s Always a Losing Game”: How Workers Understand and Resist Surveillance Technologies on the Job
Cella M Sum, Caroline Shi, Sarah E Fox
📄 Paper
In-person, Online and Back Again - A Tale of Three Hybrid Hackathons
Abasi-Amefon Obot Affia, Alexander Serebrenik, James D. Herbsleb (S3D), Alexander Nolte
📄 Paper
Making Pairs That Cooperate: Chatbot Assessment of Receptiveness in Human Conversations
Elijah L. Claggett, Hirokazu Shirado
📄 Paper
Measurement as Bricolage: Examining How Data Scientists Construct Target Variables for Predictive Modeling Tasks
Luke Guerdan, Devansh Saxena, Stevie Chancellor, Zhiwei Steven Wu, Kenneth Holstein
📄 Paper
Measuring, Modeling, and Helping People Account for Privacy Risks in Online Self-Disclosures with AI
Isadora Krsek, Anubha Kabra, Yao Dou, Tarek Naous, Laura Dabbish, Alan Ritter, Wei Xu, Sauvik Das
📄 Paper
Static Algorithm, Evolving Epidemic: Understanding the Potential of Human-AI Risk Assessment to Support Regional Overdose Prevention
Venkatesh Sivaraman, Yejun Kwak, Courtney Kuza, Qingnan Yang, Kayleigh Adamson, Katie Suda, Lu Tang, Walid Gellad, Adam Perer
📄 Paper
Systematic Literature Review on Equity and Technology in HCI and Fairness: Navigating the Complexities and Nuances of Equity Research
Seyun Kim, Yuanchen Bai, Haiyi Zhu, Motahhare Eslami
📄 Paper
The Future of Tech Labor: How Workers are Organizing and Transforming the Computing Industry
Cella M Sum, Anna Konvicka, Mona Wang, Sarah E Fox
📄 Paper
Understanding the Challenges of Maker Entrepreneurship
Natalie Friedman, Alexandra W.D. Bremers, Adelaide Nyanyo, Ian Clark, Yasmine Kotturi, Laura Dabbish, Wendy Ju, Nikolas Martelaro
📄 Paper
Unremarkable to Remarkable AI Agent: Exploring Boundaries of Agent Intervention for Adults With and Without Cognitive Impairment
Mai Lee Chang, Samantha Reig, Alicia (Hyun Jin) Lee, Anna Huang, Hugo Simão, Nara Han, Neeta M Khanuja, Abdullah Ubed Mohammad Ali, Rebekah Martinez, John Zimmerman, Jodi Forlizzi, Aaron Steinfeld
📄 Paper
“You’re in a Ferrari. I’m Waiting for the Bus": Confronting Tensions in Community-University Partnerships for Publicly Deployed Technologies
Cella M Sum, Jiayin Zhi, Amil N.T. Cook, Patrick James Cooper, Arturo Lozano, TJ Johnson, Jason Perez, rayid ghani, Michael Skirpan, Motahhare Eslami, Hong Shen, Sarah E Fox
📄 Paper
Research Areas