SocialXLab News

Taking advantage of the warming weather some of us had a little picnic near campus.

Our very own Ross Bonifacio was accepted to the Carnegie Mellon University Research Experience for Undergraduate (REU) summer program! This program is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. He will spend the summer working with CMU professors. congrats!

Yashwee Kothari, who is working on Releaf, an app to help people with concussion recovery, won first place in the student category in the NJIT New Business Model Competition. Yashwee has been working on this app for more than a year- last year, she won the NSF icorps mini grant that enabled her to do customer discovery interviews to help develop her business model. Congratulations, Yashwee!

Our lab has a new publication by Nina LaMastra, Jira Uttarapong, Reesha Gandhi, Chrissy Cook, and Dr. Wohn about the pace of games and discussions of mental health on live streams that was presented at CHIPLAY. Here is a short video describing the paper:

LaMastra, N., Uttarapong, J., Gandhi, R., Cook, C.L., & Wohn, D. Y. (2020). How a Live Streamer’s Choice in Played Game Affects Mental Health Conversations. In Proceedings of CHIPLAY 2020 [Download pdf]

Very proud to have the lab represented at CSCW (ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing), one of the top conferences on social computing. The conference took place virtually 10/18-20 this year. We have two papers and a poster, featuring the excellent work of undergraduate researchers Jira Uttarapong and Ross Bonifacio, and PhD student Jie Cai will be participating as a student volunteer. Also, thank you to our wonderful collaborators at Clemson University!

Bonifacio, R., & Wohn, D. Y. (2020). Digital Patronage Platforms. In Companion Publication of the 2020 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, 221-226 [pdf]

Li, L., Uttarapong, J., Freeman, G., & Wohn, D. Y. (2020). Spontaneous, Yet Studious: Esports Commentators’ Live Performance and Self-Presentation Practices.  In Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW2, Article 103. [pdf]

Maloney, D., Freeman, G., & Wohn, D. Y. (2020). “Talking without A Voice”: Understanding Non-verbal Communication in Social Virtual Reality. In Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW2, Article 175. [pdf]

Sarah Ryu put together this cool video about our lab!

Dr. Wohn received the 2020 NCWIT Mentoring Award for Undergraduate Research. She blogged about the experience here. Thanks to all current and former students for making this happen.

Undergrads Astha Sharma and Anisah Khandakar worked with Dr. Wohn and Dr. Kum-Biocca in Digital Design on research that explored the effectiveness of having a digital “window” installed in offices that had no windows. They installed a digital window that featured a nature landscape video in these offices and tracked people’s mood, happiness, and productivity. They found that having a digital window elevated mood and happiness, but did not raise or decrease work productivity. Their research was published and presented at the ACM Conference on Interactive Media.

Huge congrats to Ashka Patel, recipient of the 2020 Chevron/Society of Women Engineers Scholarship!