CSCW 2021 Workshops will be held virtually on October 23 and 24, 2021. Below is the program of workshops. Please follow the workshop organizers’ instructions on their websites for how to submit and participate in their workshops. Workshop participants are required to register for their workshop(s) (and pay the conference fee as well as corresponding workshop fees) via the main conference registration site.
| Title (Website Linked) | Description | Date | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Addressing Challenges and Opportunities in Online Extremism Research: An Interdisciplinary Perspective | Recent political and cultural upheavals around the globe highlight the importance of studying extremism in online spaces. The CSCW community has shown growing interest in exploring the information and influence operations, use of language and multimedia and finance structures in online extremism movements. The goal of this workshop is to broaden the current research by considering multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural aspects of online extremism research. This workshop brings together international researchers to discuss challenges and new opportunities to help (1) understand the representativeness and validity of the data used for studying extremism (2) uncover nuances in extremism research across countries and cultures (3) build norms for platform governance and policies (4) develop critical perspectives on extremism studies addressing questions such as research ethics and bias (5) promoting research efforts to aid victims of the extremism (6) leverage extremism research for aiding the recovery and social support for populations involved in online extremism. | Saturday, October 23 | 10:00AM - 4:00PM EDT |
| CUI@CSCW: Inclusive and Collaborative Child-facing Voice Technologies | Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs), from online chatbots to smart speakers, are increasingly being used to support children and family activities. This virtual workshop seeks to bring together researchers from academia and practitioners from industry who are interested in the design, development, application, and study of CUIs with a focus on children and family based interactions. In this workshop we also aim to discuss the insights CSCW research can provide into understanding how CUIs can participate in collaborative activities of children and families. By bringing together existing researchers and new ideas in this space, we intend to map new areas of work including addressing the technical, social, and ethical challenges that lay ahead. Additionally, this workshop seeks to foster a strong community and enable potential future collaborations on this important topic. We invite researchers from academia and practitioners from industry to submit position papers. The submission should describe the authors’ work related to the workshop challenges, or any other key topic that authors feel should be addressed by the community. More details are on our website. We are ambitious for papers to be diverse in terms of topic, discipline, and approach, and workshop participation to be open and accessible to all people. | Saturday, October 23 | 2:00PM - 6:00PM EDT |
| Social Computing and Collaborative Work in Latin America and Beyond | Previous initiatives have identified the potential of the Latin American region for CSCW research. However, CSCW work in the region is still disconnected, produced by small, isolated groups that often have a hard time learning about each other and finding opportunities to do research together. This workshop is an initiative of the SIGCHI Latin America Committee to bring these groups together to discuss their research, the challenges they perceive, and the possible initiatives that could be conducted to strengthen the region. | Saturday, October 23 | 10:00AM - 4:00PM EDT |
| The Future of Care Work: Towards a Radical Politics of Care in CSCW Research and Practice | CSCW has long studied how technology can support everyday care work, with an increasing emphasis on informal healthcare provision, child and elderly care, organizing and advocacy work, domestic work, teaching, and service work. The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown into stark relief the long-present tensions between the deep necessity and simultaneous devaluation of our care infrastructures. We need to pay attention to the broader social, political, and economic systems that shape care work, and by extension, the ever-increasing range of technologies being used in care work. In this one-day workshop, we will bring together researchers from academia and industry to reflect on these questions in order to extend conversations on the future of technology for care work in CSCW and HCI. Together, we will explore several critical questions of care work: What counts as care work and why? How is care work variously (de)valued, (un)supported, or coerced and to what end? What narratives are pushing the drive for technology in care work and who does it benefit? How can care be a form of resistance against oppressive systems? And how can we advocate for and with care and caregivers through our research and practice? | Saturday, October 23 | 9:00AM - 1:00PM EDT |
| Investigating and Mitigating Biases in Crowdsourced Data | It is common practice for machine learning systems to rely on crowdsourced label data for training and evaluation. It is also well-known that biases present in the label data can induce biases in the trained models. Biases may be introduced by the mechanisms selecting what data should be labelled or by the mechanisms employed to obtain the labels. Various approaches have been proposed to detect and correct biases once the dataset has been constructed. However, proactively reducing biases during data labelling and ensuring data fairness could be more economical than post-processing bias mitigation. This workshop aims to foster discussion on ongoing research around biases in crowdsourced data and to identify future research directions to detect, quantify and mitigate biases before, during and after the labelling process such that both task requesters and crowd workers can benefit. We will explore how specific crowdsourcing workflows, worker attributes, and work practices contribute to biases in the labelled data; how to quantify and mitigate biases during the labelling process; and how such mitigation approaches may impact workers and the crowdsourcing ecosystem. We also plan to run a Crowd Bias Challenge, where workshop participants will collect labels for a given dataset while minimising potential biases. | Saturday, October 23 | 3:00PM - 8:00PM EDT |
| Human-Machine Partnerships in the Future of Work: Exploring the Role of Emerging Technologies in Future Workplaces | Technologies in the workplace have been a major focus of CSCW, including studies that investigate technologies for collaborative work, explore new work environments, and address the importance of political and organizational aspects of technologies in workplaces. Emerging technologies, such as AI and robotics, have been deployed in various workplaces, and their proliferation is rapidly expanding. These technologies have not only changed the nature of work but also reinforced power and social dynamics within workplaces, requiring us to rethink the legitimate relationship between emerging technologies and human workers. It will be critical to the development of equitable future work arrangements to identify how these emerging technologies will develop relationships with human workers who have limited power and voice in their workplaces. How can these emerging technologies develop mutually beneficial partnerships with human workers? In this one-day workshop, we seek to illustrate the meaning of human-machine partnerships (HMP) by highlighting that how we define HMP may shape the design of future robots at work. By incorporating interdisciplinary perspectives, we aim to develop a taxonomy of HMP by which we can broaden our relationship with embodied agents but also evaluate and reconsider existing theoretical, methodological, and epistemological challenges in HMP research. | Saturday, October 23 | 9:00AM - 4:30PM EDT |
| From Alinsky to Zoom: Understanding Relational, Structure-Based Organizing in 2021 | Research across political science, communications, sociology, and human-computer interaction has explored how modern social movements are leveraging current social technologies and social platforms to mobilize for social change. While mass mobilization has influenced policy, triggered revolutions, and influenced cultures globally, mobilization is just one method of collective action. In contrast, the more structured, relationship-focused practice of community organizing can also enable mass societal change, such as the US Civil Rights movement and the development of tech-giant labor unions. While there is exploration into how we might research and design tools informed by organizing, there is little exploration into how specific frameworks and practices of community organizing such as the People, Power, Change framework might evolve or are currently evolving in response to the ever changing landscape of technology in society. In this workshop, we will bring together community organizers, technologists, designers, and researchers to explore what it means to and how we organize and center relationships in the modern era with (or without) computer support, in what contexts we should prioritize organizing rather than mobilizing, and how we might iterate upon our existing framework to respond to our findings. We will produce an iterated draft of a traditional organizing framework. | Saturday, October 23 | 9:00AM - 5:00PM EDT |
| arttech: Performance and Embodiment in Technology for Resilience and Mental Health | This workshop explores socially expressive technology design using collaborative principles of theater, dance and music. Building on shared roots of making something together, technologies (including virtual agents, physical devices, storytelling multimedia) and artistic provocation can create playful, productive and healthy experiences for communities. How do we: Improve collaboration between performance art and creative technology? Design apps and artistic collaboration/learning for mental health? Use theater performativity and technology to enhance our lives? As smart devices become ubiquitous, yet solidarity and cooperation remain elusive in competitive/hierarchical societies, understanding how performance art and technology collaborate can improve how we work, play and care for our and each other’s health. This workshop is a forum and creative space to discuss and play with the future of performative expression and collaborative computing. We welcome researchers and practitioners from varied disciplines including technical implementation, design, theater, dance, improv, physiology and psychology. The program features collaborative creation modules across the expressive human spectrum (movement, sound, text) using digital dramaturgy (Budde, 2017) and pleasure of learning (Brecht, 2001). It also includes participants’ presentations, expert talks and videos exploring the expressive side of computing technology. Accepted applicants are invited to share perspectives and collaborate on creative exercises on art/artefacts/artificiality. | Saturday, October 23 and Sunday, October 24 | 9:00AM - 1:00PM EDT each day |
| MOSafely: Building an Open-Source HCAI Community to Make the Internet a Safer Place for Youth | The goal of this one-day workshop is to begin building an active community of researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers who are jointly committed to leveraging human-centered artificial intelligence (HCAI) to make the internet a safer place for youth. This community will be founded on the principles of open innovation and human dignity to address some of the most salient safety issues of modern-day internet, including online harassment, sexual solicitation, and the mental health of vulnerable internet users, particularly adolescents and young adults. We will partner with Mozilla Research Foundation to launch a new open project named “MOSafely.org,” which will serve as a platform for code library, research, and data contributions that support the mission of internet safety. During the workshop, we will discuss: 1) the types of contributions and technical standards needed to advance the state-of-the art in online risk detection, 2) the practical, legal, and ethical challenges that we will face, and 3) ways in which we can overcome these challenges through the use of HCAI to create a sustainable community. An end goal of creating the MOSafely community is to offer evidence-based, customizable, robust, and low-cost solutions that are accessible to the public for the purpose of youth protection. | Sunday, October 24 | 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM EDT |
| Subtle CSCW Traits: Tensions Around Identity Formation and Online Activism in the Asian Diaspora | The COVID-19 pandemic has been uniquely challenging for the Asian diaspora. The virus has directly devastated Asian communities around the world, most notably across India. Its indirect effects have also been crushing: violent hate crimes against elders, the dissolution of once-thriving businesses, and the trauma of pandemic-enforced disconnect from transnational family networks have all weighed heavily on Asian people. Publicly grappling with these difficulties, through hashtags and GoFundMes across social media, has raised awareness of the issues that Asian people have dealt with long before COVID. But doing so amidst isolation has illuminated a need for space to build relationships, confront intra- and inter-community biases, and envision a more hopeful future. This workshop looks to create that space. By convening social computing researchers with ties to Asian diaspora identities, we aim to foster discussion of how social platforms enable identity formation and online activism unique to the Asian diasporic experience. We will consider what it means to be an Asian diaspora researcher, challenge CSCW’s notion of what it means to be Asian, and explore how Asianness can work in alliance with other marginalized identities to ultimately concretize a research agenda for CSCW to more meaningfully engage with Asian diaspora experiences. | Sunday, October 24 | 9:00AM - 3:00PM EDT |
| The Future of Research on Online Health Communities: Discussing Membership, Structure, and Support | Online health communities (OHCs) are spaces where people gather for informational and emotional support around specific medical conditions and concerns. Although OHCs are an active and exciting research area that continuously attracts a wide range of approaches and methodologies, the focus has been mostly on a limited selection of OHCs or medical conditions. At the same time, there are novel challenges that OHCs face, including changes to the medical system resulting from the COVID-19 crisis, increased medical misinformation propagating online, and additional focus on personalized medical advice that is less attainable in traditional medical systems. This workshop will bring together researchers to discuss and produce generalizable lessons about membership, structure, and support in OHCs in the context of these novel changes, generating research agendas for future exploration and design of OHCs. | Sunday, October 24 | 11:00AM - 3:00PM EDT |
| The Global Labours of AI and Data Intensive Systems | The remarkable capacities of AI-infused and data intensive systems are regularly presented as emblematic of technoscientific innovation and progress. Far less recognised is the human labour required to sift through and sort data, and ultimately train these systems. This is a labour distributed well beyond the presumed centres of technological innovation, and spun into and strewn across geographically distributed regions in the "Global South". This workshop will bring together scholars and practitioners interested in and conducting research on the hidden labours that lie behind AI and data intensive systems. Participants will have the opportunity to share perspectives or results of their research and, through highly exploratory engagements and dialogues, set out a critical mode of inquiry and future directions with and for a nascent community. | Sunday, October 24 | 07:30AM - 12:00PM EDT |
| Following the Trail of Citational Justice: Critically Examining Knowledge Production in HCI | This workshop takes on the blackbox of citational practices in HCI to unpack the implicit and explicit biases imbricated in disciplinary assumptions about knowledge production. In methodological terms, citations are portals to the past for developing new scholarly conversations in the present, for acknowledging debt to those who came before us, and to network together disparate strands of disciplinary knowledge. While citations can serve as nodes for generating knowledge, they can also be imposed on a knowledge community by a minority vested in concentration of power in few hands. Recognizing this relational, as well as transactional aspect of citations, it is imperative to interrogate how this wealth is distributed across all knowledge producers and how just these practices are to those with lesser power in the community. Our goal with this workshop is two-fold. First, to create common language to collectively interrogate and reflect on our own citational habits in order to ideate just and equitable practices we can put into action as a community. Second, through participants and organizers contributions, we seek to re-imagine citational structures in their entirety and propose novel systems and ways to bring them to life. | Sunday, October 24 | 11:00AM - 5PM EDT |
| Designing for Data Awareness: Addressing Privacy and Security Concerns About “Smart” Technologies | The internet of things (IoT) and smart home technologies are pervasive in the U.S. and abroad. Devices like smart speakers, cameras, thermostats, and vacuums promise to save consumers time and energy and to make tasks easier. Many devices also provide significant benefits through accessibility features that offer hands-free options, voice commands, and management through smartphone apps. At the same time, however, researchers and the media have documented a number of vulnerabilities in these devices, which raises concerns about what and how much data is being collected, how that data is used, and who has access to the data. In this one-day workshop, participants will work together to brainstorm potential solutions for making smart device data more visible and interpretable for consumers. Through rotating breakout sessions and full-group discussions, participants will identify data-based threats in popular smart home technologies, select data flows that are most concerning, and generate design ideas for tools or other artifacts that can help consumers make more informed decisions about using these devices. Opportunities for networking and future collaborations will also be incorporated. | Sunday, October 24 | 11:30AM - 6:00PM EDT |
| Activated: Decentering Activism in and with Academia | Who is an activist? With the advent of activism-related scholarship in HCI and CSCW, the current challenge involves thinking about what activism is, who an activist is, and the opportunities and limitations of activism. Recently, researchers in academia and industry, such as Timnit Gebru, demonstrate a commitment to stay activated for the structural changes we need, for example, diverse and inclusive scholarship, to address overlapping problems, e.g., sexism, racism, and tokenism. Additionally, there is a continuing dominance of Western, formally educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) perspectives. Countering this requires collective efforts in, citational justice and decolonial computing, among others. But such complex issues do not yet cover the inner conflicts that we face, such as mental health struggles while dismantling the prejudices stemming from the ivory tower, locating our privileges as academics while traversing less privileged locales of research sites, or the dilemmas on whether we are doing enough to fulfill our responsibilities to the people who have trusted us enough to work with us in the face of "publish or perish" culture. This workshop explores what activism means within the CSCW community and how we can remain activated while harboring doubts and hopes in calling ourselves "activists". | Sunday, October 24 | 7:00AM - 12:00PM EDT |