Saturday, October 18, 2025
1. Responsibly Training Foundation Models: Actualizing Ethical Principles for Curating Large-Scale Training Datasets in the Era of Massive AI Models
Description:
AI technologies have become ubiquitous, influencing domains from healthcare to finance and permeating our daily lives. Concerns about the values underlying the creation and use of datasets to develop AI technologies are growing. Current dataset practices often disregard critical ethical issues, despite the fact that data represents and impacts real people. While progress has been made in establishing best practices for curating smaller datasets in a more ethical fashion, the unprecedented scale of training data in the era foundation models presents unique hurdles for which AI researchers and practitioners must now face. This workshop aims to unite interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners in an effort to identify the challenges unique to curating datasets for large-scale foundation models – and then begin to ideate best practices for tackling those challenges. Drawing from CSCW’s tradition of interdisciplinary exchange, our aim is to cultivate a diverse community of researchers and practitioners interested in defining the future of ethical responsibility in the composition, process, and release of large-scale datasets for foundation model training. We will disseminate the outcomes of this workshop to the HCI community and beyond by developing a conceptual framework of both the challenges and potential solutions associated specifically with curating datasets for foundation models.
Organizers:
• Morgan Klaus Scheuerman, Sony AI
• Dora Zhao, Stanford University, USA
• Jerone T. A. Andrews, Sony AI
• Abeba Birhane, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
• Q. Vera Liao, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
• Georgia Panagiotidou, King’s College London, England
• Pooja Chitre, Arizona State University, USA
• Kathleen H. Pine, Arizona State University, USA
• Shawn Walker, Arizona State University, USA
• Jieyu Zhao, University of Southern California, USA
• Alice Xiang, Sony AI
Website: https://responsible-data-workshop.github.io/cscw2025/
2. Design for Hope: Cultivating Deliberate Hope in the Face of Complex Societal Challenges
Description:
Societal challenges, such as those at the heart of CSCW research, are often complex, and responses to them frequently prioritize harm reduction and prevention as immediate goals. While these efforts are essential, they can unintentionally narrow our sense of what is possible, centering our attention on mitigating risks rather than expanding possibilities. This one-day, in-person workshop builds on the 1st Positech Workshop at CSCW 2024 (https://positech-cscw-2024.github.io/) by offering practical ways to expand beyond reactive problem-solving and build capacity for proactive goal setting and generating pathways forward. By drawing connections between design thinking and hope theory, we aim to understand how researchers might chart directions in the face of uncertainty, complexity, and constraint. Through activities such as problem-reframing exercises, building a shared taxonomy of design methods, and reflecting on what it means to cultivate hopeful research trajectories for ourselves, we will explore ways to support researchers and research communities in navigating complex societal challenges with greater imagination and agency.
Organizers:
• JaeWon Kim, University of Washington, USA
• Lindsay Popowski*, Stanford University, USA
• Cassidy Pyle*, University of Michigan, USA
• Jiaying “Lizzy” Liu*, University of Texas at Austin, USA
• Sowmya Somanath*, University of Victoria, USA
• Hua Shen, University of Washington, USA
• Casey Fiesler, University of Colorado Boulder, USA
• Gillian R. Hayes, University of California, Irvine, USA
• Alexis Hiniker, University of Washington, USA
• Wendy Ju, Cornell University, USA
• Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller, Monash University, Australia
• Ahmer Arif, University of Texas at Austin, USA
• Yasmine Kotturi, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA
Website: https://positech-cscw-2025.github.io/
3. Traces, Breadcrumbs, and Patina: Exploring and Designing with Traces of Activity
Description:
This one-day workshop invites members of the CSCW community with a research interest in activity traces to jointly explore and refine the currently ill-defined concept of traces. Traces are an important means for people to remember and interpret the state of things, not least when navigating collaborative situations. However, although traces and related concepts have turned up in CSCW and HCI literature over at least three decades, work has been sporadic and has not been consolidated – as evidenced, for example, by a proliferation of terms, from “traces” to “footprints” and “DNA”. As a consequence, our field does not have a good conceptual apparatus for dealing with traces, whether empirically or as a resource in design. This workshop will offer a structured forum for developing traces as a concept for use in both empirical and design work. The workshop aims to recruit broadly, from those who design with traces or build systems that use or create traces, to those who seek to understand traces empirically or theoretically. Outcomes of the workshop will include a crowd-sourced catalog of traces and one or more initial definition(s) and/or a typology of traces, both of which will be available to participants after the workshop.
Organizers:
• Ida Larsen-Ledet, University College Cork, Ireland
• Myriam Lewkowicz, Troyes University of Technology (UTT), IST3N/Technologies and Practices, France
• Clemens N. Klokmose, Aarhus University, Denmark
• Carol Linehan, University College Cork, Ireland
• Luigina Ciolfi, University College Cork, Ireland and Lero (the Research Ireland Centre for Software), Ireland
Website: https://larsen-ledet.online/traces-workshop-cscw.html
4. Beyond Information: Online Participatory Culture and Information Disorder
Description:
This workshop aims to bring together a globally diverse group of scholars studying varying aspects of information disorder, including misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, hate speech, scams, and other manifestations of harmful information dynamics. As global scholars have increasingly become targets of the dynamics we study, the workshop will provide a space to discuss current trends with outcomes aimed at 1) creating international networks that emphasize care and support while 2) addressing and identifying pressing needs in research, intervention, public communication, and other actions needed to move the field forward while sustaining researchers and their work. Through the activities of the workshop, scholars will share their unique knowledge and experiences, further building out a shared understanding and knowledge base surrounding information disorder that includes published work and experiences that may be less visible in traditional scholarly outputs.
Organizers:
• Nina Lutz, University of Washington, USA
• Stephen Prochaska, University of Washington, USA
• Laura Kurek, University of Michigan, USA
• Marianne Aubin Le Quéré, Cornell University, USA
• Jason Greenfield, New York University, Princeton University, USA
• Joseph S. Schafer, University of Washington, USA
• Phil Tinn, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, SINTEF, USA
• Daniel Schroeder, Metropolitan University of Oslo, SINTEF, Norway
• Shiva Darian, New Mexico State University, USA
• Sukrit Venkatagiri, Swarthmore College, USA
• Ahmer Arif, University of Texas at Austin, USA
• Anirban Sen, Ashoka University, India
• Joyojeet Pal, University of Michigan, USA
• Kate Starbird, University of Washington, USA
Website: https://cscw2025infodisorder.netlify.app/
5. Governments as design contexts: Institutional realities of technology and design in government settings
Description:
Governments at all levels use a dizzying variety of technology systems to coordinate work with each other, provide services, analyze data, and plan for the future. The use of these systems impacts all of us politically and personally, and their effective or ineffective functioning is bound up in immensely complex systems of power, ideology, and infrastructural investment. However, governments as design settings have been underexplored and undertheorized thus far in CSCW. In this one-day hybrid workshop, we will bring together a community of researchers who have an interest in organizational and political analyses of technology design and implementation in the public sector. In so doing, we will examine current and emerging CSCW approaches to understanding organizational realities of tech development and implementation in the public sector and compile resources and a research agenda to facilitate future research.
Organizers:
• Ridley Jones Ledoux, University of Washington, USA
• Seolha Lee, University of California, Irvine, USA
• Pelle Tracey, University of Michigan, USA
• Rachel Warren, University of California, Irvine, USA
• Trine Rask Nielsen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Andrew Hamann, University of California, Irvine, USA
Website: https://sites.google.com/uci.edu/gov-as-design-context/overview
6. Co-Constructing the Future of Digital Intimacy
Description:
The Internet, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies have transformed the way humans can interact with each other and express romance, sex, and other forms of intimacy. Digital intimacy, including online dating, sexual/intimate content sharing, online sex work, and romantic chatbots, has grown ubiquitous. This can both be a source of great joy, such as when connecting remote partners and supporting sexual self-expression, and a source of harms, including but not limited to image-based sexual abuse, deepfakes, location privacy violations, and technology-enabled intimate partner violence. As new technologies continue to transform digital intimacy, this workshop aims to create a sex-positive space for digital intimacy researchers as we imagine and build a world where everyone is able to safely engage in consensual intimate activities with dignity and agency.
Organizers:
• Lucy Qin, Georgetown University, USA
• Chris Geeng, Northeastern University, USA
• Allison McDonald, Boston University, USA
• Amna Batool, University of Michigan, USA
• Diana Freed, Brown University, USA
• Oliver L. Haimson, University of Michigan, USA
• Jevan Hutson, University of Michigan, USA
• Elissa M. Redmiles, Georgetown University, USA
• Zahra Stardust, Queensland University of Technology, USA
• Miranda Wei, University of Washington, USA
• Douglas Zytko, University of Michigan-Flint, USA
Website: https://futureofdigitalintimacy.github.io/
7. CSCW Contributions to Critical Futures of Work
Description:
As the CSCW community evolves and participates in envisioning the impact of technologies on the work practices, we want toensure that critical and alternative computing perspectives are well represented while we are co-constructing the future of work. In this hybrid workshop, we invite researchers, practitioners, civic actors, economists, and other interested parties to challenge dominant, powerful, status-quo narratives and imaginaries when considering the future of work, nurturing the CSCW commitments and methods. Co-constructing the workshop with participants, we aim to develop actionable insights and strengthen the community.
Organizers:
• Alina Lushnikova, University of Luxembourg
• Michael Muller, IBM Research
• Shaowen Bardzell, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Tobi Li, University of Notre Dame
• Saiph Savage, Northeastern University & Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
Website: https://tinyurl.com/criticalfuturesofwork
8. Towards a Systemic Risk Literacy for Tech-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence
Description:
Regulators worldwide increasingly seek to mitigate the harms associated with online spaces. To comply with these regulations, platforms are being required to perform systemic risk assessments around online content and conduct forthe first time. Doing so requires bridging foundational research understanding online harm with practical knowledge of how platforms and policymakers can assess the risk of harm in practice: what we call systemic risk literacy. We argue that systemic risk literacy is under-studied — hampering our ability to create the effective and data-driven riskassessments that we need to ensure digital safety. Tech-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) is a valuable starting point for creating systemicrisk literacies: the harms of TFGBV are urgent, and there already exist robust ecosystems of science and legislation around TFGBV worldwide. In this workshop, we will work collaboratively to: (1) highlight the sociotechnical dynamics that contribute to TFGBV; (2) map potential interventions; and (3) suggest evaluations to understand whether these mitigations are effective.
Organizers:
• Ashley Marie Walker, Google
• Renee Shelby, Google Research
• Rosanna Bellini, New York University
• Amelia Hassouin, Google,
• Emily Tseng, Microsoft Research
Website: https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/risk/home
Sunday, October 19, 2025
9. Context Matters: Ethical Challenges in Research with Online Communities
Description:
While online community research is prevalent in CSCW, there are limited ethical principles for conducting research that may affect online communities. At the same time, a growing body of evidence suggests that traditional ethical review focused on research with individuals fails to fully capture the complexities of online community research. To support advancing ethical online community research, we propose a one-day hybrid workshop centered around tensions and challenges in adopting best practices for ethical online community research. This workshop aims to bring together online community researchers to 1) recognize existing approaches for ethical online community research, 2) expose gaps in current practices, and 3) prioritize directions to reconcile these ethical challenges.
Organizers:
• Matthew Zent, University of Minnesota, USA
• Stevie Chancellor, University of Minnesota, USA
• Casey Fiesler, University of Colorado Boulder, USA
• Sarah Gilbert, Cornell University, USA
• Mohammad Rashidujjaman Rifat, University of Toronto, Canada
• C. Estelle Smith, Colorado School of Mines, USA
• Svetlana Yarosh, University of Minnesota, USA
• Seraphina Yong, University of Minnesota, USA
• Michael Zimmer, Marquette University, USA
Website: https://sites.google.com/umn.edu/context-matters-cscw25
10. Regulating Sustainability: the Interplay of Laws, Policies, Norms, and Design in Sustainable CSCW
Description:
This one-day workshop explores how encounters with regulation, before, during, and after design, can shape the production of more sustainable futures. Within CSCW and Sustainable HCI there have been repeated calls to develop more systemic approaches to design that include the political, institutional, and infrastructural aspects underpinning technology-mediated interventions towards sustainability. This workshop targets these calls by drawing attention to the methodological, analytical, and design challenges of considering regulatory and policy-making aspects that can shape both the design and the processes of designing digital technologies. The workshop will be an opportunity to bring together CSCW, Sustainability, Law, and other interested scholars, representatives of public institutions, environmental collectives, and diverse actors interested in investigating the “knots” of relations between technology designs, regulatory aspects, and sustainable practices. We plan to accept up to twenty contributions and run the workshop on-site.
Organizers:
• Chiara Rossitto, Stockholm University, Sweden
• Anton Poikolainen Rosén, Stockholm University, Sweden
• Stanley Joel Greenstein, Stockholm University, Sweden
• Fatemeh Bakhshoudeh, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
• Lachlan Urquhart, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
• Susan Lechelt, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Website: www.sites.google.com/view/regulating-sustainability
11. Reflexivity & Reflection (R&R) for Sociotechnical Safety: Creating a Space for Collective Learning
Description:
Researchers in CSCW have long examined the sociotechnical aspects of digital security, privacy, and safety, building knowledge not only on the security challenges faced by (at-risk)communities, but also on the challenges of conducting responsible research. The burgeoning subfield of “sociotechnical safety” within computer security & privacy (S&P) has grown alongside this work, including topics like the S&P of at-risk users. These two research fields are distinct in epistemological and methodological approaches, but share a common goal: improving the digital safety of (at-risk) populations. During this critical time, we see an opportunity to gather as one community, to encourage honest conversation about the “hows” and “whys” of sociotechnical safety research. We invite researchers in both fields to discuss how CSCW’s methods, norms, and theories might bridge this emergent community, e.g., building meaningful collaborations with participants, researcher/participant safety. To cultivate reflexivity and reflection (R&R), we will host aclosed-door panel of experienced researchers to share learnings from their work before collaboratively developing artifacts outlining actions that researchers can take to address these challenges. By fostering a collective learning environment at CSCW, we will assist researchers across disciplines to conduct responsible sociotechnical safety research by prioritising reflexivity.
Organizers:
• Jessica McClearn, Royal Holloway University of London, UK
• Lucy Qin, Georgetown University, USA
• Emily Tseng, Microsoft Research, USA
• Miranda Wei, University of Washington, USA
• Rikke Bjerg Jensen, Royal Holloway University of London, UK
• Nora McDonald, George Mason University, USA
• Elissa M. Redmiles, Georgetown University, USA
• Morgan Klaus Scheuerman, Sony AI, USA
• Reem Talhouk, Northumbria University, UK
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/reflexivity-cscw25/home
12. Bridging Expertise and Participation in AI: Multistakeholder Approaches to Safer AI Systems for Youth Online Safety
Description:
This workshop will bring together interdisciplinary researchers, practitioners, and advocates to explore how youth-centered expertise can inform the design, deployment, and governance of GenAI systems while ensuring the online safety of youth. HCI and CSCW scholars have explored the participatory and ethical dimensions of AI, but systematically integrating youth online safety experts, advocates, and young users themselves throughout the AI development lifecycle remains a critical gap. This integration is particularly imperative for Generative AI (GenAI), which amplifies risks such as misinformation, deepfakes, and manipulative personalization challenges that are difficult to anticipate or govern due to GenAI’s reliance on large-scale, general-purpose training data and its often unpredictable outputs. To identify strategies for operationalizing multistakeholder collaboration and developing participatory tools, frameworks, and methods that promote safer, more inclusive AI, we will engage in discussions during a virtual pre-workshop session approximately two weeks before the conference, introducing one of the workshop’s core themes. This will be followed by an in-person conference workshop at CSCW to address the remaining themes. While GenAI is the primary focus, we welcome broader discussions on AI and youth online safety.
Organizers:
• Ozioma C. Oguine, University of Notre Dame, USA
• Johanna Olesk, University of Notre Dame, USA
• Jaemarie Solyst, University of Washington, USA
• Michael Madaio, Google Research, USA
• Michael Muller, IBM Research, USA
• Adriana Alvarado Garcia, IBM Research, USA
• Karla Badillo-Urquiola, University of Notre Dame, USA
Website: https://sites.google.com/nd.edu/cscw25ai4safety/
13. Exploring Resistance and Other Oppositional Responses to AI
Description:
This workshop will gather researchers and practitioners who study, and/or engage in, resistance to the proliferation of AI technologies. It will do so based on an inclusive conceptualization of what counts as AI, thereby assembling a diverse collection of participants and perspectives. The organizers will especially solicit submissions that respond to a variety of specific themes: resistance in _organizational contexts_, understandings of _community-based collective_ resistance, research around _non-voluntary_ adoption, implications for _designing technologies_ to support opposition, and the possibility of _resistance indirectly reifying_ current conceptions of AI. Prospective participants will be invited to submit descriptions of their work either studying or engaging in oppositional practices, as well as a challenge they have faced in doing so. The workshop will involve a series of interactive, hands-on activities to enable participants to share both challenges and strategies. In addition to catalyzing connections among researchers, the workshop will also produce two concrete outputs: a living annotated bibliography of relevant citations across diverse domains, and a practical guide with context-sensitive tactics for challenging the perceived inevitability of AI.
Organizers:
• Eric P. S. Baumer, Lehigh University (until June 2025), University of Toronto (beginning July 2025), USA
• Inha Cha, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
• Vera Khovanskaya, University of Toronto, USA
• Rosemary Steup, Lehigh University, USA
• Janet Vertesi, Princeton University, USA
• Richmond Wong, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Website: https://oppositiontoai.wordpress.com/
14. Augmenting Collaborative Problem-Solving: Exploring the Design and Use of GenAI for Groupwork
Description:
Complex problem-solving and creative work in the real world are rarely individual endeavors and typically unfold within teams and group settings. While advancements in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) have shown promise in augmenting creativity and productivity, these tools are primarily designed for individual use and overlook group dynamics and the collaborative aspects of teamwork. This workshop will provide a platform for researchers and practitioners to explore the design of future human-AI groups across four key themes: (1) the role of GenAI in group settings, (2) collaborative and multimodal interactions with GenAI, (3) evaluating GenAI’s influence within groups and designing for appropriate reliance, and (4) evolving group practices in the presence of GenAI. We hope to build a vibrant interdisciplinary community and foster critical discourse through a mix of short talks, thematic small-group discussions, and co-design sessions to surface tensions and identify core research directions for this emerging area. The overarching goal of the workshop is to strengthen connections within the community and construct alignment around how to pursue research that understands how GenAI can augment, undermine, or bring new practices to collaborative settings and groupwork.
Organizers:
• Janet G. Johnson, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
• Steven R. Rick, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA
• Jens Emil Grønbæk, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
• Emily Wong, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
• Ming Yin, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA
• Michael Nebeling, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
• Mark Klein, University Mohammed VI Polytechnic, Ben Guerir, Morocco
• Mark S. Ackerman, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
• Thomas Malone, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA
Website: https://www.augmentedcollaboration.info/
15. Mapping Risk Work and Designing Technologies to Support it in CSCW Research
Description:
This workshop brings together CSCW scholars of various domains, such as medicine and healthcare, disaster planning, and public safety, to consider different dimensions of risk work and their implications on computing. Risk work encompasses the practices through which workers assess, manage, and mitigate potential harms in situations framed by uncertainty. In the face of a pervasive rhetoric of crisis, risk work is expanding and evolving as workers and laypeople are increasingly charged with preventing, predicting, and communicating risks. The changing landscape of risk work is coupled with expanding technical infrastructure that shapes communication, determines information sharing, and includes technologies of data collection and prediction. In this workshop, we aim to examine the challenges and opportunities in designing computing systems that support risk work in order to develop a research agenda for studying the future of risk work. Participants will come ready to present on case studies of risk work. We will then engage in collaborative mapping exercises and design practices to identify both the potential and pitfalls of technologies to support risk work. The workshop will culminate in a shared research agenda and design strategies for the future of computing in risk work contexts.
Organizers:
• Myeong Lee, George Mason University, USA
• Rachel B. Warren, University of California Irvine, USA
• Yunan Chen, University of California Irvine, USA
• Hiba Siraj, George Mason University, USA
• Melissa Mazmanian, University of California, USA
• Ruchita Mandhre, Arizona State University, USA
• Kathleen H. Pine, Arizona State university, USA