Author: Cori

Cori Faklaris (aka "HeyCori") is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Department of Software and Information Systems, College of Computing. Faklaris received her PhD in human-computer interaction in 2022 from Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, School of Computer Science, in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. She also is a social media expert and longtime journalist, and/or "Doer of Things No One Else Wants to Do."

Bytes of Good Live podcast: Talking ‘Social Cybersecurity’ with Hack4Impact

One upside of video calls during the COVID-19 pandemic has been that I can attend or speak at virtually any location or event, without having to travel or move my schedule around too much. It’s helped me get more comfortable with public speaking, and exposed me to different audiences for my work.

In my latest public appearance: I appeared this spring with fellow CMU grad student Tom Magelinski at Bytes of Good Live, organized by Hack4Impact, a student-run nonprofit that promotes software for social good. We talked about our Social Cybersecurity research and what we know of careers in cybersecurity. The recording is available on YouTube, or click on the preview shown below to go to the video. Let me know what you think!

Alipay and WeChat Pay are everywhere in China – new paper for CSCW 2020 + reflections on cross-cultural research

This is a super-weird week to be submitting the camera-ready version of this research paper for publication at CSCW 2020. On Thursday, the “Executive Order Addressing the Threat Posed by WeChat” set a countdown of 45 days until the Tencent app would be “banned,” along with ByteDance’s TikTok. It recognizes what we document – the central role that these apps’ financial transactions play in the U.S.-intertwined Chinese economy.

Of course: I agree that apps such these, and Alipay and WeChat Pay, collect a lot of data about us while we go about using them for both fun and serious self-expression, and that this data is obtainable through various processes by the government of the country in which their parent companies are headquartered. I’ve long worried about our data security and privacy with regards to a constellation of mobile social media and short-form video apps, along with mobile payment options such as Apple Pay, Google Wallet Google Pay, PayPal, Venmo, Zelle, Square Cash, and Facebook’s Messenger and Novi. (Disclosure: I work at Facebook this summer, on marketing/ad data literacy.)

I felt a grief, however, at thinking of our global internet shrinking just a bit more from fully embracing the marvel of how newly connected so many of us can live and work despite our physical boundaries and limitations. The pandemic has sharpened my keen appreciation for how WeChat and other social media help family and friends bridge great distances, and for how much education, business and other knowledge work depends on reliable and usable communication software being available to everyone, everywhere.

It has been a joy and fascination to help pilot and design research into a very different manifestation of internet-enhanced life than the one I know in the U.S., directed by lead author Hong Shen (also a graduate of the University of Illinois College of Media) and with fellow HCII Phd researcher Haojian Jin and my awesome advisors, Laura Dabbish and Jason Hong. In China, you don’t have to go out with your wallet, just your phone! Even street vendors have QR codes for you to scan! Which gives rise to new forms of communication, such as attaching a message with a transfer equal to a penny! and new threat models, such as thieves coming in the night and replacing the QR code printout with their own!

And that was just from the pilot interviews. Read the preprint version of the paper for specifics on what my Chinese co-authors discovered when they conducted a survey (n=466) and interviews (n=12) in China about the advantages and the pitfalls of moving to a largely mobile and cashless economy.

I spoke up about my interest in the project in part thanks to Dan Grover, whose blogging (in English, thankfully 🙂 ) about his experience of working at WeChat as a product manager had piqued my interest in the various advances in the Chinese social media ecosystem. I couldn’t agree with him more in his tweeted responses to the EO on Thursday night:

“Matching Up Adults in Work Groups” – Exploratory Survey Research for Spring 2020 Class Project

One advantage of still (STILL) taking courses toward my Phd is that I can leverage our group projects to explore research questions outside of my core area. This one got a little “meta” – we looked for the factors that are key to students creating groups for successful course projects!

The following is a blog post that we created for our final project in Social Web in HCI, taught by Geoff Kaufman and Hiro Shirado. My teammates are Ruiqi Hu and Endong Zhu.

In current society, collaboration is a vital component of daily life. People collaborate for diverse personal purposes such as romantic dating, pursuing shared interests, addressing community issues, and solving technical problems. This has led to the rise of dozens of computational systems for “social matching” (Terveen & McDonald, 2005). The rise of team-oriented productivity structures in academia and industry has similarly motivated work to create tools for professional social matching (Olsson et al., 2020). While socio-technical research has led to useful solutions for instructors matching up students in group projects – such as CATME (https://info.catme.org/) and Pair Research (http://pairresearch.io/) – we seek to create a computational tool for students who want to self-organize their project groups.

To help us better envision what such a tool might need for its data inputs, we undertook an exploratory research project in Spring 2020 for the Social Web course in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. First, we undertook a literature search through Google Scholar and our existing reference libraries, and we interviewed subject matter experts and gathered feedback from classmates on what competitor tools exist and what other published research was relevant. From this process, we identified several key variables such as team size, fraction of newcomers and incumbents, team skills, and personality traits, from which to create a statistical model of which input variables mattered most for the desired outcomes of excellent grades and group-work satisfaction.

Then, we designed a pilot survey to help us explore these variables with a real-world dataset. We crafted a codebook of survey items corresponding to these variables, from which we then designed and wrote an online questionnaire in Google Forms. We then recruited survey respondents from among our class and personal networks, and we cleaned and prepared the resulting data for statistical analysis using multilinear regression. Finally, we produced charts and graphs to visualize the most important inputs for determining our respondents’ stated grade and satisfaction outcomes.

Our results showed, first, that the more “weak ties” or acquaintances that were reported in the group, the lower were the project outcomes. We theorize that this is because working with acquaintances will lower people’s expectations for the project – students may just want to “hang out” with their school friends instead of focusing on the quality of their projects.

Figure 1: The number of weak ties in a group is negatively associated with top-percentile project outcomes.

Second, our results show that the personality trait of “negative emotionality,” such as a tendency to anxiety, is positively associated with both project outcomes AND satisfaction. This finding is surprising to us, because we assumed that this trait would have negative effects on outcomes due to creating psychological obstacles or group friction. However, it may be that students who worry more tend to care more and devote more efforts to the project.

Figure 2: The “negative emotionality” personality trait is positively associated with top-percentile project outcomes AND satisfaction.

This work has validated our initial hunch that using a psychometric and skills-profiling tool may help students to self-assemble a group for their course projects that is more likely to lead to excellent grades and high satisfaction. We see the need in the future to collect a larger survey sample, with a monetary incentive for participation rather than “social capital” among the convenience sample, in order to test whether we can replicate the results.