Where is the human? Bridging the gap between AI and HCI

In recent years, AI systems have become both more powerful and increasingly promising for integration in a variety of application areas. Attention has also been called to the social challenges these systems bring, particularly in how they might fail or even actively disadvantage marginalised social groups, or how their opacity might make them difficult to oversee and challenge. In the context of these and other challenges, the roles of humans working in tandem with these systems will be important, yet the HCI community has been only a quiet voice in these debates to date. This workshop aims to catalyse and crystallise an agenda around HCI's engagement with AI systems. Topics of interest include explainable and explorable AI; documentation and review; integrating artificial and human intelligence; collaborative decision making; AI/ML in HCI Design; diverse human roles and relationships in AI systems; and critical views of AI

A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Public Reddit and Tumblr Blog Posts on Non-Suicidal Self-Injury

Self-harm is a frightening phenomenon that affects adolescents and young adults all over the world. While non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) has a high prevalence rate, it is not a new behavior. One of the earliest documented cases of NSSI was in ancient Greece and it has gained popularity amongst adolescents. NSSI content appears consistently on pro-NSSI social media and blog websites. Social media’s ubiquity has profound impacts on people’s behavior; young people in particular spend hours consuming social media every day. The combination of NSSI behavior and social media creates debate and controversy. While some have argued that social media creates a community of people struggling with similar issues, others argue that social media is a space to perpetuate negativity and rumination. Even though research has attempted to understand and explain NSSI behavior, there has been little research on NSSI behavior and related language on social media. This dissertation examines selected pro-NSSI social media to explore the linguistic processes and psychological processes active in pro-NSSI social media posts. This study, which used a synchronic corpus linguistic design, has two arms; the first arm (A) focuses on pro-NSSI posts on Tumblr and the second arm (B) examined pro-NSSI posts on Reddit. Both the study on Tumblr and the study on Reddit asked the following questions: (1) What is the NSSI specific content word use of the individuals making posts? (2) What is the pattern of use of linguistic processes of the individuals making posts compared to the pattern that appears in blogs overall? (3) What is the pattern of use of psychological processes of the individuals making posts compared to the pattern that appears in blogs overall? The study used an API to collect public, pro-NSSI posts from both Reddit and Twitter that appeared between January 1, 2017 and December 31, 2017; these posts were then anonymized and analyzed. The API was instructed to scrape posts that: (a) monolingual English and (b) contain at least one term on a NSSI terms list compiled by the researchers. The API was instructed to eliminate user names, URLs, hashtags, location of the posts, posts from outside of the US, photographs, and foreign languages. When added together, the posts collected by the API for Research Arm A (Tumblr) had a total 330,868 total word count. For Research Arm B (Reddit), the corpus’ total word count was 228,172. The data was analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software. For the first research question, the percentage of all words for each NSSI-specific category was reported. In addition, the raw count for each word in each category was listed in rank order. In terms of the second and third research questions, the following were reported for all categories except for emotional tone: (a) percentage of all words, (b) log likelihood statistic of the comparison of the NSSI corpus to general blog norms, and (c) log ratio of the comparison of the NSSI corpus to general blog norms. For the emotional tone category, the following were noted: (a) percentage of all words, (b) one sample z test of proportion with study results as p-hat and general blog norms as p0. When the Tumblr posts from Research Arm A were analyzed, the findings revealed that people posting their NSSI behaviors on public blogs are people who have a high desire to connect with others while sharing their pain and experience of numbness, and use high levels of negative emotional words. Overall, these results demonstrated that people posting on Tumblr about NSSI are hurting individuals reaching out for help. The findings for Research Arm B (Reddit) suggest that the posts were made in the mental state that was characterized by high levels of depression, anxiety, and neuroticism. When both research arms are considered as a whole, the results illustrated a profile of a young person who is struggling with managing intense negative emotions. The results from this study have implications for the clinical treatment by informing the counseling theories used to treat this population, transforming how counselors are trained in NSSI behaviors and investigating how research can further explore the nuances of language to have a better understanding of a difficult problem the plagues so many young people

Self Harmony: Rethinking Hackathons to Design and Critique Digital Technologies for Those Affected by Self-Harm

In this paper we explore the opportunities, challenges and best practices around designing technologies for those affected by self-harm. Our work contributes to a growing HCI literature on mental health and wellbeing, as well as understandings of how to imbue appropriate value-sensitivity within the digital design process in these contexts. The first phase of our study was centred upon a hackathon during which teams of designers were asked to conceptualise and prototype digital products or services for those affected by self-harm. We discuss how value-sensitive actions and activities, including engagements with those with lived experiences of self-harm, were used to scaffold the conventional hackathon format in such a challenging context. Our approach was then extended through a series of critical engagements with clinicians and charity workers who provided appraisal of the prototypes and designs. Through analysis of these engagements we expose a number of design challenges for future HCI work that considers self-harm; moreover we offer insight into the role of stakeholder critiques in extending and rethinking hackathons as a design method in sensitive contexts

Internet searches for medical symptoms before seeking information on 12-step addiction treatment programs: A web-search log analysis

© 2019 George Nitzburg, Ingmar Weber, Elad Yom-Tov. Background: Brief intervention is a critical method for identifying patients with problematic substance use in primary care settings and for motivating them to consider treatment options. However, despite considerable evidence of delay discounting in patients with substance use disorders, most brief advice by physicians focuses on the long-term negative medical consequences, which may not be the best way to motivate patients to seek treatment information. Objective: Identification of the specific symptoms that most motivate individuals to seek treatment information may offer insights for further improving brief interventions. To this end, we used anonymized internet search engine data to investigate which medical conditions and symptoms preceded searches for 12-step meeting locators and general 12-step information. Methods: We extracted all queries made by people in the United States on the Bing search engine from November 2016 to July 2017. These queries were filtered for those who mentioned seeking Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) or Narcotics Anonymous (NA); in addition, queries that contained a medical symptom or condition or a synonym thereof were analyzed. We identified medical symptoms and conditions that predicted searches for seeking treatment at different time lags. Specifically, symptom queries were first determined to be significantly predictive of subsequent 12-step queries if the probability of querying a medical symptom by those who later sought information about the 12-step program exceeded the probability of that same query being made by a comparison group of all other Bing users in the United States. Second, we examined symptom queries preceding queries on the 12-step program at time lags of 0-7 days, 7-14 days, and 14-30 days, where the probability of asking about a medical symptom was greater in the 30-day time window preceding 12-step program information-seeking as compared to all previous times that the symptom was queried. Results: In our sample of 11,784 persons, we found 10 medical symptoms that predicted AA information seeking and 9 symptoms that predicted NA information seeking. Of these symptoms, a substantial number could be categorized as nonsevere in nature. Moreover, when medical symptom persistence was examined across a 1-month time period, a substantial number of nonsevere, yet persistent, symptoms were identified. Conclusions: Our results suggest that many common or nonsevere medical symptoms and conditions motivate subsequent interest in AA and NA programs. In addition to highlighting severe long-term consequences, brief interventions could be restructured to highlight how increasing substance misuse can worsen discomfort from common medical symptoms in the short term, as well as how these worsening symptoms could exacerbate social embarrassment or decrease physical attractiveness

Analysis of Deviant Opioid Addiction Treatment Communities on Reddit

As the opioid epidemic in the US continues, many addicts turn to clinically unverified, non-mainstream, deviant recovery methods to ameliorate the symptoms of withdrawal. In this study, we analyze discussion on the social media site Reddit surrounding these treatments. We apply transfer learning methods to train a classifier highly sensitive to recovery-related posts. Based on network analysis of Reddit communities (known as “subreddits”), we generate a list of subreddits where discussion of deviant addiction treatment methods is taking place. Using word embeddings and the testimony of a practicing opioid addiction clinician, we identify potential alternative opioid addiction treatment methods. Applying the classifier to subreddit post data, we generate a dataset consisting of recovery-related discourse. When applied to these posts, topic modeling methods, such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), reveal topics discussed within the context of recovery, such as the lifestyle changes associated with kratom use.Undergraduat

A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Pro-Nonsuicidal Self-Injury and Pro-Anorexia Public Tumblr Posts Which Use Spanish (Un Analisis de Lingüística de Corpus de Publicaciones Pública que usan Español en Tumblr que Respaldan a las Pró Autolesiones No Suicidas y Pró-Anorexia)

On social media platforms and on blog sites, disordered behavior as a lifestyle choice is a growing trend that supports and promotes behaviors related to self-harm and anorexia. Web content advocating self-harm and anorexia can be found easily through search engines or can be concealed in the social media sphere through deliberately misused language and creative hashtags. Existing scholarly literature includes information regarding the language used on social media platforms and on blogs sites when material is written in English; however, there is little research exploring these phenomena as they are communicated in Spanish. The present study, which used a synchronic corpus linguistic design, has two arms, both of which examined public Tumblr posts. The first arm focused on pro-nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) posts, and the second arm scrutinized pro-anorexia (pro-ana) posts. Posts were scraped when they included Spanish language and/or hashtags and when they also utilized hashtags identifying the post as pro-NSSI or pro-ana. The research questions for the arms were as follows: First, in public Tumblr posts written in Spanish, what was the use rate of specific words for individuals posting content of a pro-NSSI or pro-ana nature? Second, in public pro-NSSI or pro-ana Tumblr posts written in English, what was the use rate of pronoun categories? Third, in public pro-NSSI or pro-ana Tumblr posts written in English, did the use rate of pronoun categories differ from norms for such posts? And, finally, in public pro-NSSI or pro-ana Tumblr posts written in Spanish, did the use rate of the psychological process categories differ from norms for such posts? Following an analysis of the data with Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software, the first arm of the study revealed the use of high levels of negative emotion words in the dominant language. The results also revealed possible depression, perceived lower social status and users’ efforts to distance themselves from their emotions when writing in the non-dominant language (English). Overall, these results demonstrated that people posting on Tumblr about NSSI are suffering and in need of help. The results of the second arm of the study revealed that reliance on pronouns increased users’ focus on people and objects, which has been linked to decreased likelihood of recovery. The psychological properties of the posts had a negative emotional tone and significant use of ingestion and health words, signaling potential symptoms of anorexia. Considering the extent of both research arms, the results show that these overlapping populations struggle to manage intense negative emotions. This research points to the benefits both of assessing bilingual clients for NSSI and anorexia symptoms and of evaluating their online posting behaviors. So, too, do these studies underscore the need for improved evidence-based treatment for trauma in bilingual individuals and the importance of devising Spanish and codeswitching blog norms to inform future research. Finally, these results can have profound implications for clinical treatment by informing the counseling theories used to treat these populations, by transforming how counselors are trained to assess and respond to NSSI and anorexia behaviors, and by investigating how research can reveal the nuances of language such that scholars better appreciate the difficult issues confronting teens and young adults

Characterization of Time-variant and Time-invariant Assessment of Suicidality on Reddit using C-SSRS

Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S (1999-2019). However, predicting when someone will attempt suicide has been nearly impossible. In the modern world, many individuals suffering from mental illness seek emotional support and advice on well-known and easily-accessible social media platforms such as Reddit. While prior artificial intelligence research has demonstrated the ability to extract valuable information from social media on suicidal thoughts and behaviors, these efforts have not considered both severity and temporality of risk. The insights made possible by access to such data have enormous clinical potential - most dramatically envisioned as a trigger to employ timely and targeted interventions (i.e., voluntary and involuntary psychiatric hospitalization) to save lives. In this work, we address this knowledge gap by developing deep learning algorithms to assess suicide risk in terms of severity and temporality from Reddit data based on the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS). In particular, we employ two deep learning approaches: time-variant and time-invariant modeling, for user-level suicide risk assessment, and evaluate their performance against a clinician-adjudicated gold standard Reddit corpus annotated based on the C-SSRS. Our results suggest that the time-variant approach outperforms the time-invariant method in the assessment of suicide-related ideations and supportive behaviors (AUC:0.78), while the time-invariant model performed better in predicting suicide-related behaviors and suicide attempt (AUC:0.64). The proposed approach can be integrated with clinical diagnostic interviews for improving suicide risk assessments.Comment: 24 Pages, 8 Tables, 6 Figures; Accepted by PLoS One ; One of the two mentioned Datasets in the manuscript has Closed Access. We will make it public after PLoS One produces the manuscrip