The Grind for Good Data: Understanding ML Practitioners' Struggles and Aspirations in Making Good Data

We thought data to be simply given, but reality tells otherwise; it is costly, situation-dependent, and muddled with dilemmas, constantly requiring human intervention. The ML community's focus on quality data is increasing in the same vein, as good data is vital for successful ML systems. Nonetheless, few works have investigated the dataset builders and the specifics of what they do and struggle to make good data. In this study, through semi-structured interviews with 19 ML experts, we present what humans actually do and consider in each step of the data construction pipeline. We further organize their struggles under three themes: 1) trade-offs from real-world constraints; 2) harmonizing assorted data workers for consistency; 3) the necessity of human intuition and tacit knowledge for processing data. Finally, we discuss why such struggles are inevitable for good data and what practitioners aspire, toward providing systematic support for data works

Exploring the Use of a Voice-based Conversational Agent to Empower Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Voice-based Conversational Agents (VCA) have served as personal assistants that support individuals with special needs. Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) may also benefit from VCAs to deal with their everyday needs and challenges, ranging from self-care to social communications. In this study, we explored how VCAs could encourage adolescents with ASD in navigating various aspects of their daily lives through the two-week use of VCAs and a series of participatory design workshops. Our findings demonstrated that VCAs could be an engaging, empowering, emancipating tool that supports adolescents with ASD to address their needs, personalities, and expectations, such as promoting self-care skills, regulating negative emotions, and practicing conversational skills. We propose implications of using of-the-shelf technologies as a personal assistant to ASD users in Assistive Technology design. We suggest design implications for promoting positive opportunities while mitigating the remaining challenges of VCAs for adolescents with ASD.N