Category Archives: Publication Highlights

Cross-Cultural Parenting and Technology

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My parents had two primary sources for parenting advice: my grandparents and the Dr. Spock book. If you are a parent today, you know that this is no longer the case! Millions of sources in printed literature, online, and in your local community all have opinions on how you should parent! How do parents manage so many diverse opinions? What happens when the values of the parents conflict with their community, with other family members, or even with each other? We thought that cross-cultural families (where the two parents are from different cultures or who are raising their child in a different culture from their own) may have a particularly salient perspective to offer on these important questions.

The idea for this project grew out of a workshop on family technologies. Over the last two years, I’ve had the honor of working with three great collaborators — Sarita Schoenebeck, Shreya Kothaneth, and Liz Bales — to try to understand cross-cultural parenting and to find opportunities for technology to help. All four of us are members of cross-cultural families (in one way or another) and we wanted to learn more about this fascinating phenomenon, so we interviewed parents from 18 cross-cultural families all around the United States. We investigated how these families respond to conflicts while integrating diverse cultural views, as well as how they utilize the wealth of parenting resources available online in navigating their lives. In our upcoming CHI 2016 paper (available as a pre-print here), we share what these parents told us about how these families find and evaluate advice, connect with social support, resolve intra-family tensions, incorporate multicultural practices, and seek out diverse views. But, what I want to share here are three design ideas for new technology that were inspired by these interviews. We think that they may not only be good for cross-cultural families but may help all kinds of families better integrate multiple cultures into everyday life. We show some very preliminary sketches of these ideas below:

Some ideas for new technology inspired by our interviews with cross-cultural families!

Some ideas for new technology inspired by our interviews with cross-cultural families!

For me personally, this project was fascinating because I got to talk to so many interesting families. It was gratifying to think that maybe cross-cultural families could inspire ideas that could help all families and bring us all a little closer. What do you think, would you use any of the ideas we suggested in the paper if we went ahead and built it? Let us know below!

YouthTube: Youth Video Authorship on YouTube and Vine

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We looked at more than 300 videos posted by children and teenagers on YouTube and Vine and discovered some interesting facts about youth video authorship.

We looked at more than 300 videos posted by children and teenagers on YouTube and Vine and discovered some interesting facts about youth video authorship.

It’s 2015, do you know what your kids are posting online? Children and teenagers use public video platforms like YouTube and Vine to share their stories. Knowing more about what and how they share could help us design tools that encourage creativity and self-expression while helping young people reflect on online safety and privacy. To find out more about what youth video authors do online, we conducted a study that looked at over 300 recently-shared youth authored videos.

We used human computation (see paper for details) to identify 336 youth-authored videos out of 4000 videos recently publicly shared on YouTube and Vine. We found interesting differences between YouTube and Vine and interesting contrasts between what youths and adults share:

  • YouTube vs. Vine. We found that the YouTube creators were on average younger (14 years old) than Vine creators (17 years old). YouTube creators more likely to collaborate with adults on the videos, and much less likely to include content that was violent, sexual, or obscene in nature. It seems that YouTube is a family space, while Vine is a playground for older teens. However, we should not be alarmist about Vine or try to keep teenagers away from it. We know that it’s important for teenagers to take risks and experiment with their identities as a way of developing resilience. Perhaps, a better focus would be creating tools to help them reflect on their online persona and better understand how their videos are viewed and shared by others.
  • Youths vs. Adults. A previous study of online video authorship identified the most common types of videos posted by adults. Adults reported being most likely to post videos of friends and family doing everyday things, videos of themselves or others doing funny things, videos of an event they attended, and videos of pets or animals. In a nutshell, it can be said that they treat video as an archive to collect and keep precious memories of everyday life with their family, friends, and pets, humorous moments, and special events. In contrast, we found that the most common types of videos posted by children and teenagers were intentionally staged, scripted, or choreographed videos, videos of friends and family doing everyday things, videos of themselves or others doing funny things, and video selfies and opinions. In short, children and teenagers are more likely to treat video as a stage to tell their stories and show their talents. Knowing this, we can design systems that support young authors not in capturing and archiving, but in planning, performing, and editing compelling narratives and performances.

If you want more details about our methods, findings, and examples of videos we found, check out our paper that has been accepted to appear in the Proceedings of CSCW 2016: Svetlana Yarosh, Elizabeth Bonsignore, Sarah McRoberts, and Tamara Peyton. 2016. YouthTube: Youth Video Authorship on YouTube and Vine. Proceedings of the 2016 conference on Computer supported cooperative work, ACM.

Reflecting on the Year and Going on the Job Market

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Early in August, I celebrated my first anniversary at AT&T and I reflected on the year. I made a list of ten events and activities that I found most fulfilling and fun during this year. In no particular order, these were:

  • Mentoring my summer intern (Tom Jenkins): coming up with a scoped project, working to understand the space, and advising on the direction of the project and study design
  • All of the STEM advocacy work I’ve done, including the invention workshop for the “Take Your Child to Work Day,” speaking to women at the “Girls Who Code” Camp, blogging for HuffPost on STEM stuff, etc.
  • Giving back to the academic community by serving on committees, including being short papers chair for IDC (that short paper madness was MAD!!) and serving on the CSCW PC for the first time.
  • Working in interdisciplinary teams on new patents for AT&T and having more than 5 of them pursued by the company (I was the primary lead on 3 of those).
  • Seeing a Masters student I advised at Georgia Tech (Sanika Mokashi), present her work as a first author at IDC and knowing that I had a big role in helping her shape and carry out this research.
  • Having my first single-author publication at CHI and getting an honorable mention award for it. Presenting the work at CHI, I felt that the community really appreciated my contribution.
  • Finding that other researchers are actually starting to use the questionnaire I developed in the course of my thesis work, even before its official publication (slated to appear at CSCW). That made me feel really useful to others.
  • Blogging and getting feedback from friends and colleagues on early ideas and reflections like this one. Having 3 posts hit over 1000 views: 1, 2, and 3.
  • The three workshops I participated in this year: Diverse Families @ CHI, Enhancing Children’s Voices @ IDC, and DSST, and all of the follow-up work and new research that’s coming out of the collaborations forged there.
  • Working with the OCAD University’s Suz Stein and my department to understand new research directions for AT&T through future-casting design techniques. Following up on these ideas to flesh out and sketch concrete scenarios, that eventually led to patents, projects, prototypes, etc.

It’s definitely been a fun year with lots of excitement! Unfortunately, I’m coming to realize that the recent organizational changes at AT&T Labs Research might make it harder for me to do the aspects of the work that I enjoy most. Also, it became clear that the things I enjoyed most about this year are much easier to pursue in academia than in industry (except maybe collaborating on department-wide project and developing patents). I love working with students, publishing, going to conferences, collaborating with researchers from other institutions, and doing service to the community. I am allowed to do all these things at AT&T, but it is becoming harder and harder to carve out time for them under the new organizational structure — researchers are expected to dedicate a lot more of their effort to projects vetted by the company’s strategy division.

This reflection has led me to the decision to go on the academic job market this year. I want to be clear that I am not making this decision because AT&T has not been a fun place to work. I love my colleagues and my manager, the culture of collaboration and willingness to help both in and outside of my department, and the potential for having my ideas influence real products. But, I think at this point in life, my passions are taking me in a different direction.

I’m open to any institution that will allow me to pursue the things I love most: working with students, investigating interesting problems, and publishing my work. And yes, I do understand that there are other parts to the job as well, like grant writing, teaching, and serving on committees — I think that I would enjoy all these parts as well. If you think I may be a good fit for your department, let me know! I’d love to check it out and learn more about it. Here’s my 140-character Tweesume: I am “an HCI researcher, investigating technologies for enhancing social relationships in the contexts of family, health, and personal growth.” I linked an example paper in each context (though, many more are available on my publications page).