Christena Nippert-Eng

Video games are deeply embedded in teenagers’ lives, shaping their social lives while exposing them to prolonged engagement and gambling-like mechanisms. Although prior work has identified harmful game design practices, teenagers’ own understandings of these experiences remain underexplored. Through semi-structured interviews with teenagers aged 13–17 ( n = 7), we examine how harmful experiences are understood and interpreted. Our findings show that despite being aware of manipulative aspects of game design, including engagement-driven reward systems that encourage prolonged engagement, teenagers frame these experiences as expected trade-offs of gaming. Through processes of acceptance, justification, and social reinforcement, harmful gaming experiences are normalized as everyday play. As a result, teenagers viewed self-control and personal responsibility as the primary ways to stay safe while gaming, shifting responsibility for online safety away from platforms and towards teenagers and parents. We argue that the central harm in contemporary gaming lies not only in manipulative mechanics themselves, but in how prolonged participation becomes normalized through routine engagement. We provide an empirical account of how teenagers come to accept, justify, and normalize harmful gaming experiences. We also show how socio-technical environments normalize harmful engagement and shift responsibility for online safety toward teenagers through expectations of self-regulation.

Zoos and aquariums house a wide range of species, yet research remains heavily skewed toward mammals and camera-based technologies. This systematic literature review examines the use of computing technologies to monitor or interact with animals in zoos, aquariums, or wildlife parks, with a focus on taxonomic representation and technological diversity. A total of 125 studies published between 2014 and 2024 met the inclusion criteria, encompassing 151 recorded instances of technology use. Cameras and video systems were the most frequently used tools, appearing alone in 40% of studies and in combination with other technologies in an additional 18.4%, accounting for 48.3% of all technology instances. Most studies focused on only mammals (73.5%), and behavioral monitoring was the most common research aim (40.9%). These findings suggest an uneven distribution of research shaped more by convenience and familiarity than by welfare need, highlighting a critical opportunity to diversify both species focus and technological application. Increased investment in underrepresented species and underutilized tools will help ensure that research better reflects the full spectrum of animal needs and experiences.

Epilepsy, a prevalent chronic neurological disorder, presents numerous challenges for people with epilepsy (PWEs) and their caregivers. They experience difficulties in receiving proper care and support due to stigma and misconceptions. Promoting public awareness in early education would be critical to reduce the stigma and to properly support them. We conducted 145 surveys and 21 interviews with teachers, school nurses, and parents of elementary and middle school students. While the participants exhibited slightly positive attitudes towards PWEs, we identified obstacles that hinder learning about epilepsy and seizure first aid: inadequate education and limited information sharing among school stakeholders. Moreover, there is a pressing need for age-appropriate education that considers the students' ages and perceptual levels. Considering the current limitations and needs, we propose potential implications for future information and communication technologies (ICTs) designs, including knowledge-sharing systems and an educational game aimed at enhancing epilepsy awareness and fostering collaborative care in elementary and middle school environments.

Though teens are a population with growing agency and use of smart technologies, their concerns surrounding privacy with AI and robots are under-represented in research. Using focus group discussions and a mixed methods analysis, we present teens' comfort levels with robotic information collection and sharing during three hypothetical scenarios involving a child interacting with the Haru social robot in the home. We find participant concerns align with an access-based definition of privacy which prioritizes being in control of their information and of when the robot behaves autonomously. Responses also indicate that teens conceptualize Haru not just as an intelligent device, but also as a social entity. Their shifts in comfort and discussions reflect an engagement in social relationship management with robots in the home in cases where the robot mediates a user's responsibilities and relationships with others.

How do Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI) researchers working with live animal participants assess the animals’ willingness to participate in their research? In this paper we present the results of a systematic literature review designed to answer this question by examining the Proceedings of the ACM International Animal Computer Interaction Conference. From 2016-2022, these proceedings included 38 full papers that reported results from research with live animal participants. We found 1) only 74% or 28/38 of the papers reported how they assessed animal participants’ willingness to engage during their research, 2) the authors of papers focused on species other than dogs had a much higher rate of providing this information than did the authors of dog-based studies (100% or 12/12 non-dog papers v 62% or 16/26 of dog-based papers), 3) most researchers who addressed the issue of an animal participant’s willingness to engage in the research relied on some form of mediated consent, informed by behavioral observation methods, to do so. However, the researchers focused on non-dog species were much more likely than researchers focused on dogs to include elements of contingent consent in their protocols (75% (9/12) of the non-dog studies v 12% (3/26) of the dog-related studies). We argue that providing each other with more details about our research methods and possibly more fully embracing the principles of contingent consent would further ACI researchers’ existing ethical commitment to our animal participants, increase our adherence to standard scientific research practice, and accelerate the continued development of the field of Animal-Computer Interaction.

Preventing workplace phishing depends on the actions of every employee, regardless of cybersecurity expertise. Based on 24 semi-structured interviews with mid-career office workers (70.8% women, averaging 44 years old) at two U.S. universities, we found that less than 21% of our participants had any formal anti-phishing training. Much of what our participants know about phishing comes from informal sources that emphasize “tips” and "tricks" like those found in conversations with friends, news stories, newsletters, social media, and podcasts. These informal channels provide opportunities for IT professionals wishing to enhance employees’ anti-phishing awareness by better aligning the delivery of expert advice with employees’ current practices and desires. We provide four recommendations designed to embrace "guerrilla learning" by distributing anti-phishing educational resources across the workplace and workday in part to encourage the delivery of more accurate information in more informal and incidental ways, and greater dialogue between anti-phishing training instructors and learners.

Phishing attacks, in which deceptive messages purporting to be from a legitimate contact are used to trick recipients and acquire sensitive information for the purposes of committing fraud, are a substantial and growing problem for organizations. IT departments and professionals may put in place a variety of institutional responses to thwart such attacks, but an organization's susceptibility to phishing also depends on the decisions and actions of individual employees. These employees may have little phishing expertise but still need to react to such attempts on a daily basis. Based on 24 semi-structured interviews with mid-career office workers (70.8% women, averaging 44 years old, with a bachelor's degree or more) at two universities in the midwestern United States, we find that employees self-describe a wide range of levels of awareness of, and confidence, competency and investment in, the organization's proscribed anti-phishing policies and practices. These employees also describe variation in the ways they would prefer to increase their perceived performance levels in all of these areas. In this paper, we argue that in order to empower employees to be better collaborators in an organization's anti-phishing efforts, organizations should embrace a range of efforts akin to the range of expertise among the users themselves. We make four such empowering recommendations for organizations to consider incorporating into their existing anti-phishing policies and practices, including suggestions to 1) embrace educating non-expert users more fully on organizational processes and consequences, 2) provide employees with a standing one-to-one communication channel between them and an IT phishing point-of-contact, 3) keep employees in the loop once phishing reports are made, and 4) avoid testing employees with "gotcha" assessments.