Selected Projects

Abstract: People with visual impairments (PVI) face challenges in terms of consuming, creating, and sharing information on social media because most of the platforms' content is visual information.  In the current work, we propose a study that aims at investigating PVI's experiences on TikTok, the emerging social media technology that heavily rely on visual content. We would like to use this study to understand PVI’s motivations, interactions, and challenges of using such technologies. 

Abstract: We investigate Chinese people's adoption of digital contact tracing. We interviewed 26 Chinese participants and used thematic analysis to interpret the data. Our findings showed that, driven by Chinese culture, citizens accepted digital contact tracing and contributed to making digital contact tracing a socio-technical infrastructure of people's daily lives. 

Abstract: We investigated users’ lived experiences with a facial recognition system in a university in the United States, using semi-structured interviews. We were interested in participants’ first impressions and initial reactions to the facial recognition system, whether and why their attitudes towards the system deployment changed afterward, and how they viewed the university that made the deployment decision. 

Abstract: We investigated the attitudes of Chinese online users towards movie piracy and examined the factors that influence the attitudes. Taking a piracy case of a Chinese movie “The Wandering Earth” as an example, we collected 735 comments from two Sina Weibo posts through web crawling. Through a content analysis based on social cognitive theory (SCT), we found that the attitudes of online users ranged from supporting, opposing pessimistically to opposing movie piracy.