Invited talk: Authenticity in the Digital Age, Tilburg University, The Netherlands

Digitalization beyond truth
We live in an era in which digitalization has impacted us as deeply as affecting our perception of what is real and true. For example, we believe that our navigation app is giving us the fastest route to our destination, even though we’ve definitely been proven otherwise. Still, we blindly trust it. This is only a small, relatively innocent example, but smart algorithms are now present in many essential products and institutions, such as health care, education, (social) media and even in some legal sectors. We let them make important decisions for us and in the process, we often forget that they are created to nudge us towards certain (by companies) desired behavior. Can we even still make our own autonomous and authentic decisions? Or have we burned these bridges a long time ago? In this talk, I talked about designing appropriate trust in human-AI interaction, for which AI agents can guide humans to appropriately trust AI and augment human agency. During this talk, I explained how authentic data can contribute to our trust in computer systems.  

Members:
Siddharth Mehrotra, RWTH Aachen University
Maria Zafar, University (Academia)
Kevin Storer, University of California, Irvine
Jennifer Mankoff, University of Washington
Anja Thieme, Microsoft Research

I have served as a team lead for the Accessibility Inclusion Team at SIGCHI in the year 2019. Our team was responsible for collaborating with SIGCHI Accessibility Group, addressing the issue of Content Accessibility  with a specific focus on ‘creating guidelines to use as a standard’. We worked on understanding current SIGCHI conference(s) website accessibility issues to generate web guidelines following WCAG standards of Level AA. Our work includes providing guidelines for alt-text, captions & audio descriptions for videos and creating structural landmarks by using specific HTML elements. Landmarks include headings, lists, tables, and paragraphs.

For example:  one way to determine if content has appropriate landmarks is to look at the page without the style sheet. 

Full report can be read here -  2019 Access SIGCHI Report 

I have worked as a student volunteer for FAccT, SIGCHI TVX, MobileHCI, and CHI PLAY conference. The task was to work directly with three SIGCHI Steering Committee /conference chairs to (re)design of a new and fresh version of their conference banners. Each banner reflected the topics, interests, and specialty inherent in every specialized conferences.