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Tawfiq Ammari. 2026. Patient-Made Knowledge Networks: Long COVID Discourse, Epistemic Injustice, and Online Community Formation. arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14528
Long COVID represents an unprecedented case of patient-led illness definition, emerging through Twitter in May 2020 when patients began collectively naming, documenting, and legitimizing their condition before medical institutions recognized it. This study examines 2.8 million tweets containing #LongCOVID to understand how contested illness communities construct knowledge networks and respond to epistemic injustice. Through topic modeling, reflexive thematic analysis, and exponential random graph modeling (ERGM), identifies seven discourse themes spanning symptom documentation, medical dismissal, cross-illness solidarity, and policy advocacy.
Blog post from the Trauma-Informed Design blog (Substack). traumainformedesign.substack.com
Yehuda Perry and Tawfiq Ammari. 2026. Navigating Algorithmic Opacity: Folk Theories and User Agency in Semi-Autonomous Vehicles. arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07312
As semi-autonomous vehicles become prevalent, drivers must collaborate with AI systems whose decision-making processes remain opaque. Through 16 semi-structured interviews with AV drivers, examines the explanatory frameworks drivers construct to make sense of AI decisions. Finds that drivers develop sophisticated folk theories—often using anthropomorphic metaphors—yet lack informational resources to validate these theories or meaningfully participate in algorithmic governance.
Yehuda Perry and Tawfiq Ammari. 2026. Normalized Surveillance in the Datafied Car: How Autonomous Vehicle Users Rationalize Privacy Trade-offs. arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11026
Autonomous vehicles are characterized by pervasive datafication through sensors like in-cabin cameras, LIDAR, and GPS. Drawing on 16 semi-structured interviews analyzed using constructivist grounded theory, examines how users make sense of vehicular surveillance within everyday datafication. Finds that drivers normalize monitoring through comparisons with established digital platforms, theorizing this indifference by situating AV surveillance within a broader “surveillance ecology.”
Tawfiq Ammari, Meilun Chen, S. M. Mehedi Zaman, and Kiran Garimella. 2026. Learning to Live with AI: How Students Develop AI Literacy Through Naturalistic ChatGPT Interaction. arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20749
Analyzes 10,536 ChatGPT messages from 36 undergraduates over one academic year. Reveals five use genres—academic workhorse, emotional companion, metacognitive partner, repair and negotiation, and trust calibration—constituting distinct configurations of student-AI learning. Demonstrates that functional AI competence emerges through ongoing relational negotiation rather than one-time adoption. Repair work during AI breakdowns produces substantial learning, developing what the study terms “repair literacy.”
Tawfiq Ammari and Samantha Gilgan. 2026. Remote Triggers: Misophonia, Technology Non-Use, and Design for Inclusive Digital Spaces. arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13355
Misophonia, characterized by intense negative reactions to specific sounds or related visual cues, remains poorly recognized in clinical settings yet profoundly affects daily life. Drawing on 16 semi-structured interviews, examines how individuals with misophonia experience and sometimes avoid technology that amplifies their triggers. Proposes design interventions including channel-specific audio-visual controls, real-time trigger detection, and shared preference tools to better support misophonic users.
Woojin Jung, Charles Chear, Andrew H. Kim, Vatsal Shah, and Tawfiq Ammari. 2026. Spatiotemporal Change-Points in Development Discourse: Insights from Social Media in Low-Resource Contexts. arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06402
Investigates the spatiotemporal evolution of development discourse in low-resource settings, analyzing more than two years of geotagged X data from Zambia. Introduces a mixed-methods pipeline utilizing topic modeling, change-point detection, and qualitative coding. Identifies seven recurring themes and detects discourse changepoints linked to the COVID-19 pandemic and a geothermal project, distinguishing between ephemeral acute crises and persistent structural reorientations. Conceptualizes “durable discourse” as sustained narrative engagement with development issues.
Jeongone Seo and Tawfiq Ammari. 2026. Interdependent Navigation and Pragmatic Disengagement: How Older Korean Immigrants Selectively Engage with Digital Technologies. arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18326
Older immigrant adults face unique barriers to digital participation, often framed as skill deficits. Through a community-based study with 22 older Korean immigrants in the greater New York area, reframes these behaviors as active strategies. Identifies pragmatic disengagement, where users selectively reject emotionally taxing or linguistically risky technologies, and interdependent navigation, where digital literacy operates as a distributed, relational resource rather than an individual skill.
Jeongone Seo, Ryan Womack, and Tawfiq Ammari. 2025. Intergenerational AI Literacy in Korean Immigrant Families: Interpretive Gatekeeping Meets Convenient Critical Deferment. arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10197
Examines how Korean immigrant families in the United States negotiate the use of AI tools such as ChatGPT and smart assistants in their homes. Through 20 semi-structured interviews with parents and teens, identifies two key practices: interpretive gatekeeping, where parents mediate children’s AI use through cultural and ethical values; and convenient critical deferment, where teens strategically postpone critical evaluation of AI for immediate utility. Challenges conventional skills-based models of AI literacy, revealing it as a dynamic relational practice.
Tawfiq Ammari, Meilun Chen, S. M. Mehedi Zaman, and Kiran Garimella. 2025. How Students (Really) Use ChatGPT: Uncovering Experiences Among Undergraduate Students. arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24126
Investigates how undergraduate students engage with ChatGPT in self-directed learning contexts. Analyzing naturalistic interaction logs, identifies five dominant use categories: information seeking, content generation, language refinement, metacognitive engagement, and conversational repair. Behavioral modeling reveals that structured, goal-driven tasks like coding, multiple-choice solving, and job application writing are strong predictors of continued use.
Karen Joy, Tawfiq Ammari, and Alyssa Sheehan. 2025. Beyond the Hype: Mapping Uncertainty and Gratification in AI Assistant Use. arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09220
Examines the gap between promises and real-world performance of emerging AI personal assistants. Drawing on interviews with early adopters of devices like Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin, maps user experiences through the lens of Uses and Gratifications and Uncertainty Reduction Theory. Identifies three core types of user uncertainty—functional, interactional, and social—and explores how each disrupts different user gratifications.
Tawfiq Ammari, Anna Gutowska, Jacob Ziff, Casey Randazzo, and Harihan Subramonyam. 2025. Retweets, Receipts, and Resistance: Discourse, Sentiment, and Credibility in Public Health Crisis Twitter. arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22032
Analyzes two years of tweets from, to, and about the CDC using a mixed methods approach. Finds that CDC communication remained largely one-directional and did not foster reciprocal interaction, while discussions around COVID-19 were deeply shaped by political and ideological polarization. Users frequently cited earlier CDC messages to critique new and sometimes contradictory guidance—a dynamic the paper terms “crisis messaging journeys.”
Tawfiq Ammari, Anna Gutowska, Jacob Ziff, Casey Randazzo, and Harihan Subramonyam. 2025. From the CDC to Emerging Infectious Disease Publics: The Long-Now of Polarizing and Complex Health Crises. arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20262
Examines how public discourse around COVID-19 unfolded on Twitter through the lens of crisis communication and digital publics. Analyzing over 275,000 tweets involving the CDC, identifies 16 distinct discourse clusters shaped by framing, sentiment, credibility, and network dynamics. Finds that CDC messaging became a flashpoint for affective and ideological polarization, with most clusters forming echo chambers while a few enabled cross-cutting dialogue.
Tawfiq Ammari. 2025. Crisis Messaging Journeys: Epistemic Struggles over CDC Guidance During COVID-19. arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10906
Investigates how the CDC communicated COVID-19 guidance on Twitter and how publics responded over two years of the pandemic. Drawing on 275,124 tweets mentioning @CDCgov, combines BERTopic modeling, sentiment analysis, credibility checks, change point detection, and survival analysis to trace three phases of discourse. Introduces the concept of crisis messaging journeys to explain how archived “receipts” of prior CDC statements fueled epistemic struggles, political polarization, and sustained engagement.
Jeongone Seo and Tawfiq Ammari. 2025. Governance and Technological Challenge in Digital Solidarity Economies: A Case Study of a Collaborative Transportation Platform in South Korea. arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04166
South Korea’s City P illustrates how lofty goals of digital solidarity can falter when challenged by local governance realities. Drawing on Hansmann’s ownership theory, collaborative governance concepts, and platform cooperativism, conducts a qualitative case study involving policy documents, independent assessments, and 11 in-depth interviews. Finds a marked disconnect between the initiative’s stated emphasis on community co-ownership and actual power dynamics that favored government agencies and external firms.
Tawfiq Ammari, Zarah Khondoker, Yihan Wang, and Nikki Roda. 2026. Beyond the Silence: How Men Navigate Infertility Through Digital Communities and Data Sharing. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Barcelona, Spain) (CHI ’26). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 1, 28 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790887
Examines how men navigate infertility through digital communities and personal data sharing. Investigates how the stigma surrounding male infertility shapes online community participation, peer support-seeking, and the ways men use quantified self-tracking and data to assert agency over a condition that has historically been underrepresented in both clinical and social media contexts.
Sherry Mason and Tawfiq Ammari. 2026. Racism, resistance, and Reddit: how popular culture sparks online reckonings. Information, Communication & Society (Apr 2026), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2026.2655885
Analyzes Reddit discussions of Watchmen and Lovecraft Country to examine how pseudonymous platform affordances produce fluid rather than fixed ideological positions around racial discourse. Finds that users move between advocate, adversary, and adaptive roles, with recognizable pseudonyms enabling emergent opinion leadership without formal authority. Pseudonymity simultaneously protects anti-racist counterpublics and enables masked racism through colorblind language.
Jeongone Seo and Tawfiq Ammari. 2026. Governance, technology, and the limits of digital solidarity economies: A South Korean case study. Internet Policy Review 15, 1 (2026). https://doi.org/10.14763/2026.1.2068
Examines a government-led cooperative mobility platform in South Korea framed as a “people-centered” digital solidarity economy invoking Korea’s pre-modern mutual-aid traditions. Finds that admin-only transaction logs and opaque algorithms drove governance costs so high that community members could never function as genuine co-owners, masking managerial capture behind cooperative rhetoric—a phenomenon the paper terms “infrastructural ventriloquism.”
Karen Joy and Tawfiq Ammari. 2026. Understanding credibility: toward a networked evidence model of health information. Information Research 31, iConf (2026), 1455–1464. https://publicera.kb.se/ir/article/view/64184
Proposes a networked evidence model of health information credibility, examining how individuals evaluate and authenticate health claims through social networks rather than individual cognitive assessment. Reconceptualizes credibility as a distributed, socially constructed property shaped by source networks, community endorsement, and iterative verification practices.
🌟 Best Paper HM — EAAMO ’25Woojin Jung, Andrew H. Kim, Ying Hung, Charles Chear, Vatsal Shah, and Tawfiq Ammari. 2026. Digital pulse of development: Leveraging social media discourse for poverty analysis. Information Processing & Management 63, 7 (2026), 104579. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2025.104579
Examines how social media discourse can serve as a scalable proxy for poverty analysis in low-resource settings. Develops a pipeline extracting interpretable topic features from X (Twitter) data to capture development-related discourse and map these signals to ground-truth poverty indicators, demonstrating the potential of social media as a “digital pulse” for tracking development outcomes where conventional data collection is limited.
Woojin Jung, Rofaida Benotsmane, Quentin Stoeffler, Andrew H. Kim, Saeed Ghadimi, Maryam Hosseini, Dimitrios Ntarlagiannis, Tawfiq Ammari, Yuxiao Lu, and Jordan Steiner. 2026. Contextualized poverty targeting with multimodal spatial data and machine learning in Brazzaville, Congo. Cities 170 (2026), 106429. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2025.106429
Develops a multimodal spatial data approach to poverty targeting in Brazzaville, Congo, integrating satellite imagery, OpenStreetMap features, and social media signals with machine learning. The contextualized approach outperforms conventional poverty targeting and directly informs aid allocation optimization, demonstrating how combining diverse data modalities improves precision for high-stakes resource distribution decisions in low-income urban settings.
Emily A. Greenfield, Natalie E. Pope, Rebecca Martin, Uri Amir-Koren, and Tawfiq Ammari. 2026. Digital Technology Use Among Age-Friendly Community Initiatives in the United States. Innovation in Aging (Mar 2026), igag025. https://doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igag025
Although studies have established the importance of various types of resources for age-friendly community (AFC) initiatives, there has been little research on digital technologies. This study explored the extent of, and contexts for, digital technology use among AFC initiatives in the United States. Using a concurrent mixed-methods design combining survey data (N = 200) with qualitative interviews, finds that over 90% of initiatives used at least one technology. Qualitative analysis identified human capital, digital infrastructure, and financial capital of collaborating organizations as conditions for technology use. Findings support digital capital as a central component of AFC initiative development and implementation.
Woojin Jung, Andrew H. Kim, Arunesh Sinha, Quentin Stoeffler, Saeed Ghadimi, Vatsal Shah, Krittika Garg, and Tawfiq Ammari. 2026. Multimodal poverty mapping and geographic transfer allocation. Sustainable Cities and Society (2026), 107248. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2026.107248
Presents a multimodal approach to poverty mapping combining satellite imagery, social media discourse, and geographic data to improve geographic transfer of poverty predictions across contexts. Addresses the challenge of model generalization from training regions to new geographies, with direct applications to equitable aid allocation and sustainable urban development planning.
Casey Randazzo and Tawfiq Ammari. 2025. Kintsugi-Inspired Design: Communicatively Reconstructing Identities Online After Trauma. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 9, CSCW, Article 311 (Oct 2025), 31 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3757507
Trauma can disrupt one’s sense of self and mental well-being, leading survivors to reconstruct their identities in online communities. Drawing from 30 in-depth interviews, presents a sociotechnical process model illustrating the mechanisms of online identity reconstruction. Introduces the concept of fractured identities and conceptualizes grief bubbles—algorithmic recommendations that concentrate on traumatic aspects of users’ identities, hindering identity integration. Discusses how trauma-informed online communities can reflect the principles of Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold.
Casey Randazzo, Minkyung Kim, Melanie Kwestel, Marya L. Doerfel, and Tawfiq Ammari. 2025. ‘We’re losing our neighborhoods. We’re losing our community’: A Comparative Analysis of Community Discourse in Online and Offline Public Spheres across Disaster Phases. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 9, CSCW, Article 312 (Oct 2025), 30 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3757446
Crisis informatics research often focuses on the immediate response phase of disasters, overlooking the long-term recovery phase. Investigates community discourse over eight months following Hurricane Ida in an online neighborhood Facebook group and Town Hall Meetings. Using a mixed methods approach, finds significant overlap in online and offline topics, illuminating themes related to long-term consequences of disasters including climate gentrification and housing inequity.
Tawfiq Ammari, Eunhye Ahn, Astha Lakhankar, and Joyce Y. Lee. 2025. Finding Understanding and Support: Navigating Online Communities to Share and Connect at the Intersection of Abuse and Foster Care Experiences. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 9, 2, Article CSCW110 (May 2025), 40 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3710985
Many children in foster care experience trauma rooted in unstable family relationships. Drawing on 10 years of Reddit data, uses a mixed methods approach to analyze how different members of the foster care system find support at the intersection of two Reddit communities—foster care and abuse. Cross-posting users concentrate on trauma experiences specific to different roles in foster care, contribute heavily to both communities, and receive higher scores and more replies, serving as critical boundary-spanners.
Karen Joy, Michelle Liang, and Tawfiq Ammari. 2025. “If it has an exclamation point, I step away from it, I need facts, not excited feelings”: Technologically Mediated Parental COVID Uncertainty. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 9, 2, Article CSCW111 (May 2025), 38 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3711009
As a novel virus, COVID introduced considerable uncertainty into the daily lives of people globally. Relying on 23 semi-structured interviews with parents whose children contracted COVID, analyzes how the use of social media moderated parental uncertainty about symptoms, prognosis, long-term health ramifications, vaccination, and other issues. Framing findings using Mishel’s Uncertainty in Illness theory, proposes new components accounting for technological mediation in uncertainty.
Woojin Jung, Arunesh Sinha, Andrew H. Kim, Vatsal Shah, Yuxiao Lu, Lami Lee, and Tawfiq Ammari. 2025. The Last Mile in Remote Sensing Poverty Prediction. ACM J. Comput. Sustain. Soc. 3, 3, Article 16 (Jun 2025), 54 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3724422
Addresses the “last mile” problem in remote sensing poverty prediction by applying explainability techniques to evaluate vision models and enhance predictions with multimodal architectures. Finds that fine-tuning with nighttime light (NTL) tends to fail in areas where NTL poorly reflects wealth. A multimodal model integrating X activity, distance from residential roads, and internet speed achieves the best performance among 10 tested architectures.
Alyvia Walters, Tawfiq Ammari, Kiran Garimella, and Shagun Jhaver. 2025. Online knowledge production in polarized political memes: The case of critical race theory. New Media & Society 27, 9 (2025), 4997–5021. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241252591
Analyzes the top-circulated Facebook memes relating to critical race theory (CRT) posted between May 2021 and May 2022. Using image clustering techniques and critical discourse analysis, finds that pro- and anti-CRT memes deploy similar rhetorical tactics to make bifurcating arguments, most of which do not pertain to academic formulations of CRT. These memes manipulate definitions of racism and anti-racism to appeal to their respective audiences.
Alyvia Walters, Tawfiq Ammari, and Shagun Jhaver. 2025. Moral disengagement and content moderation attitudes: Examining how apathy to online harms may disguise racially conservative beliefs. New Media & Society (Nov 2025). https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251385923
Using a nationally representative survey dataset, investigates how end-users’ attitudes toward moderating harmful speech online relate to their offline racial attitudes. Finds that racially conservative beliefs are significantly positively related to participants indicating a distaste for content moderation and cancel culture, suggesting that supporting “freedom of expression” by disagreeing with content moderation may be a contemporary mechanism of moral disengagement.
Joyce Y. Lee, Eunhye Ahn, Amy Xu, Yuanyuan Yang, Yujeong Chang, Hunmin Cha, and Tawfiq Ammari. 2025. Artificial intelligence in applied family research involving families with young children: A scoping review. Family Relations 74, 3 (2025), 1121–1145. https://doi.org/10.1111/fare.13090
Systematically examines the applied family science literature involving families raising young children to understand how relevant studies have applied AI-facilitated technologies. Of 10,022 studies identified, 21 met inclusion criteria. Most focused on maternal and child health outcomes in low- and middle-income countries, with 76% using AI for identifying important predictors. Finds the evidence base employing AI limited in scope with most studies lacking ethical considerations around AI fairness.
Casey Randazzo and Tawfiq Ammari. 2023. “If Someone Downvoted My Posts—That’d Be the End of the World”: Designing Safer Online Spaces for Trauma Survivors. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Hamburg, Germany) (CHI ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 481, 18 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581453
Trauma is a common experience affecting over 70 percent of adults globally, with many survivors seeking support from online communities. Yet few studies explore the online experiences of muted groups who lack the words to name or describe their trauma. Through in-depth interviews with trauma survivors, examines how platform design features—including voting systems, public metrics, and moderation policies—shape whether online spaces feel safe for trauma disclosure and recovery.
Casey Randazzo, Carol F. Scott, Rosanna Bellini, Tawfiq Ammari, Michael Ann DeVito, Bryan Semaan, and Nazanin Andalibi. 2023. Trauma-Informed Design: A Collaborative Approach to Building Safer Online Spaces. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (Minneapolis, MN, USA) (CSCW ’23 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 470–475. https://doi.org/10.1145/3584931.3611277
Trauma-Informed Design (TID), gaining greater attention in CSCW and HCI, focuses on designing and managing online platforms with consideration for the prevalence and impact of trauma. This workshop paper presents a collaborative framework for building safer online spaces, bringing together researchers working at the intersection of trauma, platform design, and vulnerable user populations to articulate shared principles and future research directions.
⭐ Best Paper AwardBruna Oewel, Tawfiq Ammari, and Robin N. Brewer. 2023. Voice Assistant Use in Long-Term Care. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (Eindhoven, Netherlands) (CUI ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 1, 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3571884.3597135
Investigates how residents in long-term care facilities use voice assistants in their daily lives, examining the affordances and limitations of voice-based interaction for older adults with varying cognitive and physical abilities. Explores how voice assistants support or fail to support independence, social connection, and wellbeing in institutional care settings.
Tawfiq Ammari, Momina Nofal, Mustafa Naseem, and Maryam Mustafa. 2022. Moderation as Empowerment: Creating and Managing Women-Only Digital Safe Spaces. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 6, CSCW2, Article 313 (Nov 2022), 36 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555204
Explores the creation, management and moderation of women-only online groups as digital safe spaces. Interviews eleven founders and moderators of six distinct, closed, women-only Facebook groups that predominantly cater to women in and from the Global South. Provides insights into motivations and mechanisms for creating and moderating these safe spaces, the affordances of social networking sites that enable or hinder such spaces, and the deep impact moderating such spaces has on the women who manage them.
Joyce Y. Lee, Olivia D. Chang, and Tawfiq Ammari. 2021. Using social media Reddit data to examine foster families’ concerns and needs during COVID-19. Child Abuse & Neglect 121 (2021), 105262. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2021.105262
Examines how foster families navigated the acute and chronic stressors introduced by COVID-19 using Reddit. Finds that online communities facilitated real-time logistical coordination and resource sharing among foster families, addressing urgent needs faster than formal institutions, while platform design features mediated whether this coordination helped or further marginalized users.
Joyce Y. Lee, Andrew C. Grogan-Kaylor, Shawna J. Lee, Tawfiq Ammari, Alex Lu, and Pamela Davis-Kean. 2020. A Qualitative Analysis of Stay-At-Home Parents’ Spanking Tweets. Journal of Child and Family Studies 29, 3 (Mar 2020), 817–830. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-019-01691-3
Examines Twitter data from stay-at-home parents to understand public discourse around spanking. Analyzes the framing, sentiment, and social context of tweets about spanking, revealing how social media platforms serve as spaces where parents negotiate norms around corporal punishment and where public discourse intersects with private parenting decisions.
Tawfiq Ammari. 2020. Social Role Transitions and Technology: Societal Change and Coping in Online Communities. Ph. D. Dissertation. University of Michigan School of Information, Ann Arbor, MI, USA. Advisor(s) Sarita Yardi Schoenebeck. Retrieved April 17, 2026 from https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/items/0b45ea87
Doctoral thesis examining how people navigating major social role transitions—becoming a father, parenting children with special needs, and other identity-defining changes—use online communities to cope with stigma, find support, and construct new identities. Develops an integrated framework connecting role theory, stigma management, and social computing to explain how platform affordances shape the conditions under which vulnerable populations can safely seek and receive peer support.
Jonas Kjeldmand Jensen, Tawfiq Ammari, and Pernille Bjørn. 2019. Into Scandinavia: When Online Fatherhood Reflects Societal Infrastructures. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 3, GROUP, Article 231 (Dec 2019), 21 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3361112
Explores the relation between Danish fathers’ online interactions and the societal, legal, and economic infrastructures in which they are situated. Denmark provides extensive parental leave and welfare resources enabling fathers to engage seriously with their children. Finds that fathers discuss legal inequities and stereotypical discrimination on Facebook, and that their online discourse reflects a strong political interest for collective action to transform societal infrastructures to support legal equality for child caretaking across genders.
Tawfiq Ammari, Sarita Schoenebeck, and Daniel Romero. 2019. Self-declared Throwaway Accounts on Reddit: How Platform Affordances and Shared Norms enable Parenting Disclosure and Support. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 3, CSCW, Article 135 (Nov 2019), 30 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359237
Parents can be subjected to scrutiny and judgment for their parenting choices, especially around stigmatized topics such as divorce, custody, postpartum depression, and miscarriage. Drawing from ten years of Reddit parenting boards, shows that parents are more likely to discuss potentially stigmatizing topics using anonymous (throwaway) accounts, and that throwaway comments are more likely to receive a response, receive more responses that are longer, and receive responses with higher karma scores.
Tawfiq Ammari, Jofish Kaye, Janice Y. Tsai, and Frank Bentley. 2019. Music, Search, and IoT: How People (Really) Use Voice Assistants. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 26, 3, Article 17 (Jun 2019), 28 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3311956
Voice has become a widespread interaction mechanism with voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana. Conducts interviews with 19 users and analyzes the log files of 82 Amazon Alexa devices (193,665 commands) and 88 Google Home devices (65,499 commands). Identifies music, search, and IoT usage as the command categories most used, and characterizes emergent issues of privacy for VA users.
Tawfiq Ammari, Sarita Schoenebeck, and Daniel M. Romero. 2018. Pseudonymous Parents: Comparing Parenting Roles and Identities on the Mommit and Daddit Subreddits. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montreal, QC, Canada) (CHI ’18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174063
Compares how parents present their identities and seek support in two gender-specific Reddit communities—Mommit and Daddit. Finds that pseudonymity shapes parenting disclosure differently by gender, with mothers using anonymity more to discuss stigmatized experiences and fathers using it to perform caregiving roles that challenge traditional masculinity norms.
Tawfiq Ammari, Sangseok You, and Lionel P. Robert Jr. 2018. Alternative group technologies and their influence on group technology acceptance. American Journal of Information Systems 6, 2 (2018), 29–37.
Examines how the presence and characteristics of alternative technologies affect group technology acceptance. Drawing on the Technology Acceptance Model and group dynamics theory, investigates how groups compare and evaluate competing technological options, and how awareness of alternatives shapes adoption decisions and technology use patterns within collaborative settings.
Joseph ‘Jofish’ Kaye, Joel Fischer, Jason Hong, Frank R. Bentley, Cosmin Munteanu, Alexis Hiniker, Janice Y. Tsai, and Tawfiq Ammari. 2018. Panel: Voice Assistants, UX Design and Research. In Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montreal, QC, Canada) (CHI ’18 EA). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1145/3170427.3186323
Panel bringing together researchers and practitioners studying and designing voice assistant experiences to share findings, methodologies, and open questions. Covers topics including naturalness in voice interaction, privacy concerns, the role of personality and persona in voice UX, and emerging research directions for voice-based conversational systems.
Janice Y. Tsai, Tawfiq Ammari, Abraham Wallin, and Jofish Kaye. 2018. Alexa, play some music: Categorization of Alexa Commands. In Voice-based Conversational UX Studies and Design Workshop at CHI. ACM.
Workshop paper presenting a taxonomy of Alexa commands derived from log data analysis. Categorizes the range of user requests to Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, with music playback and simple search queries accounting for the majority of usage. Provides an empirically grounded framework for understanding the command space that voice assistant designers must address.
Joyojeet Pal, Ana Maria Huaita Alfaro, Tawfiq W. Ammari, Sidharth Chhabra, and Meera Lakshmanan. 2017. Representation, Access and Contestation: Facebook and Vision Impairment in Jordan, India, and Peru. The Critical Institute.
Examines how people with vision impairments in Jordan, India, and Peru access and use Facebook, investigating the barriers and workarounds that shape their digital participation. Documents how accessibility limitations intersect with local infrastructure, cultural context, and economic factors to produce differentiated experiences of platform inclusion and exclusion across three Global South contexts.
Tawfiq Ammari, Sarita Schoenebeck, and Silvia Lindtner. 2017. The Crafting of DIY Fatherhood. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (Portland, OR, USA) (CSCW ’17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1109–1122. https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998270
Examines how contemporary fathers use online communities and maker culture practices to craft new fatherhood identities in the face of changing gender norms. Finds that fathers appropriate DIY and maker discourse to claim caregiving roles while navigating persistent social expectations around masculinity and breadwinning.
Tawfiq Ammari and Sarita Schoenebeck. 2016. “Thanks for your interest in our Facebook group, but it’s only for dads”: Social Roles of Stay-at-Home Dads. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (San Francisco, CA, USA) (CSCW ’16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1363–1375. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2819927
Investigates how stay-at-home dads use Facebook groups to navigate their non-normative parenting roles. Finds that SAHDs create and maintain fathers-only groups to access peer support without the gender dynamics of mixed-parent groups, and that these groups serve as spaces for negotiating changing masculine identity in the context of primary caregiving.
🌟 Best Paper Honorable MentionLindsay Blackwell, Jean Hardy, Tawfiq Ammari, Tiffany Veinot, Cliff Lampe, and Sarita Schoenebeck. 2016. LGBT Parents and Social Media: Advocacy, Privacy, and Disclosure during Shifting Social Movements. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (San Jose, CA, USA) (CHI ’16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 610–622. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858342
Examines how LGBT parents use social media to navigate advocacy, privacy, and disclosure amid rapidly shifting social and legal contexts around same-sex family recognition. Documents how the pace of social movement change creates both new opportunities for advocacy and new risks for disclosure, particularly for families in politically conservative regions.
Tawfiq Ammari, Priya Kumar, Cliff Lampe, and Sarita Schoenebeck. 2015. Managing Children’s Online Identities: How Parents Decide What to Disclose About Their Children Online. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Seoul, Republic of Korea) (CHI ’15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1895–1904. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702325
While extensive research has investigated the risks of children sharing personal information online, little work had investigated the implications of parents sharing personal information about their children. Examines how parents navigate sharing information about their children’s identities on social media, finding that parents apply dynamic contextual integrity frameworks that shift as children age and as social media platforms evolve.
⭐ Best Paper AwardTawfiq Ammari and Sarita Schoenebeck. 2015. Networked Empowerment on Facebook Groups for Parents of Children with Special Needs. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Seoul, Republic of Korea) (CHI ’15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2805–2814. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702324
Examines how parents of children with special needs use Facebook groups as sites of networked empowerment. Finds that these communities enable information sharing, emotional support, and collective advocacy that parents cannot access through formal healthcare systems or local social networks, and that group structure and moderation shape the quality of empowerment achieved.
Tawfiq Ammari and Sarita Schoenebeck. 2015. Understanding and Supporting Fathers and Fatherhood on Social Media Sites. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Seoul, Republic of Korea) (CHI ’15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1905–1914. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702205
Examines how fathers use social media to navigate shifting norms around fatherhood and caregiving. Through interviews and social media analysis, explores how men seek parenting support, share experiences of fatherhood, and negotiate identity in online spaces that were historically designed around maternal caregiving.
Tawfiq Ammari, Sangseok You, and Lionel Robert. 2015. Examining the Influence of Alternative Technologies on the Group Technology Adoption Process. In Academy of Management Proceedings. Academy of Management. https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/items/cc7f27d8
Examines how the presence of alternative technology options influences group technology adoption processes. Investigates how groups evaluate competing technologies and how the characteristics of alternatives shape adoption decisions, contributing to understanding of collective technology acceptance in organizational settings.
Tawfiq Ammari, Sarita Yardi Schoenebeck, and Meredith Ringel Morris. 2014. Accessing Social Support and Overcoming Judgment on Social Media among Parents of Children with Special Needs. In Proceedings of the 8th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (Ann Arbor, MI, USA). AAAI Press, 22–31. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v8i1.14503
Among the first studies to examine how parents of children with special needs use social media to access peer support while managing the stigma associated with their children’s conditions. Documents strategies parents use to selectively disclose on public versus private platforms, and how they balance information-seeking against fear of judgment from non-disability communities.
Gheith A. Abandah, Khalid A. Darabkh, Tawfiq Ammari, and Omar Qunsul. 2014. Secure national electronic voting system. Journal of Information Science and Engineering 30, 5 (2014), 1339–1364.
Proposes and evaluates a secure national electronic voting system architecture. Addresses core security requirements for e-voting including voter authentication, ballot secrecy, vote integrity, and resistance to tampering, with an evaluation of the system’s security properties and practical implementation considerations for national deployment.
Joyojeet Pal, Ana Maria Huaita Alfaro, and Tawfiq W. Ammari. 2014. A capabilities view of accessibility in policy and practice in Jordan and Peru. University of Hawaii at Manoa–Center on Disability Studies.
Applies Sen’s capabilities approach to examine how accessibility policy and practice unfold for people with disabilities in Jordan and Peru. Finds that formal accessibility frameworks often fail to translate into meaningful capability expansion, with implementation gaps shaped by resource constraints, cultural attitudes, and the disconnect between policy intent and everyday experience.
Joyojeet Pal, Tawfiq Ammari, Ramaswami Mahalingam, Ana Maria Huaita Alfaro, and Meera Lakshmanan. 2013. Marginality, aspiration and accessibility in ICTD. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (Cape Town, South Africa) (ICTD ’13). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1145/2516604.2516623
Examines the relationship between marginality, aspiration, and accessibility in ICTD contexts. Argues that understanding digital access requires attending not only to technical and infrastructural barriers but also to the aspirations of marginalized communities and how these shape technology adoption and use. Presents comparative evidence from multiple Global South contexts to develop a more nuanced framework for accessibility in development settings.