The birth of a child is a major milestone in the life of parents. We leverage Facebook data shared voluntarily by 165 new mothers as streams of evidence for characterizing their postnatal experiences. We consider multiple measures including activity, social capital, emotion, and linguistic style in participants' Facebook data in pre- and postnatal periods. Our study includes detecting and predicting onset of post-partum depression (PPD). The work complements recent work on detecting and predicting significant postpartum changes in behavior, language, and affect from Twitter data. In contrast to prior studies, we gain access to ground truth on postpartum experiences via self-reports and a common psychometric instrument used to evaluate PPD. We develop a series of statistical models to predict, from data available before childbirth, a mother's likelihood of PPD. We corroborate our quantitative findings through interviews with mothers experiencing PPD. We find that increased social isolation and lowered availability of social capital on Facebook, are the best predictors of PPD in mothers.

We propose an early prototype: a web-based tool "Moon Phrases" that leverages an individual's social activity online for promoting emotional reflection and wellness. Specifically, Moon Phrases tracks the emotion and linguistic expression of individuals as manifested on the social media Twitter, and presents a novel visualization-an analogy to the phases of the moon, to reveal their longitudinal trends. Social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook provide a window onto the thoughts and feelings of individuals around small and big happenings in their lives. Motivated from research in psychology and HCI, we hypothesize that identifying the changes in language, emotion, and social activity on social media would enable individuals to reflect on their own behavior over time and in a fine-grained manner, which are otherwise known to be difficult to keep track of. We believe Moon Phrases thus bears the potential to act as a self-narrative or "behavioral fingerprint", and thereby serve as an unobtrusive mechanism to facilitate emotional wellness in individuals.

HomeProxy is a research prototype that explores supporting video communication in the home among distributed family members through a physical proxy. It leverages a physical artifact dedicated to representing remote family members to make it easier to share activities with them. HomeProxy combines a form factor designed for the home environment with a "no-touch" user experience and an interface that responsively transitions between recorded and live video messages. We designed and implemented a prototype and conducted a pilot study with eight pairs of users. Our study demonstrated the challenges of a no-touch interface and the promise of offering quick video messaging in the home.

Microblogs have become an increasingly important source of information, both in the U.S. (Twitter) and in China (Weibo). However, the brevity of microblog updates, combined with increasing access of microblog content through search rather than through direct network connections, makes it challenging to assess the credibility of news relayed in this manner [34]. This paper reports on experimental and survey data that compare the impact of several features of microblog updates (author's gender, name style, profile image, location, and degree of network overlap with the reader) on credibility perceptions among U.S. and Chinese audiences. We reveal the complex mechanism of credibility perceptions, identify several key differences in how users from each country critically consume microblog content, and discuss how to incorporate these findings into the design of improved user interfaces for accessing microblogs in different cultural settings.

HomeProxy is a research prototype that explores supporting video communication in the home among distributed family members through a physical proxy. It leverages a physical artifact dedicated to representing remote family members to make it easier to share activities with them. HomeProxy combines a form factor designed for the home environment with a "no-touch" user experience and an interface that responsively transitions between recorded and live video messages. We designed and implemented a prototype and conducted a pilot study with eight pairs of users. Our study demonstrated the challenges of a no-touch interface and the promise of offering quick video messaging in the home.

HomeProxy is a research prototype that uses a physical proxy to support video messaging at home among distributed family members. A physical artifact dedicated to remote family members makes it easier to chat with them over video. HomeProxy combines a form factor designed for the home environment with a "no-touch" user experience and an interface that quickly transitions between recorded and live video communication. We designed and implemented a prototype and our early experiences with it indicate the promise of offering quick video messaging at home and the challenges of a no-touch interface.

Consumer-based synchronous video communication is on the rise and is viewed as a valuable medium to support long distance relationships. We were interested in the potential of asynchronous video to augment children's close friendships and what types of activities they would engage in using video. We explored both of these concepts through a 9-week field study with a group of six 9-10 year old girls. We see children as potential media trendsetters when it comes to video communication given their comfort with video and desire for rich social interactions. The results from this study were striking. Despite having frequent face-to-face interactions, the girls used our asynchronous video communication tool extensively to augment their existing relationships. Not only were they able to have rich conversations using asynchronous video, they also demonstrated a strong desire to share more than just a "talking head". The results from this work point to the need for video mediated communication to move beyond conversations, to the sharing of rich experiences.

Work teams are often geographically distributed, and in some cases, experience large time-zone differences with no overlap in working hours. We explored the use of asynchronous video in temporally distributed teams. We developed VideoThreads, which provides a novel thread-based visualization of video messages. Based on a deployment to four teams, we offer design recommendations and insights about the benefits of asynchronous video sharing.

Consumer-based synchronous video communication is on the rise and is viewed as a valuable medium to support long distance relationships. We were interested in the potential of asynchronous video to augment children's close friendships and what types of activities they would engage in using video. We explored both of these concepts through a 9-week field study with a group of six 9-10 year old girls. We see children as potential media trendsetters when it comes to video communication given their comfort with video and desire for rich social interactions. The results from this study were striking. Despite having frequent face-to-face interactions, the girls used our asynchronous video communication tool extensively to augment their existing relationships. Not only were they able to have rich conversations using asynchronous video, they also demonstrated a strong desire to share more than just a "talking head". The results from this work point to the need for video mediated communication to move beyond conversations, to the sharing of rich experiences.

Twitter is now used to distribute substantive content such as breaking news, increasing the importance of assessing the credibility of tweets. As users increasingly access tweets through search, they have less information on which to base credibility judgments as compared to consuming content from direct social network connections. We present survey results regarding users' perceptions of tweet credibility. We find a disparity between features users consider relevant to credibility assessment and those currently revealed by search engines. We then conducted two experiments in which we systematically manipulated several features of tweets to assess their impact on credibility ratings. We show that users are poor judges of truthfulness based on content alone, and instead are influenced by heuristics such as user name when making credibility assessments. Based on these findings, we discuss strategies tweet authors can use to enhance their credibility with readers (and strategies astute readers should be aware of!). We propose design improvements for displaying social search results so as to better convey credibility.

Time Travel Proxy (TTP) enables participating in meetings that you cannot attend in real time, either because of time conflicts or global time zone differences. TTP uses lightweight video recordings to pre-record your contributions to a meeting, which are played on a tablet that serves as a proxy for you during the meeting. Reactions and responses in the meeting are also captured in video to give you feedback of what happened at the meeting. A working prototype of TTP was deployed and studied within four developer teams in their daily stand-up meetings. The study found that the affordances of video helped integrate the time traveler into the social context of the meeting, although the current prototype was better at enabling the time traveler to contribute to the meeting than it was in conveying the meeting experience back to the time traveler.

This paper describes VideoPal, a novel video based asynchronous communication system. VideoPal is currently being used by approximately 30 4th and 5th grade students from the US and Greece to explore the opportunities and challenges of video-mediated asynchronous communication in supporting traditional Pen Pal activities.