New NSF funding for Yaxing Yao

Congratulations to CHCI faculty affiliate Yaxing Yao on his new award from the NSF Human-Centered Computing (HCC) program for a project entitled "Supporting Unbiased and Safe Disability Representation in Social Virtual Reality."  Yaxing is the Virginia Tech lead on this collaborative project with the University of Wisconsin. Once the project gets underway, he will be looking for a VT student to work with him on this research.

Yao is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science. His research lies at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Privacy, and Accessibility. He seeks to enhance people's privacy literacy and empower them with more control of their privacy in our increasingly complicated socio-technical environment. His research covers various technological contexts (e.g., smart homes, virtual reality, online privacy) and several user groups, including at-risk populations (e.g., people with disabilities, children, and teenagers).  Recently, Yao has expanded his work in a few directions, including blockchain security, dark pattern notice and intervention, and self-representation in virtual reality.

About the NSF project: Social Virtual Reality (VR) is an emerging social medium, where a user immerses in a 3D virtual space in the form of an avatar and interacts with others via speech and body gestures. This technology can improve the social life of people with disabilities (PWD) since it simulates the real-world "face-to-face" social experience and can mitigate barriers to interaction that PWD can face in the physical world. The use of avatars also allows PWD to flexibly express their identity, curating desired social images that may be more or less connected to their disabilities. However, current social VR platforms are immature in supporting inclusive identity representation for PWD, in terms of how well avatars' appearance, sounds, and behavior can support desired self-representations. Moreover, even effective tools for identity expression can lead to stigma and risks for PWD due to the lack of well-established social norms in social VR and the stigma that PWD often suffer. 

This project promotes inclusion and equity for PWD by investigating how to support flexible and safe disability representation in social VR. By studying PWD's experiences and preferences through close co-design work, the project team will make both theoretical and technical contributions, including design guidelines for inclusive disability expression, theoretical models of risks for PWD in social VR, and technologies and toolkits that mitigate those risks.