Vedant Das Swain

🔭 Searching for a postdoc to join me at @nyutandon ! Focus on human-AI interaction x mental wellbeing research x future of work. Expert? Interested? You should apply! apply.interfolio.com/163899

📧 Questions? Email me w/ sub: [Prospective Postdoc]

Position starts asap!

🙏 pls share

#academicsky

NYU Tandon’s newest cohort of faculty members is addressing a wide range of interdisciplinary topics | NYU Tandon School of Engineering Looking for News or Events?

NYU Tandon welcomes four new faculty members to Brooklyn!

#NYUTandonMade @aineshbakshi.bsky.social @vedantneedmoedu.bsky.social
engineering.nyu.edu/news/nyu-tan...

Non-trivial trivia: This was my second time on the post-PhD job search cycle. Last time I felt so defeated. But the only way to go is up, right? Wrong. This cycle was a Roland Emmerich level disaster. And some of us got lucky.

Reach out to me if you or someone you know wants to pursue research to reimagine tech for healthier & happier work through algorithms, data, and AI supporting holistic wellbeing.

Shares appreciated!

⏭️ After brutal academic job market cycle, thrilled to find perfect fit at Technology, Management, & Innovation dept.

🙏 So grateful to mentors, collaborators, friends, family. Closest ones know how unreal this journey has been. Now I hope to pay it forward.

NYU Tandon’s newest cohort of faculty members is addressing a wide range of interdisciplinary topics | NYU Tandon School of Engineering

🚀 I'm joining @nyutandon.bsky.social as an Assistant Prof. + looking for PhD students in Human-Centered Technology, Innovation & Design!
engineering.nyu.edu/news/nyu-tan...

Starting a new group on COmputing for Productive, Healthy, and Empathetic Experiences (COPHEE): cophee-lab.com

#AcademicSky

Yayyy! Congratulations Dr (is it too soon to call you Prof?) Buçinca!!!

Non-trivial Trivia: The prototype was originally named "Pro-Pilot" because it is proactive. But reviewers felt this could mislead people to think its a premium version of copilot. [7/7]

This work would not have been possible without my amazing coauthors: Joy, Jash, Alex, Roy, Mary, Jina, @mishravarun.bsky.social, @kous2v.bsky.social, and Javier. Thank you all! 🙏 [6/7]

Beyond productivity, AI in workplaces must support wellbeing too. Our paper shows that while Care-Pilot is promising, human coworkers remain essential for shared experiences — pointing to complementary support systems. [5/7]

😌 In our simulation studies, CSRs found the cognitive burdens of working with uncivil clients reduced with Care-Pilot.

They reported it helped them avoid negative thinking spirals, recenter during difficult interactions, and maintain empathy toward upset clients. [4/7]

🤖💬 We evaluated Care-Pilot against human coworker support messages across uncivil client scenarios.

Linguistic analyses and CSR perceptions showed Care-Pilot's messages were more sincere, actionable, and relatable than human support. [3/7]

Client-Service Reps (CSRs) learn to “act nice” but lack tools for deep emotional regulation when facing incivility.

🧠✨ Care-Pilot is placed in client interactions to identify negative thoughts and offer support messages to help workers cognitively reframe situations. [2/7]

😓 #AI co-pilots excel in information work, but what about emotional ones? Working with angry clients harms #MentalHealth

🫂 Our #CHI2025 paper w/ @msftresearch.bsky.social
introduces Care-Pilot, an AI-agent to empathetically support workers. #FutureOfWork

bit.ly/carepilot2 [1/7]

Second time on the market for me. Can't say I'm used to the externalities 🤕 ... but regardless of the outcome, I can't wait to get on the other side of it 😌

age yourself with a movie you saw in theaters

I was infamous for a while as the free food distributor (not supplier) -> Then people who had leftovers from events started telling me about it because of my reputation ♻️

Contextual and dependent on specificity but possibly missing: critic, copyeditor, data scientist, event planner, therapist

YouTube video by TEDx Talks How to create AI to improve mental health | Stevie Chancellor | TEDxMinneapolis

My TEDx talk about people-centered AI and mental health is finally live! This was a really big accomplishment with a lot of work, and I'm proud of it, esp in light of conversations on social media and mental health we're having today - www.youtube.com/watch?v=H30b...

The methods here look so cool. Can't wait to read it and cite it!

Paper abstract for "Design(ing) Fictions for Collective Civic Reporting of Privacy Harms": Individually-experienced privacy harms are often difficult to demonstrate and quantify, which impedes efforts for their redress. Their effects often appear small and are inconsistently documented, and they only become more obvious when aggregated over time and across populations. Taking a design fiction approach, we explore the design requirements and cultural ideals of a government-run system that empowers people to collectively report on and make sense of experiences of privacy harm from online behavioral advertising. Through the use of fictional inquiry, story completion, and comicboarding methods, delivered in an online survey with 50 participants, we found that participants had detailed conceptions of the user experience of such a tool, but wanted assurance that their labor and personal data would not be exploited further by the government if they contributed evidence of harm. We extrapolate these design insights to government-supported complaint-reporting platforms in other domains, finding multiple common design gaps that might disincentivize people to report experiences of harm, be they privacy-related or otherwise.

chapter 5 of my dissertation 🧩 co-authored with @willie-agnew.bsky.social, keith edwards, + @sauvik.me is coming to #CSCW2025 🇳🇴

glad to finally share my work on imagining a future of people collectively reporting on privacy harms

preprint: www.yuxiwu.com/pubs/cscw25_...

🥲1st time seeing my student present

As a @KhouryCollege Apprentice, Joyce Hsu, incorporated LLM explanations and co-design to our ongoing study on human-in-the-loop mental health informatics

Big 🎉 for her future!

#academicsky
#academicchatter

A slide with a bright yellow background and pink abstract shapes. The title reads: ‘Your top choices.’ Four images are listed with percentages: 41% (Work-Life Balance), 21% (Gig Economy), 21% (Neurodiverse Workplaces), and 17% (Ethical Bossware).

This year the assessment was all about Future of work. Students had to pick one of 4 challenges to design for and research:

1. worker-centred gig economy
2. inclusive work environments for neurodiversity
3. managing work-life balance for working students
4. designing transparent & ethical bossware

A slide with a blue and pink gradient background. The text reads: ‘Together, we’ve spent 2160 minutes in class this semester. Individually, you have put even more time into this module than you perhaps realise.’ At the bottom, the quote: ‘You get what you give’ from New Radicals – ‘You Get What You Give’ is displayed.

That's 36 hours - 1h lecture and 2h workshops a week, for 12 weeks.

Thought I'll do some community service by highlighting/bringing together some local bright minds before the snow covers us. Please reply to the thread if you'd like to be added!

go.bsky.app/UfVCMRN

Focused Time Saves Nine: Evaluating Computer–Assisted Protected Time for Hybrid Information Work | Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Funny, that's what we found in our study too!

People spent similar duration on work applications but they were much better at condensing/prioritizing their daily schedule. Also, they actually felt better - more immersed and less depletion of resources.

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

If you saw my thread on public social media, research ethics, and AI earlier today and would like an easier way to read and share it than a very long series of posts, here you are! skywriter.blue/pages/cfiesl...

📢📢 Fresh in ‼️ We at the Soundability Lab are recruiting postdoctoral fellows in HCI & accessibility area.
careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

We’re also recruiting upto 3 PhD students in various areas.
accessibility.eecs.umich.edu#apply

See the postings for our projects of interest & how to apply.

I am creating a starter pack of #HCI and #design researchers from the #CHIWORK community. You can follow them here (I will add more names progressively), or let me know if you want to be added.

go.bsky.app/ABedduL

🥳 Excited to share our new #IMWUT paper, "Ask Less, Learn More: Adapting Ecological Momentary Assessment Survey Length by Modeling Question-Answer Information Gain" led by
Jixin Li.