ACTION Lab

Welcome to the Adaptive Cognition and Interaction Design (ACTION) lab. The ACTION lab is led by Dr. Jessie Chin, at the School of Information Sciences of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Currently, there are four main research themes in the ACTION Lab:

  • Adaptation to Information Proliferation
  • Coupling Cognitive Systems
  • Reliable, Useful and Accurate Health Knowledge for All
  • Innovative and Accessible Health Care for All

As an interdisciplinary team, our research aims at translating theories in cognitive sciences, human-computer interaction, human factors and health informatics to understand and build sociotechnical solutions for promoting complex cognitive activities (such as learning and decision-making) and health behavior/communication among diverse patient populations across the lifespan. [Learn More]

Keywords from Current Research Projects: Applied Cognitive Science, Human-Computer Interaction, Human Factors, Information Foraging, Self-Regulated Learning, Decision-Making, Cognitive Aging, Health Communication, Health Literacy, Health Misinformation, Digital Health, Aging-in-Place, Precision Medicine, Cancer Prevention and Control, Conversational Agents, Human-Machine Interactive Learning

NEWS FROM THE ACTION LAB

Jan 20. Congrats to Michelle Bak‘s first-authored paper published online: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10785880/.

Oct 4. Congrats to Morgan Lundy for winning first place in the doctoral student poster competition at the ALISE 2023 conference!!

Oct 3. Upcoming invited seminars in the Department of Psychology (Quant Brownbag, 1:30 PM on Oct 25 and Human Memory and Cognition Lab, 9 am on Oct 27).

Oct 3. Congrats to Smit Desai and Sheny Lin for the acceptance of their proceeding paper, “Like My Aunt Dorothy: Effects of Conversational Styles on Perceptions, Acceptance and Metaphorical Descriptions of Voice Assistants during Later Adulthood“, to the ACM CSCW’24 conference!

Sep 8. The IMLS project is featured in a recent article!

August 7. Congrats to Smit, Xinhui, and Morgan for their proceeding paper, “Using Experience-Based Participatory Approach to Design Interactive Voice User Interfaces for Delivering Physical Activity Programs with Older Adults”, being accepted to the 11th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (HAI 2023)!

July 29. The ACTION Lab received a new research award from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), for the project entitled, Libraries as Partners for Emergency Preparedness and Response in Times of Crisis!

July 27. A recent story to highlight Smit Desai‘s several exciting research papers at CUI’23! One of them was co-first-authored with Morgan Lundy!

July 20. Check out our newly published article on storytelling conversational agents for older adults! Congrats to Smit and Morgan on their presentations at CUI’23 this week!

July 9. Congrats to Michelle Bak, for her first-authored conference proceeding, Use of health belief model-based deep learning to understand public health beliefs in breast cancer screening from social media before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, being accepted to the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 2023 Annual Symposium!

June 8. Congrats to Morgan Lundy for her recent work on TikTok health misinformation receiving attention!

May 26. Congrats to Smit Desai for winning the Gary Marsden Travel Awards from ACM SIGCHI!

May 26. Congrats to Michelle Bak, for her first-authored short paper, Representations of Health and Wellness on Instagram: An Analysis of Posting Behavior of Top-Ranked Health Influencers, being in press in Human Computer Interaction International (HCII) 2023!

May 19. Congrats to Morgan Lundy and Smit Desai for their paper, Bridging the Gap between Designers and Users: Co-designing Health-Related Voice User Interface Experiences with Older Adults, accepted in 2023 ALISE Annual Conference!!

April 27. Congrats to Smit Desai and Morgan Lundy for their excellent work, “A Painless Way to Learn:” Designing an Interactive Storytelling Voice User Interface to Engage Older Adults in Informal Health Information Learning, receiving acceptance to ACM CUI’23!!

April 24. 10:30AM CST: We will present “OK Google, Let’s Learn: Using Voice User Interfaces for Informal Self-Regulated Learning of Health Topics among Younger and Older Adults” at ACM CHI’23 in Hamburg, Germany! Please check out our new article here.

April 27. Doctoral candidate Morgan Lundy will make prelim presentation, “Have a flare with me!”: A collaborative knowledge and codesign approach to disability storytelling on TikTok”.

April 27. Our undergraduate researchers are presenting their research at 2023 Undergraduate Research Symposium. Yimei Jiang (Psychology) will make an oral presentation, “The effects of embodiment experience on text foraging”, at 11AM CST (Illini Union Rm 215). Zubair Yacub (Psychology) will make a poster presentation, “Question generation to improve learning outcomes”, at 10:45AM (Illini Union South Lounge).

April 21. ACM CHI 2023 presentation has been featured here.

April 13. New article in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking is out! Congrats to Michelle Bak again!!

March 27. Congrats to Yimei Jiang to be selected as a recipient of the Research Support Grant (RSG) by the Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR).

Congrats to our doctoral researchers on their recently accepted publications!
– Huge congrats to Smit Desai on the acceptance of his first-authored proceeding in the prestigious conference, ACM CHI’23, entitled “OK Google, Let’s Learn: Using Voice User Interfaces for Informal Self-Regulated Learning of Health Topics among Younger and Older Adults”! Smit has developed the conversational agent, Health Buddy, with different metacognitive strategies to support health information learning, and examined its effects on self-regulated learning for both younger and older users in a user study. We will present this paper at ACM CHI’23 this April.
– Huge congrats to Michelle Bak on the acceptance of her first-authored peer-reviewed journal article in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, entitled “Mental Health Pandemic during the COVID-19 Outbreak: Social Media as a Window to Public Mental Health”. Parts of the results were presented at IC2S2 and received the Honorable Mention Poster Award!

ONGOING FUNDING For THE ACTION LAB

Our research has been supported by:

  1. National Institute of Health (National Cancer Institute) since 2020
  2. Jump ARCHES since 2021
  3. Campus Research Board since 2022
  4. CHAD Pilot Grant since 2022
  5. Institute of Museum and Library Services since 2023

Last Update: Oct 3, 2023