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1. Making the employment interview work for a neurodiverse workforce: Perspectives of individuals on the autism spectrum, employers, and service providers

   https://doi.org/10.3233/JVR-230031  

   Chang, Hsiao-Ying; Saleh, Matthew C.; Bruyère, Susanne M.; Vogus, Timothy J. (June 2023, Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation)

   BACKGROUND: The traditional job interview process can pose numerous barriers which may disadvantage job seekers on the autism spectrum. Further research is needed to understand the specific dynamics of the interview process that pose the most significant challenges to hiring success and possible ways to remediate these challenges. OBJECTIVE: This qualitative research examined the barriers to, and facilitators of, successful employment interviews from the perspectives of three stakeholder groups: people on the autism spectrum, employers, and service providers. METHODS: We used qualitative content analysis to derive themes from interviews with 23 participants, including individuals on the autism spectrum with job interview experience, employers with experience in interviewing job candidates on the autism spectrum, and service providers who provide employment support to people on the autism spectrum. RESULTS: Five themes emerged across stakeholder groups: (1) navigating unpredictability, (2) introducing flexibility and modifications, (3) relationship-building strategies, (4) importance of self-awareness and self-advocacy, and (5) nuances of Self-disclosure. Across the themes, participants described how to modify the interview process to be more inclusive of neurodiversity. CONCLUSION: We conclude with how rehabilitation service providers can more effectively provide direct services to individuals on the autism spectrum and consult with employers on workplace policies and practices to enhance neurodiversity inclusion. 

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2. Toward User Control over Information Access: A Sociotechnical Approach

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3584318.3584327  

   Malchik, Caleb; Feigenbaum, Joan (October 2022, Proceedings of the 2022 New Security Paradigms Workshop)

   We study the relationship between Web users and service providers, taking a sociotechnical approach and focusing particularly (but not exclusively) on privacy and security of personal data. Much conventional Web-security practice seeks to protect benevolent parties, both individuals and organizations, against purely malev- olent adversaries in an effort to prevent catastrophic events such as data breaches, ransomware attacks, and denial of service. By contrast, we highlight the dynamics among the parties that much conventional security technology seeks to protect. We regard most interactions between users and providers as implicit negotiations that, like the interactions between buyers and sellers in a market- place, have both adversarial and cooperative aspects. Our goal is to rebalance these negotiations in order to give more power to users; toward that end we advocate the adoption of two techniques, one technical and one organizational. Technically, we introduce the Plat- form for Untrusted Resource Evaluation (PURE), a content-labeling framework that empowers users to make informed decisions about service providers, reduces the ability of providers to induce be- haviors that benefit them more than users, and requires minimal time and effort to use. On the organizational side, we concur with Gordon-Tapiero et al. [19] that a collective approach is necessary to rebalance the power dynamics between users and providers; in par- ticular, we suggest that the data co-op, an organizational form sug- gested by Ligett and Nissim [25] and Pentland and Hardjono [28], is a natural setting in which to deploy PURE and similar tools. 

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3. Unfiltered: Measuring Cloud-based Email Filtering Bypasses

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3589334.3645499  

   Rao, Sumanth; Liu, Enze; Ho, Grant; Voelker, Geoffrey M; Savage, Stefan (May 2024, Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Web Conference)

   Email service has increasingly been outsourced to cloud-based providers and so too has the task of filtering such messages for potential threats. Thus, customers will commonly direct that their incoming email is first sent to a third-party email filtering service (e.g., Proofpoint or Barracuda) and only the "clean" messages are then sent on to their email hosting provider (e.g., Gmail or Microsoft Exchange Online). However, this loosely coupled approach can, in theory, be bypassed if the email hosting provider is not configured to only accept messages that arrive from the email filtering service. In this paper we demonstrate that such bypasses are commonly possible. We document a multi-step methodology to infer if an organization has correctly configured its email hosting provider to guard against such scenarios. Then, using an empirical measurement of edu and com domains as a case study, we show that 80% of such organizations making use of popular cloud-based email filtering services can be bypassed in this manner. We also discuss reasons that lead to such misconfigurations and outline challenges in hardening the binding between email filtering and hosting providers. 

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4. Implications for Supporting Marginalized Job Seekers: Lessons from Employment Centers

   Dillahunt, T.R.; Garvin, M.; Held, M.; Hui, J. (January 2021, ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing)

   Rapid changes in technology are expected to limit the availability of decent work for millions of people worldwide. This particularly disadvantages socially and economically marginalized job seekers who are already being pushed into lower-wage precarious work with increasing levels of job insecurity. While the number of employment support tools that match job seekers to employers has been growing, marginalized job seekers still significantly rely on physical employment centers that have a track record of supporting the specific needs associated with marginalization and economic constraints. We drew from prior HCI and CSCW literature uncovering the employment and technology-related challenges that marginalized job seekers face and from the Psychology of Working Theory to frame our research questions and results. To complement this prior work, we investigated how employment center staff work with marginalized job seekers and moderate factors to securing decent work. We found in an interview of 21 employment center staff--career advisors and business services coordinators--that they performed significant work to prepare and encourage marginalized job seekers in applying to positions, while also training employers to be more inclusive and open-minded. Career advisors worked directly with job seekers to connect them with external resources, provide encouragement, strategize long-term goals, and mitigate feelings of stigma. Business services coordinators worked directly with employers to prepare job positions and employee support programs. Drawing from the expertise of employment centers, we contribute a framework for designing employment support tools that better serve the needs of marginalized job seekers, and outline tangible design implications that complement the support these organizations provide. 

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5. Analyzing and Characterizing User Intent in Information-seeking Conversations

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3209978.3210124  

   Qu, Chen; Yang, Liu; Croft, W. Bruce; Trippas, Johanne R.; Zhang, Yongfeng; Qiu, Minghui (July 2018, Proceedings of the 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference onResearch and Development in Information Retrieval)

   Understanding and characterizing how people interact in information-seeking conversations will be a crucial component in developing effective conversational search systems. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset designed for this purpose and use it to analyze information-seeking conversations by user intent distribution, co-occurrence, and flow patterns. The MSDialog dataset is a labeled conversation dataset of question answering (QA) interactions between information seekers and providers from an online forum on Microsoft products. The dataset contains more than 2,000 multi-turn QA dialogs with 10,000 utterances that are annotated with user intents on the utterance level. Annotations were done using crowdsourcing. With MSDialog, we find some highly recurring patterns in user intent during an information-seeking process. They could be useful for designing conversational search systems. We will make our dataset freely available to encourage exploration of information-seeking conversation models. 

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