arXiv subjects

Gunnar Stevens

Publications and source records attributed to Gunnar Stevens.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Heating in human-HVAC interaction for smart homes: An interdisciplinary overview

As part of HVAC systems, residential heating provides foundational infrastructure for human habitation in cold weather. However, research on how residents interact with HVAC systems, particularly heating systems, remains fragmented across architecture, engineering, informatics, physiology, psychology, sociology, and design. Based on 541 studies from these fields, this review integrates interdisciplinary research on Heating in Human-HVAC Interaction in smart homes.The resulting synthesis is conceptualized through the Situated Interaction Dynamics of control and feedback between users and systems. User-initiated interactions involve monitoring past and present system performance and planning future operation, while system-initiated interactions rely on sensor networks to trigger automation or provide information enabling user action. These interaction dynamics connect Residents' Experience and Practices with Heating in HVAC System Mechanics. Residents' Experience and Practices include thermal comfort and energy management, where thermal comfort involves both individual physiological and psychological experiences of indoor climate and social practices shaped by norms, empathy, and negotiation among cohabitants. Heating in HVAC System Mechanics includes thermal conditions and energy performance. Thermal conditions concern the regulation of air temperature, mean radiant temperature, air velocity, and relative humidity, while energy performance concerns efficiency and environmental impact. This overview highlights four interdisciplinary tensions: sensed versus lived conditions, personalization versus negotiation, efficiency versus health, and automation versus agency. The resulting framework offers a conceptual lens to interpret heating interactions and design Human-HVAC Interaction that balances IEQ-driven healthy thermal conditions, affordability, and sustainability.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Public EV Charging Choices: How Users Trade Off Time, Price, and Renewable Energy

The carbon intensity of electric-vehicle (EV) charging varies over time and place, yet EV charging recommender systems and eco-routing interfaces rarely make this variation actionable for drivers. We investigate how renewable-energy information interacts with two attributes that routinely shape public-charging decisions: travel time and price. Fifty car users completed a within-subjects stated-choice study with three navigation-interface variants, and 10 EV drivers participated in semi-structured interviews. Across the three variants, the share choosing the slower option was 38%, 42%, and 66%, respectively. A paired-sample analysis found that choices differed across variants (Cochran's Q(2) = 11.47, p = .003). When the time-price trade-off was held constant, adding a renewable-energy label increased selection of the slower station from 38% to 66% (exact McNemar test, Holm-adjusted p = .004). Interviews nevertheless showed that renewable energy was usually a secondary consideration: participants evaluated it through situational constraints such as urgency, charging cost, traffic, charger availability, and familiarity with locations. We derive a constraint-first design rationale for renewable-energy-aware charging recommendations: filter options using context-sensitive time and cost constraints, disclose the renewable-energy signal and its uncertainty, and preserve user control rather than relying on a green default alone. Together, the results provide an empirical baseline for research on green charging recommendations, while characterizing stated choices in a small exploratory sample rather than real-world charging behavior.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Exploring patient trust in clinical advice from AI-driven LLMs like ChatGPT for self-diagnosis

Trustworthy clinical advice is crucial but can be burdensome to obtain. Limited access and financial costs may lead people to self-diagnose. However, self-diagnosis requires considerable learning and can create risks when people pursue treatment without professional guidance. Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 may offer a convenient yet risky alternative because they can produce inaccurate but convincing information. We therefore ask whether patients can trust clinical advice from AI-driven LLMs. We examined this question through a think-aloud observation in which a patient used GPT-4 for self-diagnosis while a doctor assessed its responses using professional expertise. We then conducted a semi-structured interview with the patient about their trust in the system. Our results show that patients may struggle to identify errors because they lack professional medical knowledge, even when GPT-4 provides advice that a doctor can recognize as false. Patients may develop some trust because GPT-4 explains its responses and acknowledges its limitations, but this trust remains uncertain because its advice can be unreliable. The doctor also reported that checking GPT-4's responses required more effort than making a diagnosis without it. Patients tend to trust doctors because educated and authorized professionals can provide effective guidance. This trust also develops through social connection, certification, institutional accountability, and professional rules. Doctors can adapt their questions, observe patients, and use different methods when patients cannot clearly describe their symptoms. An LLM, however, depends primarily on the information provided in a prompt and may overlook details that a doctor could identify during a clinical consultation. These findings raise questions about competence, responsibility, autonomy, and safety when LLMs are used for clinical advice.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

When Suspicion Becomes Detection. Folk Deception Cues and Detection Strategies in Online Dating Romance Scams

The growth of mobile dating platforms has coincided with a rise in romance scams, in which offenders construct convincing personas to defraud users. While research on romance scams is expanding, victims lived experiences of recognizing and responding to deception in mobile-mediated interactions remain insufficiently understood. To address this gap, we conducted indepth interviews with 24 victims of online dating romance scams in Iran, where legal, social, and cultural constraints limit formal support. Our analysis identifies suspicion cues and the investigative strategies victims use to verify identities across platforms. We show that victims are not passive recipients of deception but engage in active, iterative detection practices under significant emotional, social, and relational pressure. Based on these findings, we contribute empirically grounded insights into deception cues and user driven detection work, and we discuss implications for the design of mobile technologies that better support users in identifying, resisting, and recovering from romance scams. Content Warning, This paper discusses sexual violence

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Talking about privacy always feels like opening a can of worms. How Intimate Partners Navigate Boundary-Setting in Mobile Phone Without Words

Mobile phones, as simultaneously personal and shared technologies, complicate how partners manage digital privacy in intimate relationships. While prior research has examined device-access practices, explicit privacy-rule negotiation, and toxic practices such as surveillance, little is known about how couples manage digital privacy without direct discussion in everyday relationships. To address this gap, we ask: How is digital privacy managed nonverbally and across different media on mobile phones? Drawing on 20 semi-structured interviews, we find that partners often regulate privacy practices through privacy silence -- the intentional avoidance of privacy-related conversations. We identify five motivations for leaving boundaries unspoken: perceiving privacy as unnecessary in intimacy, assuming implicit respect for boundaries, signaling trust and closeness, avoiding potential conflict or harm, and responding to broader societal and cultural expectations that discourage explicit privacy talk. We also identify a hierarchical grouping of content-specific privacy sensitivities, ranging from highly private domains such as financial data to lower-risk domains such as streaming accounts, and show how these priorities shift across relationship stages. These findings show how silence, culture, and content sensitivity shape everyday boundary-setting and underscore the relational and emotional dynamics underpinning mobile phone privacy management.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

My Parents Expectations Were Overwhelming: Online Dating Romance Scams Targeting Minors in Iran Through Exploitation of Parental Pressure

Minors are at risk of myriad harms online, yet online dating romance scams are seldom considered one of them. While research of romance scams in Western countries finds victims to predominantly be middle-age, it is unknown if minors in geographic regions with cultural norms around teenage marriage are uniquely susceptible to online dating romance scams. We present an interview study with 16 victims of online dating romance scams in Iran who were minors when scammed. Findings show that, with westernized dating apps banned in Iran, scammers find teenage victims through messaging platforms tethered to local neighborhoods, offering relief for parental pressures around finding a marital partner and academic performance. Using threats, lies, and exploitation of emotional attachment lacking from their families, scammers pressured minors into financial and sexual favors. The study demonstrates how local cultural context should be foregrounded in future research on, and solutions for, technology-mediated harm against minors. Content Warning: This paper discusses sexual abuse.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

What Matters in Explanations: Towards Explainable Fake Review Detection Focusing on Transformers

Customers' reviews and feedback play crucial role on electronic commerce~(E-commerce) platforms like Amazon, Zalando, and eBay in influencing other customers' purchasing decisions. However, there is a prevailing concern that sellers often post fake or spam reviews to deceive potential customers and manipulate their opinions about a product. Over the past decade, there has been considerable interest in using machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models to identify such fraudulent reviews. Unfortunately, the decisions made by complex ML and DL models - which often function as \emph{black-boxes} - can be surprising and difficult for general users to comprehend. In this paper, we propose an explainable framework for detecting fake reviews with high precision in identifying fraudulent content with explanations and investigate what information matters most for explaining particular decisions by conducting empirical user evaluation. Initially, we develop fake review detection models using DL and transformer models including XLNet and DistilBERT. We then introduce layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) technique for generating explanations that can map the contributions of words toward the predicted class. The experimental results on two benchmark fake review detection datasets demonstrate that our predictive models achieve state-of-the-art performance and outperform several existing methods. Furthermore, the empirical user evaluation of the generated explanations concludes which important information needs to be considered in generating explanations in the context of fake review identification.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Explaining AI Decisions: Towards Achieving Human-Centered Explainability in Smart Home Environments

Smart home systems are gaining popularity as homeowners strive to enhance their living and working environments while minimizing energy consumption. However, the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled decision-making models in smart home systems faces challenges due to the complexity and black-box nature of these systems, leading to concerns about explainability, trust, transparency, accountability, and fairness. The emerging field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) addresses these issues by providing explanations for the models' decisions and actions. While state-of-the-art XAI methods are beneficial for AI developers and practitioners, they may not be easily understood by general users, particularly household members. This paper advocates for human-centered XAI methods, emphasizing the importance of delivering readily comprehensible explanations to enhance user satisfaction and drive the adoption of smart home systems. We review state-of-the-art XAI methods and prior studies focusing on human-centered explanations for general users in the context of smart home applications. Through experiments on two smart home application scenarios, we demonstrate that explanations generated by prominent XAI techniques might not be effective in helping users understand and make decisions. We thus argue for the necessity of a human-centric approach in representing explanations in smart home systems and highlight relevant human-computer interaction (HCI) methodologies, including user studies, prototyping, technology probes analysis, and heuristic evaluation, that can be employed to generate and present human-centered explanations to users.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

Peeking Inside the Schufa Blackbox: Explaining the German Housing Scoring System

Explainable Artificial Intelligence is a concept aimed at making complex algorithms transparent to users through a uniform solution. Researchers have highlighted the importance of integrating domain specific contexts to develop explanations tailored to end users. In this study, we focus on the Schufa housing scoring system in Germany and investigate how users information needs and expectations for explanations vary based on their roles. Using the speculative design approach, we asked business information students to imagine user interfaces that provide housing credit score explanations from the perspectives of both tenants and landlords. Our preliminary findings suggest that although there are general needs that apply to all users, there are also conflicting needs that depend on the practical realities of their roles and how credit scores affect them. We contribute to Human centered XAI research by proposing future research directions that examine users explanatory needs considering their roles and agencies.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2023

Unveiling Black-boxes: Explainable Deep Learning Models for Patent Classification

Recent technological advancements have led to a large number of patents in a diverse range of domains, making it challenging for human experts to analyze and manage. State-of-the-art methods for multi-label patent classification rely on deep neural networks (DNNs), which are complex and often considered black-boxes due to their opaque decision-making processes. In this paper, we propose a novel deep explainable patent classification framework by introducing layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) to provide human-understandable explanations for predictions. We train several DNN models, including Bi-LSTM, CNN, and CNN-BiLSTM, and propagate the predictions backward from the output layer up to the input layer of the model to identify the relevance of words for individual predictions. Considering the relevance score, we then generate explanations by visualizing relevant words for the predicted patent class. Experimental results on two datasets comprising two-million patent texts demonstrate high performance in terms of various evaluation measures. The explanations generated for each prediction highlight important relevant words that align with the predicted class, making the prediction more understandable. Explainable systems have the potential to facilitate the adoption of complex AI-enabled methods for patent classification in real-world applications.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2023

Time Series Anomaly Detection in Smart Homes: A Deep Learning Approach

Fixing energy leakage caused by different anomalies can result in significant energy savings and extended appliance life. Further, it assists grid operators in scheduling their resources to meet the actual needs of end users, while helping end users reduce their energy costs. In this paper, we analyze the patterns pertaining to the power consumption of dishwashers used in two houses of the REFIT dataset. Then two autoencoder (AEs) with 1D-CNN and TCN as backbones are trained to differentiate the normal patterns from the abnormal ones. Our results indicate that TCN outperforms CNN1D in detecting anomalies in energy consumption. Finally, the data from the Fridge_Freezer and the Freezer of house No. 3 in REFIT is also used to evaluate our approach.

cs.LG↗