May 2026: Lab member Ruchi Panchanadikar successfully defended her dissertation proposal titled "Generative AI as a Multifaceted Sociotechnical Actor in Creative Work: A Cross-Stakeholder Investigation of Understanding and Designing Generative AI for Indie Game Development". Congratulations!
April 2026: Paper "A Dual Role Collision: How Generative AI's Intertwining Productivity Support and Social Support Reshape Indie Game Developers' Creative Work" (by Ruchi Panchanadikar, Yang Hu, and Guo Freeman) has been accepted to the ACM Conference on Fairness Accountability and Transparency (FAccT '26'). Congratulations!
April 2026: Kelsea Schulenberg won the 2026 Outstanding HCC PhD Student Award! Congratulations Dr. Schulenberg!
January 2026: Five full papers have been accepted at CHI 2026! These papers are:
November 2025: Lab member Kelsea Schulenberg successfully defended her HCC PhD dissertation titled "AI In Consideration of Her: Accounting for Gendered Workplace Dynamics in the Design and Evaluation of Human-Centered AI Integration in Everyday Workplaces". Congratulations, Dr. Schulenberg!
October 2025: Our CSCW 2025 paper titled "I Have Abused Someone Who Abused Me": Understanding People Who Have Experienced Both Sides of Harassment Accusations in Social VR" (by Guo Freeman, Lingyuan Li, and Kelsea Schulenberg) won Best Paper Honorable Mention Award (Top 3%). Congratulations!
August 2025: Yawen Zhang joined our lab as a new HCC PhD student! Welcome Yawen!
July 2025: Our work-in-progress paper "Beyond Traditional Gaming: Understanding How Social VR Streaming Creates New Forms of Play" (co-first authors Yang Hu and Ruchi Panchanadikar, and Guo Freeman) has been accepted to CHI PLAY 2025. Congratulations!
May 2025: Our paper "Understanding Social VR Streamers' Unique Challenges in Managing Cross-Reality Social Interactions Through Multi- dimensional VR Interfaces" (by Yang Hu and Guo Freeman) has been accepted to Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '25). Congratulations!
May 2025: Our new CSCW paper titled "I Have Abused Someone Who Abused Me": Understanding People Who Have Experienced Both Sides of Harassment Accusations in Social VR" is published! Congratulations to all authors: Guo Freeman, Lingyuan Li, and Kelsea Schulenberg! We will present this paper at CSCW 2025 in Norway in October!
January 2025: Five full papers have been accepted at CHI 2025! These papers are: '"Comforting and Small Like a House Cat, Big and Intimidating Like a Bodyguard": How Women Perceive and Envision AI Companions as a New Harassment Mitigation Approach in Social VR' (by Guo Freeman, Kelsea Schulenberg, Lingyuan Li, Ruchi Panchanadikar, and Nathan McNeese); '"Grab the Chat and Stick It to My Wall": Understanding How Social VR Streamers Bridge Immersive VR Experiences with Streaming Audiences Outside VR' (by Yang Hu, Guo Freeman, and Ruchi Panchanadikar); '"It's about Research. It's Not about Language": Understanding and Designing for Mitigating Non-Native English-Speaking Presenters' Challenges in Live Q&A Sessions at Academic Conferences" (by Lingyuan Li, Ge Wang, and Guo Freeman); 'Trusting Autonomous Teammates in Human-AI Teams - A Literature Review' (by Wen Duan, Christopher Flathmann, Nathan McNeese, Matthew J Scalia, Ruihao Zhang, Jamie Gorman, Guo Freeman et al.); and 'A Scoping Review of Gender Stereotypes in Artificial Intelligence (by Wen Duan, Lingyuan Li, Guo Freeman, and Nathan McNeese). Congratulations to all the authors!
November 2024: Dr. Freeman will be the General co-Chair for ACM CSCW 2026!
October 2024: Paper '"I'm a Solo Developer but AI is My New Ill-Informed Co-Worker": Envisioning and Designing Generative AI to Support Indie Game Development' has been awarded a Best Paper Honorable Mention at CHI PLAY 2024! Congratulations!!
August 2024: Dr. Freeman has been awarded a 3 year National Science Foundation (NSF) HCC grant as PI with co-PI Dr. Carlos Toxtli-Hernández to study the intersection of generative AI and creative workforces! We are excited to continue our lab's years of work on supporting creative technology workers such as indie game developers! More details here!
July 2024: Paper '"I'm a Solo Developer but AI is My New Ill-Informed Co-Worker": Envisioning and Designing Generative AI to Support Indie Game Development' (by Ruchi Panchanadikar & Guo Freeman) has been accepted to CHI PLAY 2024. Congratulations! https://doi.org/10.1145/3677082
February 2024: 3/3 papers have been accepted as ACM CHI 2024 Late Breaking Works!! The papers are: '"A New Golden Era" or "Slap Comps": How Non-Profit Driven Indie Game Developers Perceive the Emerging Role of Generative AI in Game Development' (by Ruchi Panchanadikar, Guo Freeman, Lingyuan Li, Kelsea Schulenberg, & Yang Hu); '"My Audience Gets to Know Me on a More Realistic Level": Exploring Social VR Streamers' Unique Strategies to Engage with Their Audiences' (by Yang Hu, Guo Freeman, Ruchi Panchanadikar, Amelia L Hall, Kelsea Schulenberg, & Lingyuan Li); "Exploring Redesigning Digital P2P Payments to Facilitate Social Connections: A Participatory Design Approach" (by Lingyuan Li, Guo Freeman, & Wen Duan) Congratulations to all the authors!
February 2024: Our lab is featured in the Washington Post news article about the recent attacks in social VR and whether law enforcement in the offline world should be involved. Check here!
January 2024: Dr. Freeman will be ACM CHI PLAY 2024 General Co-Chair! Looking forward to Tampere, Finland!
November 2023: Two papers "Beyond Just Money Transactions: How Digital P2P Payments (Re)shape Existing Offline Interpersonal Relationships." (by Lingyuan Li, Guo Freeman, & Bart Knijnenburg) and 'Does Who You Are or Appear to Be Matter?: Understanding Identity-Based Harassment in Social VR Through the Lens of (Mis)Perceived Identity Revelation' by (Kelsea Schulenberg, Guo Freeman, Lingyuan Li & Bart Knijnenburg) https://doi.org/10.1145/3637301 have been accepted at CSCW 2024! Congratlations!
September 2023: We won TWO Best Paper Honorable Mention Awards [Top 3%] at CSCW 2023! The award winning papers are "We Don't Want a Bird Cage, We Want Guardrails: Understanding & Designing for Preventing Interpersonal Harm in Social VR through the Lens of Consent" (Kelsea Schulenberg, Lingyuan Li, Caitlin Lancaster, Douglas Zytko, & Guo Freeman) and "Creepy Towards My Avatar Body, Creepy Towards My Body: How Women Experience and Manage Harassment Risks in Social Virtual Reality" (Kelsea Schulenberg, Guo Freeman, Lingyuan Li, & Catherine Barwulor)
September 2023: Dr. Freeman has been awarded the CECAS Junior Researcher of the Year Award!
August 2023: Two new PhD students join CUGAME lab! Welcome Ruchi and Yang!
July 2023: Our lab is featured in the newest CNN report "She was sexually harassed in the metaverse. Hear her story" Check here!
May 2023: Dr. Freeman has been promoted to Dean's Associate Professor with Tenure!
May 2023: Two papers "We Don't Want a Bird Cage, We Want Guardrails: Understanding & Designing for Preventing Interpersonal Harm in Social VR through the Lens of Consent" (Kelsea Schulenberg, Lingyuan Li, Caitlin Lancaster, Douglas Zytko, & Guo Freeman) and "Creepy Towards My Avatar Body, Creepy Towards My Body: How Women Experience and Manage Harassment Risks in Social Virtual Reality" (Kelsea Schulenberg, Guo Freeman, Lingyuan Li, & Catherine Barwulor) have been accepted by CSCW 2023!
April 2023: Lab member Lingyuan Li won the 2023 Outstanding HCC PhD Student Award! Congratulations Dr. Li!
April 2023: Lab member Lingyuan Li successfully defended her PhD dissertation titled "Beyond Just Money Transactions: Redesigning Digital Peer-to-Peer Payments for Social Connections". Congratulations Dr. Li!
January 2022: 3/3 papers have been accepted at ACM CHI 2023!! The 3 exciting papers are: "Understanding and Mitigating Challenges for Non-Profit Driven Indie Game Development to Innovate Game Production" (by Guo Freeman, Lingyuan Li, Nathan McNeese, and Kelsea Schulenburg); ""We Cried on Each Other's Shoulders": How LGBTQ+ Individuals Experience Social Support in Social Virtual Reality" (by Lingyuan Li, Guo Freeman, Kelsea Schulenburg, and Dane Acena); and "Towards Leveraging AI-based Moderation to Address Emergent Harassment in Social Virtual Reality" (by Kelsea Schulenburg, Lingyuan Li, Guo Freeman, Samaneh Zamanifard, and Nathan McNeese). Congratlations to all, and especially to Lingyuan and Kelsea on their first-author CHI paper!
January 2022: Dr. Freeman has been invited to be the ACM GROUP 2025 General Chair! Look forward to 2025!
January 2022: We won TWO Best Paper Honorable Mention Awards at ACM GROUP 2022/2023!! The two award-winning papers are: "Working Together Apart through Embodiment: Engaging in Everyday Collaborative Activities in Social Virtual Reality" (by Guo Freeman, Dane Acena, Nathan McNeese, and Kelsea Schulenburg) and "Let's Think Together! Assessing Shared Mental Models, Performance, and Trust in Human-Agent Teams" (as a collaboration with Nathan McNeese and TRACE Lab).
January 2022: Paper "I Felt Like I Wasn't Really Meant to be There'': Understanding Women's Perceptions of Gender in Approaching AI Design & Development" (lead by Kelsea Schulenburg) has been nominated for Best Paper at The 2023 Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2023)! Congratulations, Kelsea!
December 2022: Paper "I Felt Like I Wasn't Really Meant to be There'': Understanding Women's Perceptions of Gender in Approaching AI Design & Development" (lead by Kelsea Schulenburg) has been nominated for Best Paper at The 2023 Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2023)! Congratulations, Kelsea!
December 2022: Paper "Understanding Safety Risks and Safety Design in Social VR Environments" (a collaboration with Prof. Yun Huwang at UIUC) has been accepted by CSCW 2023!
November 2022: Paper "A Surprise Birthday Party in VR: Leveraging Social Virtual Reality to Maintain Existing Close Ties Over Distance (by Samaneh Zamanifard and Guo Freeman) has been accepted by iConference 2023 (Acceptance rate: 35%)! Congratulations Samaneh!
November 2022: Our research is featured on Dell Technologies! "How human-like avatars animate online experiences" Check here!
October 2022: Our paper "Pay to Win or Pay to Cheat: How Players of Competitive Online Games Perceive Fairness of In-Game Purchases" (by Guo Freeman, Karen Wu, Nicholas Nower, and Donghee Yvette Wohn) won Best Paper Honorable Mention Award (Top 5%) at ACM CHI PLAY 2022! Check via the link.
September 2022: Dr. Guo Freeman joins the ACM CHI PLAY Steering Committee!
August 2022: Lab member Kelsea Schulenberg's first authored paper "I Felt Like I Wasn't Really Meant to be There": Understanding Women's Perceptions of Gender in Approaching AI Design & Development was accepted at The 2023 Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2023)! Congratulations, Kelsea!
August 2022: Our research is featured on CNN again! "Here's why you still look terrible in virtual reality" Check here!
July 2022: Paper titled "Pay to Win or Pay to Cheat: How Players of Competitive Online Games Perceive Fairness of In-Game Purchases" (by Guo Freeman, Karen Wu, Nicholas Nower, Donghee Yvette Wohn) was accepted at CHI PLAY 2022!
June 2022: Our research is featured on ScienceLine! "Why an assault on your VR body can feel so real" Check here!
May 2022: Our research is featured on CNN! "Harassment is a problem in VR, and it's likely to get worse" Check here!
March 2022: Two papers were accepted by CSCW 2022! One paper is titled "'Acting Out' Queer Identity: The Embodied Visibility in Social Virtual Reality" (by Guo Freeman and Dane Acena) and the other is titled "Channeling End-User Creativity: Leveraging Live Streaming for Distributed Collaboration in Indie Game Development" (by Lingyuan Li, Guo Freeman, and Nathan Mcneese)
December 2020: Two papers are accepted at CSCW 2021! One is titled "A Tale of Creativity and Struggles: Team Practices for Bottom-Up Innovation in Virtual Game Jams" (by Guo Freeman and Nathan McNeese) and the other is titled "Leveling Up Teamwork in Esports: Understanding Team Cognition in a Dynamic Virtual Environment" (by Geoff Music, Rui Zhang, Nathan McNeese, Guo Freeman, and Anurata Hridi).
October 2020: CSCW paper titled "Mitigating Exploitation: Indie Game Developers' Reconfigurations of Labor in Technology" has won a Best Paper Honorable Mention award at CSCW 2020 (Top 5%)! See this link.
September 2020: Two full papers are accepted at the 2021 Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2021)! One is titled "Money vs. Social Life: Why People Choose Not to Use Facebook Messenger Payment" (by Lingyuan Li and Guo Freeman). The other is titled "Collaboration, Dedication, and Social Pressure: A Comparative Analysis of Virtual and Face-to-Face Game Jams" (by Lingyuan Li, Divine Maloney, and Guo Freeman).
August 2020: Paper titled "Anonymity vs Familiarity: Self-Disclosure and Privacy in Social Virtual Reality" (by Divine Maloney, Samaneh Zamanifard, and Guo Freeman) is accepted at The 2020 ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST 2020) (acceptance rate: 26.5%).
August 2020: Paper titled "Streaming Your Identity: Navigating the Presentation of Gender and Sexuality through Live Streaming" (by Guo Freeman and Donghee Yvette Wohn) is accepted by Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): The Journal of Collaborative Computing and Work Practices.
August 2020: Two papers are accepted at CSCW 2020 June cycle! They will be published as journal articles in Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. CSCW. One is titled "Body, Avatar, and Me: The Presentation and Perception of Self in Social Virtual Reality" (by Guo Freeman and Divine Maloney); and the other is titled ""An Ideal Human": Expectations of AI Teammates in Human-AI Teaming (by Rui Zhang, Nathan McNeese, Guo Freeman, and Geoff Musick).
July 2020: Paper titled "Breakups on Social Media: Social Behaviors and Dilemmas" (by Rui Zhang, Guo Freeman, and Nathan McNeese) is accepted at CSCW 2020 as a Late Breaking Work.
July 2020: Two papers are accepted at CSCW 2020 January cycle! They will be published as journal articles in Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. CSCW. One is titled "Spontaneous, Yet Studious: Esports Commentators' Live Performance and Self-Presentation Practices" (by Lingyuan Li, Jirassaya Uttarapong, Guo Freeman, and Donghee Yvette Wohn); and the other is titled ""Talking without A Voice": Understanding Non-verbal Communication in Social Virtual Reality" (by Divine Maloney, Guo Freeman, and Donghee Yvette Wohn).
July 2020: Three full papers are accepted at CHI PLAY '20: The 2020 annual symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (Acceptance rate: 29.3%)! The three papers are: "Falling Asleep Together: What Makes Activities in Social Virtual Reality Meaningful to Users" (by Divine Maloney and Guo Freeman); "A Virtual Space for All: Exploring Children's Experience in Social Virtual Reality" (by Divine Maloney, Guo Freeman, and Andrew Robb); and "Power in Skin: The Interplay of Self-presentation, Tactical Play, and Spending in Fortnite" (by Lingyuan Li, Guo Freeman, and Donghee Yvette Wohn).
Mar. 2020: Paper titled "Audience Management Practices of Live Streamers on Twitch" is accepted at the 2020 ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences (IMX, previously TVX).
Mar. 2020: Paper titled "Mitigating Exploitation: Indie Game Developers' Reconfigurations of Labor in Technology" is accepted at CSCW 2020 January cycle and will be publised as a journal article in the Proc. ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, CSCW.
Feb. 2020: Paper titled "It Is Complicated: Interacting with Children in Social Virtual Reality" is accepted at the IEEE 6th Workshop on Everyday Virtual Reality (WEVR).
Feb. 2020: Paper titled "My Body, My Avatar: How People Perceive Their Avatars in Social Virtual Reality" is accepted at The 2020 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'20) Late Breaking Work.
Jan. 2020: Advised by CUGAME Lab director Dr. Guo Freeman, a team of SoC students has been selected as one of the five finalist for the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2020 student game design competition (the Innovative Interfaces category). The team members are: Alex Adkins (HCC PhD student), Kristopher Kohm (HCC PhD stuent), Rui Zhang (HCC PhD student), and Nicholas Gustafson (CS undergrad) and the game/paper is titled: "Lost in Spaze: An Audio Maze Game for the Visually Impaired."
Jan. 2020: Lab member Samaneh Zamanifard has been awarded a Facebook PhD fellowship for 2020-2022 with the AR/VR ethics and privacy team. (https://newsstand.clemson.edu/facebook-fellowships-fund-ph-d-research-in-school-of-computing/)