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This project is a qualitative study of non-textual mobile communication practices in Southern China. Examining the rapid proliferation of emoji in WeChat use, we attend to the lessening dependence on a text. We use interview and observation data from 30 participants to investigate how rural, small town and urban Chinese adults creatively and innovatively balance the use of emoji and text in their communication, as we envision the evolution of emoji into a modality of its own.

The Content Aggregation System for Election Observation (CASE) will aggregate real-time election observation data from formal observer missions and social media sources. Our new system, combining the power of crowdsourced data from social media with the precision of formal observers in the field, will create a first-ever fully integrated monitoring system. Simple technical interfaces will allow users to share particular information in real-time while still maintaining necessary data security and privacy.

Researchers in ubiquitous computing fields have assumed that smartphone owners consistently use, carry, or have access to their phones throughout the day. Current applications in fields such as mHealth believe that the smartphone is a promising and reliable sensing platform to understand user behaviors and environment. However, as wearable technology (e.g., smartwatches) has become more widely adopted, the changed technology landscape has impacted users' proximity to their smartphone. By introducing new research techniques, we investigate the current users' proximity to their smartphone.