Eryn (Yiran) Ma

Eryn (Yiran) Ma

she/her

Publications

You can also find my articles on my Google Scholar profile.

Conference Papers

EyeDraw: Investigating the Perceived Effects of Shared Gaze on Remote Collaborative Drawing

Published in GROUPS 2025, 2025

Shared gaze, where collaborators can see each other’s point of gaze visualized on their screen in real time, is a novel non-verbal mechanism that augments remote collaborations and increases shared awareness and common grounding. While past studies have focused on well-structured tasks and analyzed task performance and efficiency, our study explores the domain of collaborative drawing for recreational purposes and focuses on collaborators’ own perceptions.

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Prospects for Improving Password Selection

Published in SOUPS 2023, 2023

In this work, we investigate whether prospect theory, a behavioral model of how people evaluate risk, can provide insights into how users choose passwords and whether it can motivate new designs for password selection mechanisms that will nudge users to select stronger passwords. The results provide guidance for designing and implementing password selection interfaces that will significantly improve the strength of user-chosen passwords.

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Sensitivity Analysis for Dynamic Control of PSTNs with Skewed Distributions

Published in ICAPS 2023, 2023

Probabilistic Simple Temporal Networks (PSTN) facilitate solving many interesting scheduling problems by characterizing uncertain task durations with unbounded probabilistic distributions. However, most current approaches assess PSTN performance using normal or uniform distributions of temporal uncertainty. This paper explores how well such approaches extend to families of non-symmetric distributions shown to better represent the temporal uncertainty introduced by, e.g., human teammates by building new PSTN benchmarks.

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Prospective consent: The effect of framing on cookie consent decisions

Published in CHI 22 Extended Abstracts, 2022

Prospect theory is a behavioral model of how people make decisions in the presence of risk; this work explores the application of prospect theory, particularly the reference-dependence effect, to user interactions with cookie banners. We find that for both possible slants, a negative framing is significantly more effective at nudging user decisions. We also find that the combination of slant and framing impact cookie opt-out rates by a factor of three.

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