HCID members Stephann Makri and Monica Visani Scozzi joined the community at the ACM Conference on Human-Information Interaction and Retrieval community (CHIIR 2026) in Seattle. They shared their research and connected with the HCI community focused on human information seeking and retrieval.

Challenges in verification with LLMs for academics

Monica Visani Scozzi presented the paper "Although Powerful, It’s Not Infallible": Investigating Academic Researchers’ Verification Challenges with LLMs, co-authored with Stephann Makri and Pranava Madhyastha. This is her first full paper, forming part of a PhD by prospective publication.

In her study, Monica investigated the factors that influence academic researchers’ decisions to verify LLM responses, their verification strategies, and the effectiveness of those strategies. Her findings highlight that prevailing LLM design can hamper users’ ability to satisfy their information needs due to a lack of transparency about underlying sources and a lack of faithfulness in LLM outputs to referenced material.

Flow and serendipity in library search

Stephann Makri also had a full paper on supporting serendipity in academic research environments, with the tile: Don't Break the Flow: Supporting Deferral and Review of Potentially Serendipitous Information in Library Search. The paper was presented by the first author Orland Hoeber and Stephann extensive experience on serendipity studies informed the study and the findings.

Stephann Makri also chaired the session about Accessibility and Real-World Applications.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3786304.3788846