Kapil Garg

@kapilgarg.bsky.social

177 Followers 304 Following

Postdoc UC, Irvine, advised by Anne Marie Piper and Erik Sudderth. Interests: HCI, AI / ML, accessibility, social computing. Prev: PhD NorthwesternU, Intern SlackHQ

A research poster titled "It’s trained by non-disabled people": Evaluating How Image Quality Affects Product Captioning with Vision-Language Models published at CHI 2026. It presents two studies on how blind and low-vision (BLV) people use AI for product identification and how image quality affects model performance. The left side reports survey results from 86 BLV users with key results including: 55% use AI mostly at home, many prefer human help in stores when browsing products (49%) or searching for products (55%) due to reliability and speed, and most rely on humans for critical details like allergens while using AI for general identification; 69% say image quality impacts captions. The right side shows a line chart of the accuracies of four models, which drop sharply as image quality worsens (from ~95–98% to ~28–69%). An example shows a blurry cake-mix box that two GPT-4.1 and Gemini 2.5 Flash incorrectly captioned as lasagna and cat food, respectively.

A poster advertising a paper talk: What Remotely Matters? Understanding Individual, Team, and Organizational Factors in Remote Work at Scale by Kapil Garg, Diego Gómez-Zará, Elizabeth Gerber, Darren Gergle, Noshir Contractor, and Michael Massimi. The talk is at CSCW on Tuesday, October 21, 2025, in Smatroll.

There are 2 columns. The first describes the problem and research questions.

Problem:
Work is collaborative, but does it need to be in-person? Workplaces seem to say yes, but the discussions about how to make knowledge workers effective focus only on where we should work instead of how we can work better when we’re distributed.

Research Questions:
1. What factors do knowledge workers perceive as enablers and barriers of remote or hybrid work activities?
2. What individual, team, and organizational-level differences affect workers’ perceptions of the enablers and barriers of remote work?

The second describes key findings from a theoretically-informed survey of 1,526 U.S. knowledge workers:
1. Personal Familiarity Matters Less: Workers didn’t need to know their teammates on a personal level, but did need a strong sense of belonging on the team, which newer teams struggled with
2. Workers and Managers Value Different Factors: Managers value observability; workers value autonomy.
3. Hybrid Teams Struggle More Than Virtual Teams: Managing multiple modalities introduces friction to collaborative work, especially when norms for how to work aren't clear.
4. Reliability of Tools to Support Work: Routine inconveniences when collaborating (e.g., microphone off, missing document access) derail collaboration.
5. Norm Setting for Tightly Coupled Work: Highly collaborative work requires norm setting, which newly-formed teams may lack and larger teams may outgrow.