Alex Godwin, Ph.D

I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at American University. My research is focused on using information visualization and novel interaction techniques to make civic data more accessible.

1 minute read

UI teaser

Our work on privacy-preserving collection of patient data on violent incidents has been accepted to the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems! In this paper, we talk about our technique for helping to fill in the gaps in violent incident data, and present a technique and system to collect data for those gaps.

🏆Honorable Mention at CHI 2025!

Abstract

Violence is a significant public health issue. Interventions to reduce violence rely on data about where incidents occur. Cities have historically used incomplete law enforcement crime data, but many are shifting toward data collected from hospital patients via the Cardiff Model to form a more complete understanding of violence. Still, location data is wrought with issues related to completeness, quality, and privacy. For example, if a patient feels that sharing a detailed location may present them with additional risks, such as undesired police involvement or retaliatory violence, they may be unwilling or unable to share. Consequently, survivors of violence who are the most vulnerable may remain the most at risk. We have designed a user interface and mapping algorithm to confront these challenges and conducted an experiment with emergency department patients. The results indicate a significant improvement in location data obtained using the interface compared to the existing screening interview.

Godwin, A., Foriest, J. C., Bottcher, M., Baas, G., Tsai, M., & Wu, D. T. (2025, April). Interaction Techniques for Providing Sensitive Location Data of Interpersonal Violence with User-Defined Privacy Preservation. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-18). link:

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