Published Works

About | Research Themes | Research Projects | Creative Practice | Teaching

Peer Reviewed Journal Papers

Unlu, A., Truong, S., Sawhney, N., Tammi, T., & Kotonen, T. 2025. From Prejudice to Marginalization: Tracing the Forms of Online Hate Speech Targeting LGBTQ+ and Muslim Communities. New Media and Society, Sage Journals.

Unlu, A., Truong, S., Sawhney, N., & Tammi, T. 2024. Unveiling the Veiled Threat: The Impact of Bots on COVID-19 Health Communication. Social Science Computer Review, 0(0).

Unlu, A., Truong, S., Sawhney, N., & Tammi, T. 2024. Setting the misinformation agenda: Modeling COVID-19 narratives in Twitter communities. New Media & Society, 0(0).

Unlu, A., Truong, S., Sawhney, N. et al. 2024. Long-term assessment of social amplification of risk during COVID-19: challenges to public health agencies amid misinformation & vaccine stance. J Comput Soc Sc 7.

Unlu, A., Truong, S., Sawhney, N., Sivelä, J., & Tammi, T. 2024. Tracing the dynamics of misinformation and vaccine stance in Finland amid COVID-19. Information, Communication & Society, 1–25.

Gonzalez Torres, A. P., Kajava, K., & Sawhney, N. 2023. Emerging AI Discourses and Policies in the EU: Implications for Evolving AI Governance. Communications in Computer and Information Science, Springer.

Gonzalez Torres, A. P. and Sawhney, N. 2023. Role of AI Regulatory Sandboxes and MLOps for Finnish Public Sector Services. Special issue of The Review of Socionetwork Strategies (RSS), Springer.

Sawhney, N. 2022. Contestations in Urban Mobility: Rights, Risks & Responsibilities for Urban AI. Special Issue on Urban AI, AI & Society, The Journal of Culture, Knowledge and Communication. Springer.

Leinonen, T., Brinck, J., Vartiainen, H., & Sawhney, N. 2021. Augmented reality sandboxes: children’s play and storytelling with mirror worlds, Digital Creativity, 32:1, 38-55.

Sawhney, N., de Klerk, C., & Malhotra, S., 2015. Civic Engagement through DIY Urbanism and Collective Networked Action. Journal of Planning Practice & Research, 30(3), Special Issue: Using Social Media and Mobile Technologies to Foster Engagement and Self-Organization in Participatory Urban Planning and Neighbourhood Governance, Taylor & Francis, pp.337-354.

Sawhney, N., Yacoub, R., & Norman, J., 2009. Jerusalem and Belfast: Envisioning Media Arts for Cultural Identity and Urban Renewal in Divided Cities. Jerusalem Quarterly Journal, Institute for Jerusalem Studies, 39, pp.62-80.

Sawhney, N., Griffith, S., Maguire, Y., & Prestero, T., 2002. ThinkCycle: Sharing Distributed Design Knowledge for Open Collaborative Design. International Journal of Technologies for the Advancement of Knowledge and Learning (TechKnowLogia),4(1), pp.49-53.

Sawhney, N., Wheeler, S., & Schmandt, C., 2001. Aware Community Portals: Shared Information Appliances for Transitional Spaces. Journal of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 5(1), pp.66-70.

Schmandt, C., Marmasse, N., Marti, S., Sawhney, N. and Wheeler, S., 2000. Everywhere Messaging. IBM Systems Journal, 39(3.4), pp.660-677.

Sawhney, N. and Schmandt, C., 2000. Nomadic Radio: Speech and Audio Interaction for Contextual Messaging in Nomadic Environments. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human interaction (TOCHI), 7(3), pp.353-383.

Sawhney, N., Balcom, D., & Smith, I., 1997. Authoring and Navigating Video in Space and Time. IEEE Multimedia Journal, 4(4), pp.30-39.

Peer Reviewed Conference Papers

Kucheria, A., Sawhney, N., & Hellas, A. 2025. Comparing Behavioral Patterns of LLM and Human Tutors: A Population-level Analysis with the CIMA Dataset. In Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2025), pp. 873–881, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).

Sawhney, N. 2025. Challenges of Designing Inclusive and Value-Aligned AI in the Public Sector. Forthcoming in AlgoSoc International Conference on The Future of Public Values in the Algorithmic Society, April 10-11, 2025, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Lee, S., Truong, L., Choi, D., H. Paakki., & Sawhney, N. 2025. Into the Unknown: Leveraging Conversational AI with Large Language Models in Supporting Young Migrants’ Journeys Towards Cultural Adaptation. Forthcoming in the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Yokohama, Japan.

Truong, L., Lee, S., & Sawhney, N. 2024. Enhancing Conversations for Migrant Counseling: Designing for Trustworthy AI-mediated Collaboration between Migrants and Service Advisors. ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, San José, Costa Rica, November 9-13, 2024.

Vitiugin, F., Lee, S., Paakki, H., Chizhikova, A., & Sawhney, N. 2024. Unraveling Code-Mixing Patterns in Migration Discourse: Automated Detection and Analysis of Online Conversations on Reddit. Workshop on Data for the Wellbeing of Most Vulnerable. Proceedings of the 18th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), June 3–6, 2024, Buffalo, New York.

Datta, P., Chizhikova, A., Vitiugin, F., & Sawhney, N. 2024. Construction of Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graph Using Pre-Trained Large Language Models. AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Workshop on Graphs and more Complex structures for Learning and Reasoning, February 20-27, 2024, Vancouver, Canada.

Houben, M., van As, N., Sawhney, N., Unbehaun, D., & Lee, M. 2023. Participatory Design for Whom? Designing Conversational User Interfaces for Sensitive Settings and Vulnerable Populations. Workshop Proposal, Conversational User Interfaces Conference (CUI 2023),July 19-21, 2023, Eindhoven, Netherlands.

Varanasi, U., Šerpytytė, R., & Sawhney, N. 2023. Re-evaluating Evaluation: Looking for Value-based Metrics in Public Service Design. Position Paper for Workshop on Designing the City: Challenges and Opportunities in Public Service Design. Communities and Technologies (C&T) ‘23, Lahti, Finland.

Olsson, T., Pyyhtinen, O., Laaksonen, S., Vigren, M., Ylipulli, J., Rantasila, A., & Sawhney, N. 2023. A User-Centered Lens into Digital Excess: Exploring the Superfluity and Environmental Burden of the Digital World. In Limits’23, Ninth Workshop on Computing within Limits, June 2023, Everywhere All at Once. ACM.

Varanasi, U., Leinonen, T., Tikka, M., Ahsanullah, R., & Sawhney, N. 2023. Collaborative Sensemaking in Crisis: Designing Practices and Platforms for Resilience. Pictorial Paper, ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2023) Conference, July 10-12, Pittsburgh, PA.

Drobotowicz, K., Truong, L., Gonzalez Torres, A. P., Ylipulli, J., & Sawhney, N. 2023. Practitioners’ Perspectives on Inclusion and Civic Empowerment in Finnish Public Sector AI. Communities & Technologies Conference, May 29–June 02, 2023, Lahti, Finland.

Tikka, M., Ahsanullah, R., Varanasi, U., Härmä, V., Sawhney, N., & Leinonen, T. Contextual Inquiry of Affordances for Collaboration in Crisis: Lessons from the Finnish Context. Proceedings of the 20th ISCRAM Conference, May 28-31, 2023, Omaha, Nebraska.

Tikka, M., Ahsanullah, R., Sawhney, N., Leinonen, T., & Varanasi, U. 2022. Studying the Potentials and Pitfalls of ICT Tools Designed for Crisis Communication & Management. European Communication Conference, October 19-22, 2022, Aarhus, Denmark.

Sawhney, N. and Gonzalez Torres, A. P., 2022. Devising Regulatory Sandboxes and Responsible Practices for Designing AI-based Services in the Finnish Public Sector. International Workshop on AI Compliance Mechanism (WAICOM 2022), 35th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2022), Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany.

Varanasi, U., Sawhney, N., & Leinonen, T. 2022. Child-Centred Algorithmic Literacy: Using participatory and speculative design for critical and inclusive learning. Position Paper for Workshop: Age Against the Machine, NordiCHI 2022 Conference, October 8-12, 2022, Aarhus, Denmark.

Sharma, S., Kinnula, M., Iivari, N., Ventä-Olkkonen, L., Hartikainen, H., Durall, E., Molin-Juustila, T., Okkonen, J., Kotilainen, S., Sawhney, N., Eden, G., & Monga, C. 2022. Age Against the Machine: A Call for Designing Ethical AI for and with Children. InAdjunct Proceedings of the 2022 Nordic Human-Computer Interaction Conference (NordiCHI ’22). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 15, 1–6.

Paakki, H., Sawhney, N., & Ghorbanpour, F. 2022. An Approach to Computational Crisis Narrative Analysis: A Case-study of Social Media Narratives Around the COVID-19 Crisis in India. Conference on Language Technologies and Digital Humanities, September 15-16, 2022, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Ylirisku, S., Jang, G., & Sawhney, N. 2021. Re-thinking Pedagogy and Dis-embodied Interaction for Online Learning and Co-Design. NORDES, vol. 9.

Sawhney, N., 2020. Te Awa Tupua: Sacred Rivers and Cooperative Urban AI Ecosystems. In Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2020): Workshop on Urban AI: Formulating an Agenda for the Interdisciplinary Research of Artificial Intelligence in Cities. ACM. July 6-20, Eindhoven, Netherlands.

Sawhney, N., and Tran, A., 2020. Ecologies of Contestation in Participatory Design. In Proceedings of the 16th Participatory Design Conference (PDC 2020), Manizales, Columbia. ACM.

Sawhney, N., 2019. Cooperative Crisis Response among Emergency Responders and AI Systems. Position paper for workshop on better supporting workers in ML workplaces, ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, November 9-13, Austin, USA.

Sawhney, N., Graver, C., & Breitkopf, E., 2018. Audio Journaling for Self-Reflection and Assessment among Teens in Participatory Media Programs. In Proceedings of the 17th Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC ’18), Trondheim, Norway. ACM.

Sawhney, N., Dougherty, A., Shim, L., & Lopez, R. 2013. Aago for Mobile Media Narratives Created by Teens: Lessons from Co-Design, Prototyping and Evaluation. Workshop on Enhancing Children’s Voices with Media and Technology, 12th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC ’13). ACM, New York, NY, USA.

Sawhney, N., 2009, June. Voices Beyond Walls: The Role of Digital Storytelling for Empowering Marginalized Youth in Refugee Camps. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (pp. 302-305). ACM.

Clarkson, B., Sawhney, N., & Pentland, A., 1998. Auditory Context Awareness via Wearable Computing. Energy, 400(600), p.20.

Schilit, B.N., Wilcox, L.D., & Sawhney, N., 1997, March. Merging the Benefits of Paper Notebooks with the Power of Computers in Dynomite. In CHI’97 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 22-23). ACM.

Sawhney, N. and Schmandt, C., 1997, October. Nomadic Radio: A Spatialized Audio Environment for Wearable Computing. In Wearable Computers, 1997. Digest of Papers, First International Symposium on (pp. 171-172). IEEE.

Abowd, G.D., Atkeson, C.G., Feinstein, A., Hmelo, C., Kooper, R., Long, S., Sawhney, N., & Tani, M. 1997. Teaching and Learning as Multimedia Authoring: The Classroom 2000 Project. In Proceedings of the 4^th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MULTIMEDIA ’96). New York, NY, USA, 187–198.

Sawhney, N. and Murphy, A.1996. ESPACE 2: An Experimental Hyperaudio Environment. In Conference Companion on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’96), ACM, New York, NY, USA, 105–106.

Sawhney, N., Balcom, D., & Smith, I., 1996, March. HyperCafe: Narrative and Aesthetic Properties of Hypervideo. In Proceedings of the seventh ACM conference on Hypertext (HYPERTEXT ’96). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–10.Recipient of the First Douglas Engelbart Best Paper Award established by ACM Hypertext.

Monographs, Book Chapters and Edited Volumes
Sawhney, N. 2024. Contributions to chapters on Participation and The Inner Public. Interrogative Design, Edited by Ian Wojtowicz, MIT Press.

Sawhney, N. 2024. Invisible Lives, Visible Determination: Creative Agency as Resilience among Palestinian Children under Siege in Gaza. Lived Resistance Against the War on Palestinian Children, Edited by Heidi Morrison, University of Georgia Press (Children, Youth, and War Series).

Kajava, K. and Sawhney, N. 2023. Language of Algorithms: Agency, Metaphors, and Deliberations in AI Discourses. Lindgren, S. Handbook of Critical Studies of Artificial Intelligence. Edward Elgar Publishers.

Sawhney, N. March 2019. Zona Intervenida: Performance as Memory, Transforming Contested Spaces. In Rethinking Peace: Discourse, Memory, Translation, and Dialogue, Edited by Jeremiah Alberg, Alex Hinton and Giorgio Shani, Rowman & Littlefield International.

Acevedo, A., Ramirez, J. P., & Sawhney, N. 2015. Guatemala Después: Rethinking the Past, Reimagining the Future. Printed exhibition catalogue with artist/curator statements (in English and Spanish). Ciudad de la Imaginación, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, ISBN: 978-9929-668-03-4.

Hourcade, J.P., Sawhney, N., & Reardon, E. (Editors), 2013, June. Forward. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC 2013), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), New York City.

Sawhney, N. 2012. Making Sense of Participatory Video: Approaches for Participatory Content Analysis. (Chapter 11). The Handbook of Participatory Video, Edited by E-J Milne; Claudia Mitchell and Naydene de Lange, AltaMira Press.

Dougherty, A. and Sawhney, N. 2012. New Directions in Participatory Video: Emerging Digital Technologies and Practices. (Chapter 28). The Handbook of Participatory Video, Edited by E-J Milne; Claudia Mitchell and Naydene de Lange, AltaMira Press.

Coover R., Pat Badani, R.C., Caviezel, F., Marino, M., Sawhney, N., & Uricchio, W. 2012. Digital Technologies, Visual Research and the Non-Fiction Image. Advances in Visual Methodology, Edited by Sara Pink, Sage, p.191.

Sawhney, N. 2003. Cooperative Innovation in the Commons: Rethinking Distributed Collaboration and Intellectual Property for Sustainable Design Innovation. Doctoral Dissertation, MIT Media Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences. Advisor: Prof. Alex (Sandy) Pentland.

Whitepapers and Invited Articles
Dignum, V., Régis, C. et al. 2025. Roadmap for AI Policy Research. AI Policy Lab, Umeå University and MILA-Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, University of Montreal, AI Policy Research Summit, Stockholm, November 2024.

Fernández, D. and Sawhney, N. 2016, June. Experimenting with Butoh-based Performance: An Artistic Inquiry into Translation, Memory and Dialogue. Rethinking Peace Studies Conference on Translation, Memory and Dialogue, Japan ICU University, Tokyo, Japan.

Malhotra, S., de Klerk, C., & Sawhney, N. 2015. Mobilizing Collective Urban Actions through MicroActs. In Civic Media Project, MIT Press.

Sawhney, N. and Hill, R. 2014. Children long for kites, not bombs, in Gaza skies. Op-ed with 7-minute video short and photography by Anne Paq/Activestills, +972 Magazine, August 26, 2014.

Sawhney, N., Abowd, G.D., & Atkeson, C.G. 1996. Can Electronic Notebooks Enhance the Classroom? Graphics, Visualization and Usability (GVU) Center Technical Report [536], Georgia Tech.

Sawhney, N. and Balcom, D., 1996. HyperCafe and the “Hypervideo Engine”: A Generalized Approach for Hypervideo Authoring and Navigation. ACM SIGWEB Newsletter, 5(2), p.29.

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