NOW PLAYING · PENN STATE IST

Yubo Kou

Associate Professor · Haile Family Early Career Professor
Assistant Director of Master's Programs
College of Information Sciences and Technology, Penn State

Hi, I'm Yubo. When it comes to gaming, I'm a gamer first and a researcher second.

About

I'm an associate professor and the Haile Family Early Career Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), where I also serve as Assistant Director of Master's Programs. My research lies in the intersection of HCI, CSCW, social computing, and usable privacy and security. My most current research interests are governance and play.

Dr. Xinning Gui and I co-run the Health and Play Lab at Penn State. Before Penn State, I was an assistant professor at Florida State University and a postdoc at Purdue University. I received my PhD in Information and Computer Sciences from UC Irvine.

QUEST LOG

Research

My research lies in human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, social computing, usable privacy and security, and video games. At present, I'm mostly exploring the intersection of governance and play in contexts such as video games, content moderation, and user-generated virtual worlds.

MAIN QUESTS · ACTIVE

Harmful design in user-generated virtual worlds

While user-generated virtual world platforms such as Roblox promise enriched, immersive experiences, an urgent question is who creates content of varying degrees of complexity for them and how to regulate such content.

SELECTED PAPERS

  • CHI PLAY 2024Harmful Design in User-Generated Games and its Ethical and Governance Challenges
  • CHI 2025Child Safety, Monetization, and Moderation on Roblox
  • CCS 2026How Children Assess Digital Safety Risk in Gaming Platforms

Gaming and esports

I'm interested in knowing more about all aspects of gaming. With collaborators, I've worked on topics such as teamwork, self-tracking, toxic behavior, governance, progression, streaks, and streaming.

SELECTED PAPERS

  • CHI PLAY 2014Playing with Strangers: Understanding Temporary Teams in League of Legends
  • CSCW 2020Emotion Regulation in eSports Gaming
  • CSCW 2024Casual Competition by Design
  • CHI PLAY 2025Gendered Toxicity in Competitive Gaming

User punishment and moderation experience

We study how design efforts such as moderation could make online communities a better place. A focus is on understanding and supporting punished users.

SELECTED PAPERS

  • CHI 2021Flag and Flaggability in Automated Moderation
  • CSCW 2021Punishment and Its Discontents
  • CHI 2024Community Begins Where Moderation Ends
  • CHI 2026Why Creators Break Rules

SIDE QUESTS · LESS FREQUENTLY UPDATED

Culture and technology use

I seek to explore the links between technology use and its cultural conditioning, and how "local" perspectives or frameworks could better interpret seemingly confusing human-computer interaction phenomena. My previous work has explored how Confucian values are manifested in people's practices around censorship and the use of visual languages such as emoji.

  • INTERACT 2017A Confucian Look at Internet Censorship in China
  • CSCW 2019Culturally-Embedded Visual Literacy

AI in context

This interest concerns the contexts in which people interact with technologies clustered under the umbrella term of "artificial intelligence."

  • CSCW 2020Mediating Community-AI Interaction through Situated Explanation
  • CHI 2021The Medical Authority of AI

Community and technology

I'm interested in understanding and designing technology to support community development. Emerging or distributed forms of communities raise new questions about socialization, professionalization, and governance.

  • ACM TSC 2018Understanding Social Roles in an Online Community of Volatile Practice
  • CHI 2019A Practice-Led Account of the Conceptual Evolution of UX Knowledge

Social media discourses

This line of work situates online discourses, including conspiracy theorizing, propaganda, and fake news, in their conversational, social, or cultural contexts.

  • CSCW 2017Conspiracy Talk on Social Media
  • JCSCW 2017One Social Movement, Two Social Media Sites

Recent publications

All publications → Google Scholar →
CCS2026

How Children Assess Digital Safety Risk in Gaming Platforms: A Case Study of Roblox

Zinan Zhang, Qiurong Song, Xinning Gui, Junnan Yu, Sunhye Bai, and Yubo Kou

Students

CURRENT PHD STUDENTS

ALUMNI

Renkai Ma PhD, 2024 · Assistant Professor, School of Information Technology, University of Cincinnati

Master's and undergraduate researchers: Alexander Pretka · Lingwei Qu · Jeffrey Oh · Franco Woan · Andrew Woan · John Zhuang · Kon Woo Kim

Teaching

  • IST 520

    Foundations of Human-Centered Design

    GRADUATE

  • IST 525

    Computer-Supported Cooperative Work

    GRADUATE

  • IST 402

    Emerging Issues and Technologies: Game and Play

    UNDERGRADUATE

Contact

Interested in joining? Please read the Health and Play Lab’s notes for prospective students before getting in touch.

yubokou@psu.edu

E353 Westgate Building
University Park, PA 16802

HOW TO PLAY

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