Hello, I'm Kapil!

I'm a postdoctoral scholar at University of California, Irvine, advised by Anne Marie Piper. I develop Accessible Workplace Infrastructures, which integrate recent AI and ML advances into novel systems that enable more equitable workplace interactions for blind people.

I completed my Ph.D. in Technology and Social Behavior (TSB) at Northwestern University, advised by Haoqi Zhang and Darren Gergle. My dissertation developed Situated Practice Systems that support workers in understanding and developing the effective work practices for self-directing their work process, not just work tasks and progress. Unlike existing work in CSCW that has largely focused on providing task support in the workplace, Situated Practice Systems provide a critical missing layer of practice support that helps workers understand how issues in their existing practices are preventing work progress and facilitate opportunities in which workers can attempt an effective practice. To enable such systems, the core technical contribution I introduce are abstractions in machine systems that model the situated practices people enact in a workplace, which help workers manage the complexity of specifying to a system how they want it to track and surface tailored practices to workers in the relevant contexts across a workplace (e.g., at weekly planning meetings).

My work draws from the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Social Computing, the Learning Sciences, Management and Organizational Sciences, and Artificial Intelligence. Throughout my work, I take a mixed-methods approach, including design research, UX methods (e.g., ethnography, large-scale surveys, prototype testing, etc.), and qualitative (e.g., thematic analysis) and quantitative analysis (e.g., factor analysis, regression, multilevel models). I also take a socio-technical approach to system design, where I consider how new technologies reflect an organization’s work processes and social structures, and study how they are affected by the introduction of the technology.

Conference and Journal Publications

What Remotely Matters? Understanding Individual, Team, and Organizational Factors in Remote Work at Scale

Kapil Garg, Diego Gómez-Zará, Elizabeth Gerber, Darren Gergle, Noshir Contractor, and Michael Massimi.
CSCW 2025

Orchestration Scripts: A System for Encoding an Organization’s Ways of Working to Support Situated Work

Kapil Garg, Darren Gergle, and Haoqi Zhang.
CHI 2023

Understanding the Practices and Challenges of Networked Orchestration in Research Communities of Practice

Kapil Garg, Darren Gergle, and Haoqi Zhang.
CSCW 2022

Opportunistic Collective Experiences: Identifying Shared Situations and Structuring Shared Activities at Distance

Ryan Louie, Kapil Garg, Jennie Werner, Allison Sun, Darren Gergle, Haoqi Zhang
CSCW 2020

4X: A Hybrid Approach for Scaffolding Data Collection and Interest in Low-Effort Participatory Sensing

Kapil Garg, Yongsung Kim, Darren Gergle, Haoqi Zhang
CSCW 2019

Workshop Publications

Supporting Workers in Developing Effective Collaboration Skills for Complex Work
Evey Huang, Kapil Garg, Diego Gómez-Zará, Julie Hui, Chinmay Kulkarni, Michael Massimi, Elizabeth Churchill, and Elizabeth Gerber.
Workshop organizer

CSCW 2023

Dissertation

Situated Practice Systems: Developing Worker’s Capabilities for Complex Work in Networked Workplaces

Kapil Garg
September 2024