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I’m Kinga Skorupska, a researcher, Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology in Warsaw and Member of the Scientific Council (Discipline: Information and Communication Technology). I hold a PhD in Computer Science from the joint ICT and Psychology programme run by PJAIT and SWPS University. I work at the intersection of computer science and the social sciences, collaborating closely with the Social Informatics Lab at PJAIT. My research focuses on ICT for Social Good, with an emphasis on designing technology for genuine human needs. This includes designing better human–AI interactions, devising accessible and collaborative learning and play environments, and engaging communities in cultural heritage work through crowdsourcing and citizen science.
I hold an MA in English Philology from the University of Warsaw; my thesis examined the function of the 'other' and the 'monstrous' in extended realities: unfamiliar minds, scapegoating, and what societies do with entities that don't quite fit. After graduating I worked across audiovisual translation, localisation QA, web development, journalism, and adult education, often connecting these areas through technology. I subtitled feature films, documentaries, and cinematic trailers, and worked on QA for PC and console game localizations. In parallel I worked as a news editor and content writer for bilingual outlets including the Ellementy agency newsletter, Cogo-news and TheVarsovian, where I coordinated an editorial team of eight and acquired habits that still shape my work.
During that same period I was heavily involved in the TED Translators community, serving as Polish Language Coordinator for the TED Open Translation Project and as a core member of the TEDxWarsaw team. As Polish Language Coordinator, I helped run a distributed, volunteer-powered quality-assurance pipeline: organising workshops and translatathons, writing guides for contributors, mentoring volunteers, and representing the Polish community at TED and TEDx conferences. I was driven by a conviction that knowledge should be accessible to everyone regardless of language, and I still feel the same.
A short 2014 interview with me by Richard Lucas is available here: https://richardlucas.com/blog/an-interview-with-kinga-skorupska-of-the-open-translation-project-and-more
In late 2016 I joined the Alien Project as a Researcher and Methodologist. It was an international educational initiative exploring migration through social design and art methods, run in collaboration with partner universities including Aalto University. As part of that work, I led the development of two books on social design and education, written with an international staff team: Understanding Migration Processes and Understanding People through Art and Design Practice. I also co-developed the concept for a thematic Community of Practice.
Around the same time I got involved in PJAIT Living Lab activities, which kickstarted my work on crowdsourcing systems and my interest in designing technology with and for older adults. My collaboration resulted in a first-ever scientific paper, outlining the Living Lab's activities. This is also when I officially started my PhD.
During that period I also contributed to several projects at the intersection of XR, participatory design, and human factors. With the XR Lab at PJAIT I explored VR as a tool for environmental awareness in Myszków - where I also helped launch Winnica Rajska, a small Polish vineyard, working on branding, trademark preparation, and hands-on testing and production. I co-designed accessible online psychological support interventions for LGBT+ individuals across Poland in partnership with the Kobo Association, and participated in the Alpha-XR simulated lunar mission at the Lunares Habitat, a two-week study of communication and co-design in isolated, confined, and extreme environments that resulted in a full paper at ISMAR and a CHI Late-Breaking Work paper on 3D printing in ICE conditions. I also collaborated with Ewa Makowska on her PhD research on Digital Transformation Stress, co-designing online interventions to help employees manage increasing workloads.
My PhD, defended with distinction in 2022, grew out of a question I'd been circling since my subtitling and TED days: how to design crowdsourcing systems to address barriers to participation? Before starting my PhD, I had suggested to TED, together with my friend, the idea of a TEDxSeniors initiative, much like TEDxYouth, as we both felt older adults were underrepresented at TED events. That shaped my later crowdsourcing research, focusing on older adults and how to build on their strengths: language proficiency, experience, and accumulated knowledge. I explored this through three systems: a Smart TV app for checking TEDx subtitle quality, a chatbot for editing Wikipedia infoboxes, and web-based citizen science tasks inspired by Zooniverse. Working closely with older adult participants throughout, I distilled what I learned into AFFORCE, a framework for designing crowdsourcing experiences with and for older adults, with publications at CSCW, INTERACT, and CHI.
I have built on that work through major European projects, in collaboration with the Social Informatics Lab at PJAIT: the Horizon Europe Link4Skills project and the EUonAIR European Universities Alliance (Erasmus+), where I am a researcher in the Centre of Excellence for Human–AI Interaction. Both of these projects focus on how people learn and work alongside AI systems. I currently lead the AI4Everyone project on the PJAIT side and organize a NAWA-funded International Summer School for PhD Candidates on Disinformation and Debunking. Beyond that, I also collaborate on minimalist technologies that encourage positive friction, recently publishing a CHI paper on the development and evaluation of a dedicated design system for e-paper mobile phones.
At PJAIT I teach Participatory Computer Games Design and occasionally broader HCI topics, coming to games research as a lifelong player and maker. I started in Multi-User Dungeons, where I joined as a Wizard coding items and quests in LPC. I am fascinated by the culture and stories around MUDs and intend to collect them before they disappear. I was actively engaged in strategy and online competitive team games. I still hold pen-and-paper RPG sessions, and host board game evenings together with some physical game design of my own. Years before I had any reason to run a VR study, I was an avid Ingress player, a precursor to Pokemon GO AR Game. I carry that designer-player double vision into my course, which includes learning through play via building physical prototypes of computer-game ideas and conducting game tests. I am currently studying the barriers and learning benefits involved in transposing computer-game ideas into physical prototypes. Most recently, I've also resumed work on a study comparing how people experience and collaborate on the Pandemic boardgame across three formats, as a physical tabletop game, on desktop over Zoom, and in VR on Tabletop Simulator.
I co-supervise doctoral candidates in the ICT & Design programme across research topics where my language-community work and current HCI research converge. This has already resulted in joint publications at EMNLP with Witold Sosnowski, my first PhD student. I aid Katarzyna Kowalczyk as her auxiliary supervisor helping her plan research on HerStories related to folklore and design. I also co-supervise a PhD candidate in collaboration with the Institute of Computer Science at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin. Both of these PhDs deal with preserving cultural heritage and human stories, one thorugh folk crafts, the other via Early Digital Artifacts (EDAs). I collaborate regularly with researchers across Poland, especially at the Information Processing Institute and its Interactive Technologies Lab, the Maritime University of Szczecin, and Wrocław University, and increasingly with partners across Europe within international projects and COST Actions (currently GRADE and GameTable) with a focus on preserving cultural heritage of both historical games and early digital culture. I am always looking for new partnerships that push my work in useful and unexpected directions.
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