Toward User Comprehension Supports for LLM Agent Skill Specifications in ACM Conference on AI and Agentic Systems First Workshop on Agent Skills, 2026.

Author: Zikai Alex Wen

Highlights: I analyzed 878 cybersecurity agent skills to see what their SKILL.md specs tell users. Most specs describe what a skill draws on, but far fewer show a concrete example or expected outcome. That gap matters, since a good example is often what lets a non-expert build a first local check on their own. So, should we also design specs as user-facing capability disclosures, not just containers for executable instructions?

Supporting Family Discussions About Digital Privacy Through Perspective-Taking: An Empirical Investigation in the proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2025.

Authors: Zikai Wen, Lanjing Liu, Yaxing Yao

Highlights: We present on the results of a structured activity promoting perspective-taking in privacy discussions with 13 parent-child dyads. We identified key communication challenges and addressed these challenges through scaffolded, moderated conversations between parents and children, to help families treat privacy as a spectrum and something that is context-dependent.

The Influence of Explanation Designs on User Understanding Differential Privacy and Making Data-Sharing Decision in Information Sciences, Sep. 2023.

Authors: Zikai Alex Wen, Jingyu Jia, Hongyang Yan, Yaxing Yao, Zheli Liu, Changyu Dong

Highlights: Our explanatory illustration design simplifies the understanding of differential privacy protection of numerical data. A survey of 228 people shows visual illustration outperformed text-based explanation in understanding differential privacy. Learning about privacy-enhancing technology does not necessarily increase the willingness to share data.

Pointer: Storytelling

What.Hack: Engaging Anti-Phishing Training Through a Role-Playing Phishing Simulation Game in the proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2019.

Authors: Zikai Alex Wen, Zhiqiu Lin, Rowena Chen, Erik Andersen

Highlights: People being phished is due in part to insufficient and tiresome user training in cybersecurity. we designed the game What.Hack, which not only teaches phishing concepts but also simulates actual phishing attacks in a role-playing game to encourage the player to practice defending themselves.

Pointer: Game