This Thursday at Change Nicki Dell will be talking about participant response bias in ICTD and HCI. Although HCI researchers and practitioners frequently work with groups of people that differ significantly from themselves, little attention has been paid to the effects these differences have on the evaluation of technological systems. Via 450 interviews in Bangalore, India, we measure participant response bias due to interviewer demand characteristics and the role of social and demographic factors in influencing that bias. We find that respondents are about 2.5x more likely to prefer a technological artifact they believe to be developed by the interviewer, even when the alternative is identical. When the interviewer is a foreign researcher requiring a translator, the bias towards the interviewer's artifact increases to 5x. In fact, the interviewer's artifact is preferred even when it is degraded to be obviously inferior to the alternative. We conclude that participant response bias should receive more attention within the CHI community, especially when designing for underprivileged populations. Nicki Dell is a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is advised by Professor Gaetano Borriello and Professor Linda Shapiro and her research interests are in computer vision and human-computer interaction, with a focus on designing and evaluating applications that improve the lives of underserved populations in low-income regions. This talk will present research that was done during a summer internship with the Technology for Emerging Markets Lab at Microsoft Research in Bangalore India. Nicki also runs the Change Seminar, a group at the University of Washington exploring how technology can improve the lives of underserved populations in low-income regions and is actively involved in DUB, a multidisciplinary group at UW that leads research in Human Computer Interaction and Design. What: Nicki Dell on Participant Response Bias. Where: The Allen Center, CSE 203. When: Thursday, February 16 at 12 noon.