Spring 2008 - Research Paper
Evaluating and understanding state-of-the-art efforts in interface design is an important task in HCI research and practice. Reading papers from the research literature and investigating new and proposed products, systems, and tools can help you understand how new ideas work (and how they don't). This assignment will give you the opportunity to do this investigation for a topic of your choice.
For a topic of your choosing, you will review the research literature and other current efforts, preparing an 8-10 page paper comparing and constrasting current efforts. You will read research papers, summarize their details, compare them with related efforts, and summarize comparisons: which tools have broader sets of features? Which are lacking? Comment on the designs - do they appear to be well-thought out? - and the methods -did the developers understand and account for user needs? You should end with suggestions of unsolved problems and oppportunities, perhaps even including design proposals.
A short (1 page or less) proposal describing your topic will be due on March 11.
Potential topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
- Social Networks for specific applications
- Embedded computing in education
- Electronic voting systems
- Persuasive Interfaces
- Ambient Interfaces
- Input Devices
- Mobile Computing
Your paper should contain at least 12-15 references, with at least 10 of those coming from research publications. Sources for research papers can be found on the class page describing the journal reports. Papers that you (or your classmates) read for journal reports are fair game for selection of topics and for inclusion in your bibliography.
The project final report will be an 8-10 page paper in the ACM SIGCHI conference publications format. This paper should include an abstract summarizing your work, an introduction, description of the problem/challenge, discussion of the various systems that you've reviewed, comparisons, conclusions, and suggestions for future work.
As always, plagiarism will be considered a serious offense. If I find any reason to believe that your report contains any text that is not yours, I reserver the right to take appropriate measures - including the use of internet search engines - to investigate my concerns.
The final paper will be due, via email, by 5pm on May 6. (Note that this represents an extension from April 29, as announced in class on April 22)