Class Presentation and Report Date: as assigned by instructor
This assignment is an individual exercise where you will investigate an advanced area of HCI, write a short report, and deliver a short interactive class on the topic.
The objectives of this assignment are for you to:
Another equally important goal is for your fellow classmates to learn about your topic area through the class that you lead and the report that you write.
Topics are dictated by the assigned readings for this class. Pick one of the assigned papers, and that will form the basis of your topic. You will want to look up some of the papers and skim their abstracts in order to get a sense of the various topic areas. The papers available for selection are those papers that are numbered on the 544 Schedule webpage, except for the ones marked “Optional”.
By noon PST Wednesday September 21 at the latest you must email the professor with your selection of at least 3 preferred papers clearly ranked #1, #2, #3. Use “CS544 Paper Selection” as the subject of the email. The content of the email should look as follows:
Name: Joe Blow
Student number: 123456789
Ranked papers: 5, 23, 6, 1, 8, 11, 9
Each paper will only be assigned to one student. Your professor will process the papers on a first come first served basis. If all of your ranked preferred papers have been assigned to other students already, you may be informed by email of the remaining topics for you to choose or you may be assigned a topic if insufficient choice remains. (The more papers you rank in your selection, the lower the likelihood that you will be assigned a topic that you have not chosen.)
You will be notified by e-mail on Thursday September 22nd of which topic/paper you have been assigned. The date of your presentation is dictated by the date the assigned paper appears in the course schedule. Presentations will commence on Tuesday October 4th.
[Note: All students are expected to attend classes throughout the term. Thus, the professor is at liberty to assign any class time for a presentation to any student. If you know now of any classes at which you will not be present please let the professor know the dates and your reason in the email you send specifying selected topics. Only medical and critical family-related reasons will be considered.]
Now the fun begins! Do some research to find out more about your topic area. Begin by reading the selected paper for your topic. From there you may want to do web searches in appropriate online databases, e.g., the HCI Bibliography (www.hcibib.org) and the ACM Digital Library (portal.acm.org) and visit actual physical libraries. General web searches through engines such as Google (www.google.com) or Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) may also be useful.
You must read at least 4 additional papers in your topic area (i.e., 5 papers including the assigned paper).
Your research should cover at least the following areas for your topic area:
You will need to choose your papers wisely in order to cover the above areas.
Write a report that summarizes and synthesizes your research. This report should provide the reader with a short, concise, accurate, introduction to the topic. Assume that the reader is familiar with HCI concepts, but is not familiar with the research topic you have chosen.
In terms of style, you may use point form where appropriate, but it is expected that some parts of the report will be in sentences and paragraphs. Include all relevant sources of your research: URLs, paper references, etc. Be sure to use an appropriate format for citing references, such as APA style (American Psychological Association). All sources should be annotated. An annotation is a short description of a source, usually 1 or 2 sentences.
The main body of the report cannot exceed 4 pages printed on 8.5 x 11 paper with 12 point font. The annotated references cannot exceed 1 page. If you include any figures and tables, they should be attached in an appendix (no page limit). In addition to submitting a printed report, you must submit an electronic version of your report to the professor by email. You should use PDF format. Both the printed report and the electronic version of the report are due in class one week following your presentation.
The quality of your writing and the organization of your report will count towards a large portion of your grade for the written portion of this assignment.
As with all assignments in CPSC544, your submitted work must be your own. In my experience, some students are unfamiliar with what constitutes plagiarism. If you are unsure, please review UBC’s academic regulations on plagiarism http://students.ubc.ca/calendar/index.cfm?tree=3,54,111,0 as well as the Department of Computer Science’s regulations http://www.cs.ubc.ca/about/policies/collaboration.shtml. Feel free to talk to me if you are still not unsure after consulting these resources.
Your task is to hold a 30 minute interactive class on your topic area. How exactly you structure the class, is left to your discretion. You can assume that your classmates have read the one assigned paper for your research area and that they are familiar with general HCI topics, but that they are otherwise unfamiliar with your research area. You can do a formal presentation on your topic area for part of the class, but what you should not do is simply present the assigned paper. You may want to give a demo or show a video clip. You may want to split the class in two and hold a mini debate. Be creative! Your total time is 30 minutes.
An important goal of your interactive class is to inform your fellow classmates about a research area. You will be graded on how well you achieve that objective. This includes your ability to:
Please pay particular attention to your timing constraints. You will not be allowed to continue beyond your allotted 30 minutes so you are encouraged to carefully think through how you will deliver you class to ensure that it is a good length and meets the objectives above. (Note that tightly timed presentations are very common at research conferences where many presentations need to be given within a small number of days. It is awkward for both the presenter and the audience when the presentation terminates prematurely.)