CPE/CSC 486-S09 Human-Computer Interaction Theory and Design Presentation and Paper

This course requires a presentation on a topic related to Human-Computer Interaction and User-Centered Design. The presentation is accompanied by a term paper on the same topic.

Topic

You can select your own topic, but it must be pre-approved by the instructor. A formal topic proposal must be submitted via Blackboard.

Your topic proposal must include:

• proposed title (and date for presentation)
• proposed abstract (a two or three paragraph explanation of the topic)
• outline of your approach to the topic (list the big issues and how you want to look at them, maybe a note about why this is an important or timely topic)
• a short bibliography (three sources minimum; books, papers, Web pages or other sources)

Due Dates

The overall timeline for the presentation and paper is as follows:

The documents are due at the end of the day on Thursday of the week indicated in the table above.

Late submission are subject to a penalty of 10% per business day.

Format

The paper should follow the requirements for submissions to one of the following publications:

• IJCAI 2009 formatting guidelines; includes links to LaTeX and Word templates that adhere to those guidelines
• ACM Crossroads student magazine; see their Writers' Guide for more details.

I expect papers to be 4,000-6,000 words long, which corresponds to roughly 5-10 pages (depending on formatting).

Structure

Your paper should contain the following information:

• Cover Page: Title, author, affiliation of the author, date, and abstract (5 - 10 sentences, less then 500 words is typical)
• Introduction Section: a rough overview of what issue you are writing about, and how this relates to the topic of the class.
• Background Section: This section provides background information on your topic. It often contains material that is necessary to understand the technical aspects, related work (especially if it lead to the work you're presenting), and some information on the context of your topic. Any factual statements or other evidence must be supported by citing your sources.
• Main Section:In this section, you're discussing the relevant concepts, methods, approaches, systems, etc. central to your topic. This is typically the longest section, and can be divided into subsections. The structure of this section also depends on the type of the paper. If a new approach, system, method, or algorithm is presented, it typically contains an overview, then technical details, and possibly some experiments to demonstrate the feasibility or performance. If the paper is centered on a (possibly controversial) issue, it may start with a statement of the issue, present arguments supporting various perspectives on the issue, and then analyze those arguments. The arguments can be based on your own assessment, or on other people's statements. For both types of papers, there should be an evaluation based on objective evidence, such as experiments, systematic evaluations, or facts presented earlier. This subsection is also the proper place to express your subjective opinion.
• Conclusions: This section is usually short, and contains the main aspects of your overall document. As a writer, it is your chance to refresh and confirm the reader's impression. You should not, however, just copy and paste statements from previous parts. While there is some overlap in content between the abstract, the introduction section, and the conclusions, it is better to rephrase important aspects, instead of repeating sentences.
• Bibliography and Citations: The purpose of references and bibliographies is twofold: On one hand, they establish a trail of evidence that the reader can follow to verify facts, or find out additional information. On the other hand, they also acknowledge work performed by other people. Whenever one or both of these aspects applies, you need to put a referenc in your paper (Ex 1: "the Internet now makes up 4% of the Gross National Product of the USA" [cited source goes here and in your bibliography.] Ex 2: This document contains material based on Dr. Turner's CSC 300 class; since that material is not foramlly published, however, and this is not a formal publication either, I chose to give credit via an acknowledgement at the end of the document.)
  There are many bibliographic styles in use. Two of the most popular ones are: 1) Numbered schemes, where you list the sources in the order in which they appear in the paper, and refer to them via a number in the text (e.g. [3]). This is the scheme suggested for the ACM Crossroads magazine; see http://www.acm.org/crossroads/doc/information/wg/citations.html. 2) Schemes that include the names of the author(s) and the year of publication. In this case, the sources are listed alphabetically at the end, and something like [Parberry, 1994] is used in the text.
  When you use Web pages as a source, try to provide at least the following information in addition to the "naked" URL: Title, author, affiliation, date of publication (or date of viewing). A good reference for Web citations is maintained by Bedford/St. Martins at http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/cite7.html#1. And of course you should be especially careful with the reliability and trustworthiness of Web pages.

Draft and Final Version

The draft version should be "content complete"; this means that all parts and sections of the paper should have text, figures, diagrams, code, or other content elements you may plan to use. It may have deficiencies in the formulation, formatting, use of citations, or accordance with the publication guidelines.

The final version should not have any of the above deficiencies, and respect all the publication guidelines that are provided by the editors or publishers. For professional publications, this is also often referred to as "camera-ready" version, indicating that the appearance of that version is almost identical to the one that will appear in the publication (the publisher typically adds headers and footers with information like running titles and page numbers.

Copyright Issues and Plagiarism

It can be tempting to "write" the paper by copying and pasting parts (or the whole paper) from somebody else's document. Under no circumstances is this justified without acknowledging the original work. If you as the author feel that it is critical to include pieces from another publication, the proper way to do this is as a quotation. A quotation is either surrounded by quotation marks, or visually marked, often by indentation and the use of a different font or style. In both cases, a reference to the original work must be given. This applies not only to text, but also to other artefacts like diagrams, charts, drawings, photographs, etc. If your paper includes a reproduction of artwork, you may have to get copyright clearance from the copyright holder (often the publisher, sometimes the author of the original work).

The Role of Peer Reviewers

In addition to giving a presentation and writing a term paper, you are required to act as peer reviewer or commentator on two papers written by other students, and on their presentations. In this capacity, your task is to make sure that the material is presented in such a way that it is as easy as possible for readers to benefit from the paper. This includes, but is not restricted to, the following:

• Verify the facts. Make sure that the sources cited in the paper exist, confirm the facts, and are reputable.
• Check the arguments, and the conclusions derived. Try to ensure that the reasoning employed in the paper is consistent and sound. Point out if there are gaps, inconsistencies, or other problems.
• Ensure balance and fairness. Especially for controversial issues, authors may get carried away by their own preferences and viewpoints. Look at the arguments presented for or against different perspectives, and point out omissions or biased presentations. This is of course less relevant for the sections where the authors present their own, subjective opinion. Opinions and personal preferences should be clearly identified, and there should be a clear separation between facts and issues on one hand, and the subjective opinions on the other.
• Do a consistency check between citations and the list of references in the bibliography. Every citation in the text must have a full listing in the bibliography, and ideally each source listed in the bibliography should be referenced at least once in the text.
• Point out spelling and grammatical errors.
• Phrase your criticism in a professional and positive way. Your job is not to "trash" the paper, but to help the author improve it.

The issues above are typically addressed when professionals review articles submitted to academic journals, and are usually followed by a recommendation to publish the article, reject it, or to ask the author for modifications. To this end, the evaluators fill out a review form, and return it to the editor of the journal, who then makes the final decision about publication, rejection, or a request for modification of the paper.

The identity of the reviewers is usually only known to the editor; otherwise, authors who are unhappy with the evaluation of their paper may be tempted to retribute against the reviewers. Some conferences and journals also use "double-blind" reviews, where the identities of the authors as well as those of the reviewers are hidden. In order to keep the administrative overhead low, we will conduct open reviews, where the authors know the identity of the reviewer.

Specifically for this class, you need to complete the peer review form, and submit it to the respective BlackBoard Wiki.

As a reviewer, you also need to formulate at least two follow-up questions that can serve as a starting point for further discussions after the presentation.

Grading Guidelines

The presentation and paper together contribute 40% to the overall grade. The breakup of the score is detailed in the table below. The total score for paper and presentation is 100.

For the evaluation of student presentations, I am using a form based on a spreadsheet. A file with this form (and a few others) is available as 486-Feedback.xls.

A tentative version of the evaluation form I will use for grading the papers is available here: 486-Paper-Evaluation.txt.

Please note that while the peer reviews may influence my impression of the paper, the numerical values assigned by the reviewer will not be used directly for the calculation of the assignment score.

Presentation and Paper Writing Tips

Here is a list of brief, but essential hints:

• Do a spell check!
• Check the grammar!
• Remember the Writing Lab in 10-138.
• Use a clean, clear format, with descriptive headings.
• Number the pages.
• Do not use long quotes; cite the ones you use.
• Cite all "facts" you state by listing a reference to the sources of those facts (this is important!)
• Link citations to your bibliography in a reasonable way (author and name, or numbers are fine); journals also often specify explicitly how citations must be formatted.
• Do an explicit analysis of the ideas, concepts, methods, or tools under investigation in a rational manner, and restrict your subjective opinions to the appropriate parts of the paper.

Additional hints can be found at the following Web sites:

• Charles Elkan, UCSD, "Notes on Giving a Research Talk:" http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/users/elkan/254/speaking.html
• Ian Parberry, University of Northern Texas, "Speaker and Referee Guides:" http://www.eng.unt.edu/~ian/guides/guides.html

Related Work

You can find examples of student papers at the CPSR and ACM Crossroads Web pages. Of particular interest may be submissions by former Cal Poly students, such as Eric Rall's paper on Shrinkwrap licenses, and Rom Yatziv's paper on Spyware: Do You Know Who's Watching You?. Note: I just saw that the papers are not available anymore, but there's still a listing of the Essay Contest Winners.

There are some articles in the ACM Crossroads magazine, (which contains only submissions by students) that are relevant to this class, although some of them are a little dated by now:

• Intelligent Agents
• Robotics
• Applications of AI in Education
• XML: The Future Of The Web
• Design and Implementation of a Digital Library