Winter 2012
Changes
in red.
The Project component of
this course involves doing a research project and producing a research
paper. The paper must be formatted as
per submissions to "CHI" – the ACM Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems, sponsored by the ACM's SIGCHI. Here is the template
file describing the CHI publications format.
For the research project,
you must conduct some research and write a paper on it. The research should involve doing a
comparative evaluation of two or more interfaces or interaction
techniques. The evaluation should
include independent variables (at least one), dependent variables (at least two),
and data analyses as typically found in HCI research papers. Consult the slides presented in class and the
evaluations presented in papers read for the course as guidelines.
You can build custom
software for the experiment or design an experiment that uses existing systems
or devices. Alternatively, some
experimental software is located at http://www.yorku.ca/mack/HCIbook/.
You may use one of these applications, but try to find an original idea
to test. Feel free to modify the
software, as needed. Each application
has a detailed API, but you will need to build the API using javadoc. These programs will be demo’d
in class.
Tips on writing and
formatting of the research paper are given in the template file, and were (or
will be) elaborated in class. Do not pad
the paper by adding extra white space (e.g., at the end of paragraphs). Also, do not write in the 1st
person (e.g., “An experiment was conducted to…” is preferable to “I conducted
and experiment to…”).
The paper should be 4-5
formatted pages for undergrads (4441), 7-8 formatted pages for grads
(5351). Cite and reference at least six
(6) published papers. Your submission
should use, or be consistent with, the styles embedded in the template file for
headings, paragraphs, figures, captions, etc.
Submission. Submit
your project paper as PDF and DOC files in Prism using the command 'submit
4441 project project.xxx', where xxx is either pdf or doc.
Files sent to the course professor by email attachment will not be
accepted.
Submit any extra files you
feel are useful; but please explain in a readme.txt file. For example, a video might be useful to
demonstrate your apparatus or to demonstrate participants interacting with the
apparatus.