spring 2009

CS376: Research Topics in Human-Computer Interaction

Tuesday & Thursday, 12:50PM – 2:05PM, GESB 134

Jeffrey Heer, Gates 375, Office Hours: Tuesdays 11:15am - 12:15pm

ta: Greg Schwartz, Office Hours: TBD and by email appointment

Syllabus · Submit and View Assignments · Grading · Project Information and Ideas · Staff E-mail (cs376@cs)

Final Project Presentations will be held Tuesday, June 9 at 3:30-5:30pm in 104 Gates Hall!

Overview

This course is a broad graduate-level introduction to HCI research. The course begins with seminal work on interactive systems, and moves through current and future research areas in interaction techniques and the design, prototyping, and evaluation of user interfaces. Topics include computer-supported cooperative work; audio, speech, and multimodal interfaces; user interface toolkits; design methods; evaluation methods; ubiquitous and context-aware computing; tangible interfaces; haptic interaction; and mobile interfaces.

Students in this course are encouraged to attend CS547, the HCI seminar, on Fridays from 12:30 - 2:00.

Course Structure

The course consists of two components: the reading and discussion of research papers, and a quarter-long research project.

For each class period, students will submit short critiques of the assigned readings (submitted online in this format by 7am on the day of class). After 7am on the day of class, all critiques will be made available for other students to read (again, through the online submission system). The discussion leader and course staff will all read these before class to prepare for discussion. Students are expected to do all of the readings, but critiques are only required for those marked on the syllabus.

In addition to critiques, students will be asked to lead one class discussion. For details on how to structure a discussion, go here. On their discussion day, students should submit their materials instead of their critique using the online submission system. The discussant should read all student critiques before class and integrate them into the discussion.

Syllabus

Note: Stanford students can use the Stanford Library proxy for off-campus access to the readings posted on ACM Portal.

Date	Topic	Critique Required?	Readings
31 Mar	Course Introduction		No Readings
2 April	Seminal Ideas Discussant: Hristo Bojinov	•	As We May Think, Vannevar Bush, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945.
		•	Direct Manipulation Interfaces, Edwin L. Hutchins, James D. Hollan, and Donald A. Norman, Human-Computer Interaction, 1(4), 1985, pp. 311 - 338.
			User Technology: From Pointing to Pondering, Stuart K. Card and Thomas P. Moran, ACM Conference on the history of personal workstations, 1986, pp. 183 - 98.
7 April Jeff at CHI Berdahl visit	Ubiquitous Computing Discussant: Henry Liou	•	The Computer for the 21st Century, Mark Weiser, Scientific American, September 1991, pp. 94 - 104.
7 April Jeff at CHI Berdahl visit	Ubiquitous Computing Discussant: Henry Liou	•	Charting Past, Present, and Future Research in Ubiquitous Computing, Gregory Abowd, Elizabeth Mynatt, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 7(1), 2000, pp. 29 - 58.
9 April Jeff at CHI Berdahl visit	Tangible & Haptic Interaction Discussant: Filip Kaliszan	•	Getting in Touch, Paul Dourish in Where the Action Is, pp. 25-54
9 April Jeff at CHI Berdahl visit	Tangible & Haptic Interaction Discussant: Filip Kaliszan	•	Haptic Techniques for Media Control, Scott S. Snibbe, Karon E. MacLean, Rob Shaw, Jayne Roderick, William L. Verplank, Mark Scheeff, UIST 2001: ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, pp. 199-208.
10 April	Research Group Partner Choices Due at 7:00am - Submit Via Email to cs376@cs.stanford.edu
14 April	CSCW Discussant: Juho Kim	•	Beyond Being There, Jim Hollan and Scott Stornetta, CHI 1992: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 119 - 25.
		•	Groupware and Social Dynamics: Eight Challenges for Developers, Jonathan Grudin, Communications of the ACM (CACM), 37(1), 1994, pp. 92-105.
			Distance Matters, Gary Olson and Judith Olson, Human-Computer Interaction, 15(2/3), 2000, pp. 139 - 178.
16 April	Social Computing Discussant: Jason Chuang	•	Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm, Yochai Benkler, Yale Law Journal, 112:369, 2002. Read sections I and III.
16 April	Social Computing Discussant: Jason Chuang		Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship, danah boyd and Nicole Ellison, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11, October 2007.
17 April	Project Abstract Draft Due at 7:00am - Submit Online
21 April	Research Discussant: Stephen Hess	•	The Science of Design, Herbert A. Simon in The Sciences of the Artificial, 1969, pp. 128-159.
21 April	Research Discussant: Stephen Hess	•	The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Ch. 1-4, 9, Thomas S. Kuhn, 1962, pp. 1-42, 92-110.
23 April	Fieldwork Discussant: David Sirkin	•	Thick Description, Clifford Geertz, in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 3-30.
23 April	Fieldwork Discussant: David Sirkin	•	An Ethnographic Approach to Design, Jeanette Blomberg, Mark Burrell, and Greg Guest, in The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook, A. Sears, J. Jacko, ed., 2003, pp. 964-986.
28 April	Evaluation Discussant: Eyal Ophir	•	Methodology Matters: Doing Research in the behavioral and social sciences, Joseph E. McGrath, in Readings in Human-Computer Interaction: Toward the Year 2000, R. M. Baecker, J. Grudin, W. A. S. Buxton, S. Greenberg, ed., 1995, pp. 152 - 169.
28 April	Evaluation Discussant: Eyal Ophir	•	Practical Guide to Controlled Experiments on the Web, Ron Kohavi, Randal Henne, Dan Sommerfield, KDD 2007: ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. TBD.
30 April	Distributed Cognition Discussant: Abel Allison	•	The Power of Representation, Donald Norman in Things that Make Us Smart, 1993, pp. 43-76.
30 April	Distributed Cognition Discussant: Abel Allison	•	On Distinguishing Pragmatic from Epistemic Action, David Kirsh and Paul Maglio, Cognitive Science, 1994, pp. 513-549.
1 May	Project Abstract Final Due at 7:00am - Submit Online
5 May	Design Methods Discussant: Kelly Nigh	•	Reinventing the Familiar: Exploring an Augmented Reality Design Space for Air Traffic Control, Wendy E. Mackay, Anne-Laure Fayard, Laurent Frobert and Lionel Médini, CHI 1998: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 558 - 565.
5 May	Design Methods Discussant: Kelly Nigh	•	Getting the Right Design and the Design Right: Testing Many Is Better Than One, Maryam Tohidi, William Buxton, Ronald Baecker, Abigail Sellen CHI 2006: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1243 - 1252.
7 May	Design Process & Tools Discussant: Sharon Lin & Bowen Li	•	Sitemaps, storyboards, and specifications: a sketch of Web site design practice, Mark Newman and James Landay, DIS 2000: ACM Symposium on Designing Interactive Systems, pp. 263 - 274.
7 May	Design Process & Tools Discussant: Sharon Lin & Bowen Li		The Designers’ Outpost: A Tangible Interface for Collaborative Web Site Design, Scott R. Klemmer, Mark W. Newman, Ryan Farrell, Mark Bilezikjian, James A. Landay, UIST 2001: ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology: pp. 1–10. (video)
12 May	Information Visualization Discussant: Reid Senescu	•	Information Visualization (Ch. 1), Stuart K. Card, Jock D. Mackinlay, Ben Shneiderman in Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1999, pp. 1 - 34. (FilmFinder video, Treemap video, book website)
12 May	Information Visualization Discussant: Reid Senescu		Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Information Visualization, Jeffrey Heer, Fernanda Viegas, Martin Wattenberg, CHI 2007: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1029 - 1038.
14 May	Input Techniques Discussant: Akshay Kothari	•	Input Technologies and Techniques, Ken Hinckley, in The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook, A. Sears, J. Jacko, ed., 2007, pp. 161-176.
			Informing the Design of Direct-Touch Tabletops, Chia Shen, Kathy Ryall, Clifton Forlines, Alan Esenther, Frederic D. Vernier, Katherine Everitt, Mike Wu, Daniel Wigdor, Meredith Ringel Morris, Mark Hancock, Edward Tse, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 26(5), September 2006, pp. 36-46.
			Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known and Loved, Bill Buxton.
19 May	Speech & Multimodal Interaction Discussant: Jesse Cirimele	•	Multimodal Interfaces, Sharon Oviatt, in The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook, A. Sears, J. Jacko, ed., Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003, pp. 286-304.
19 May	Speech & Multimodal Interaction Discussant: Jesse Cirimele		Designing SpeechActs: Issues in Speech User Interfaces, Nicole Yankelovich, Gian-Anne Levow, Matt Marx, CHI 1995: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 369 - 376.
21 May	Models of Performance and Behavior Stu Card visit Discussant: Patty Sakunkoo	•	Information Foraging Theory: Framework and Method, Peter Pirolli, in Information Foraging Theory: Adaptive Interaction with Information, Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 3-29.
21 May			A Morphological Analysis of the Design Space of Input Devices, Stuart K. Card, Jock D. Mackinlay, and George G. Robertson, ACM Transactions on Information Systems, Volume 9, Issue 2, 1992, pp. 99-122.
22 May	Project Progress Meetings with Staff - Schedule TBD Submit Online
26 May	User Interface Toolkits Discussant: Mike Bostock	•	Past, Present, and Future of User Interface Software Tools, Brad Myers, Scott E. Hudson, Randy Pausch, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, March 2000, pp. 3 - 28.
			Reflective physical prototyping through integrated design, test, and analysis, Björn Hartmann, Scott R. Klemmer, Michael Bernstein, Leith Abdulla, Brandon Burr, Avi Robinson-Mosher, Jennifer Gee, UIST 2006: ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.
			A Design Tool for Camera-based Interaction, Jerry Alan Fails and Dan R. Olsen, CHI 2003: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 449 - 56.
28 May	Adaptive Interfaces Discussant: Nathan Sakunkoo	•	Ephemeral adaptation: The use of gradual onset to improve menu selection performance, Leah Findlater, Karyn Moffatt, Joanna McGrenere, Jessica Dawson, CHI 2009: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
			Principles of Mixed-Initiative User Interfaces, Eric Horvitz, CHI 1999: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 159-166
			Recommender Systems, Paul Resnick, Hal R. Varian, Communications of the ACM, 40(3), March 1997, pp. 56-58.
2 June	Course Summary		(No Readings)
9 June	Class Project Presentations - 3:30-5:30pm, 104 Gates.
11 June	Project Papers Due at at 7:00am - Submit Online