CS889 Advanced Topics in HCI (Winter 2025)

Course Components

The course components will contribute to your final grade as follows:

Participation

Participation is important: you're expected to attend all classes, demo coding experiments, read the papers, and contribute to class discussions. As a rule of thumb, try to contribute to discussion at least 1 or 2 times each class: ask a question, comment on a topic, clarify a point, etc.

Attendance alone is not enough for your participation mark. You must participate.

Worth 20% of grade. Based on level of participation in class discussions.

Micro-Reviews

Two days before each class with seminar papers, you will submit a compact three-part review of each paper being presented. The micro-review must answer three specific questions:

  1. What is a specific strength? e.g. Is something very original and innovative? Is some aspect a particularly elegant insight or solution? Was there something surprising that you learned?
  2. What is a specific weakness? e.g. Is there a weak or flawed assumption? Is there a methodological problem? Is there a better solution to some part? Was some aspect unclear or not fully explained?
  3. How could you use the results? e.g. Could this justify a research decision? Could you extend or incorporate this in your research? t This could be an idea for a course project.

Each question must be answered in less than 300 characters.

All micro-reviews will be made public to the class after the submission deadline (with the first name of each student).

Seminar papers are marked with an 'id' consisting of the first author's name and year (e.g. "smith95").

You do not need to do a micro-review for the paper you are presenting on, for any paper or seminar not marked with an 'id', or for any related papers.

Due before 1pm Sunday (48 hours before class). Submit in the form linked from each paper id in the schedule.
Worth 10% of grade. 1 mark for each on-time submission.

Coding Exercises

You'll experiment and extend the code and techniques from coding workshops (and possibly take-home exercises) to create an artwork-like coding "sketch". The goal is to demonstrate some innovation and competent execution of both an artistic aspect (the "concept") and in how the code was implemented (the "technical"). At the start of the following class, you'll demo your coding sketch for the class and say some words about your concept and technical approach.

Be ready to demo your sketch at the beginning of each class that follows a workshop. Submit your code by pushing to an "exercises" repo you setup in the first workshop.
Worth 20% of grade. Each coding exercise contributes up to 5 marks: 0 if not ready to demo in class; 1-2 if minimal effort; 3-4 if either concept or technical aspect is innovative and competently executed; 5 if both concept and technical are innovative and competently executed.

Seminar

Every student is required to lead one 40 minute paper seminar and discussion.

Sign-up

You can request specific seminars or even certain days for your seminar. We'll do our best to assign you to one of these.

Before the second class, submit seminars (or days) you prefer..

Instructor Review

You must submit draft presentation slides before 9am on Monday before your presentation day for the instructor to review. Comments will be returned before 5pm Monday.

Due Monday 9am before your presentation day. Submit the PPT or PDF of your draft slides to the Draft Slides dropbox on LEARN

Seminar Format

Use the paper content and examples as a way to introduce and address questions that go beyond the paper itself:

As a rough guide, keep specific summary of information in the paper to less than a third of your talk and the rest for answering the questions above. Spread the specific content of the paper around and use it to ground the discussions of the more important seminar questions. Remember, everyone in the class will have read the paper ahead of time to create their micro-reviews, so everyone already has a good grasp of what the paper is about. Whatever you do, do not simply give a summary of the paper contents (the grading rubric below makes it clear you will not do very well if you do).

If you find that your slides cover all sections of the paper in the same order in which they appear, and you only show figures and tables from the paper, then you are creating a summary presentation. Don't do that.

Class Discussion

You are responsible for leading discussion during (and perhaps after) your presentation. Be prepared to get the class started by seeding the discussion with open-ended questions and some controversial statements.

You'll have access to the class micro-reviews at least 24 hours before your seminar, so budget some time to read through them, and summarize the responses on your slides. You are encouraged to call on specific individuals in the class during the discussion to expand or justify their responses (you'll have their names associated with the micro-reviews).

You'll have to manage the class: this means keeping people on topic, encouraging everyone to speak, and making sure the discussion isn't dominated by a few people.

Length and Structure

You have 40 minutes, but this will include significant class discussion.

Due Tuesday 1pm on your presentation day. Submit the PPT or PDF of your final slides to the Final Slides dropbox on LEARN
Worth 20% of grade.

The seminar is graded out of 20 as follows:

  • [5 marks] instructor advance review (all materials submitted on time, draft is reasonably complete to review).
  • [5 marks] length and delivery (clear speaking, clear slides, on time plus-or-minus 5 minutes)
  • [5 marks] paper presentation (should be more critique than summary with relevant and insightful comments)
  • [5 marks] leading discussion (questions prepared, micro-reviews summarized, managed class effectively)

Project

The final project is an interactive artwork described in a related "pictorial" research paper with accompanying documentation video. You'll give a live demonstration of your artwork in the final class in a "critique" format.

Proposal

Submit a description explaining your concept and technical approach. Support this with hand drawn sketches and screen captures of initial code experiments.

Studio

Attend studio class to discuss your in-progress project with the instructor.

Demonstration and Critique

You will have 10 - 15 minutes to demo your artwork and field comments from the class.

Pictorial and Video

You'll submit a 5 - 10 page pictorial paper and a 1 - 2 minute video demonstrating your artwork.

A pictorial is style of research paper that emphasizes visual communication (i.e. lots of images). Here's a description from the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS):

Pictorials are papers in which the visual components (e.g. diagrams, sketches, illustrations, renderings, photographs, annotated photographs, and collages) play a major role in conveying the ideas and contributions of a study in addition to the accompanying text.

Here's an example of a pictorial:

Elvin Karana, Elisa Giaccardi, Niels Stamhuis, and Jasper Goossensen. 2016. The Tuning of Materials: A Designer's Journey. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 619–631. https://doi.org/10.1145/2901790.2901909

Worth 30% of grade.

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© Daniel Vogel

Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo

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