CSC 486 Research Activity

In this part of the class work, your task is to find interesting concepts, methods, or applications related to HCI and your team project. You will give a short presentation of about ten minutes to your classmates, and create a document that accompanies your presentation. The document can be in the form of a traditional research paper, or in some alternative format, such as a blog post, podcast, narrated presentation, or a video. If you have other ideas for such a document, let me know.

This is an individual assignment, but you can coordinate topics and presentation dates with your teammates.

Choice of Topics

If possible, your research activity should be related to the topic of the team project. If necessary, discuss alternatives with me.

Proposal

Your proposal must contain the following information:

• Title
• Name of the author (you)
• Abstract: a brief description, about 100-200 words long
• Outline: bulleted list form, with at least ten items arranged in at least two levels
• Sources: at least five references or links to information sources; if you use links, add information like title, author, organization, publication date - "naked" URLs are not sufficient

The format of the proposal is the same as in my CSC/CPE 480 Artificial Intelligence class; see an example there for an “AI Nugget Proposal”. In particular, it contains examples of references, and some hints on what to avoid in the list of references.

The following section discusses suggestions for the structure and formatting of your research activity as a conventional research paper. I do not have similar suggestions for the alternatives such as blog entry, video, or podcast. If you choose do to one of these, talk to me directly.

Paper

After the submission of the proposal, you are expected to develop the paper (or alternative document) in multiple stages:

• Extended Outline: This should be an expansion and revision of the one from the proposal. It should be content-complete: All sections and subsections are identified, and an indication of the content for each is provided either through bulleted lists (talking points), or brief descriptions of what content to expect. Places where diagrams, figures or other artwork will appear should be identified and marked, together with a caption.  The intended source of the artwork should be identified (e.g., produced by the author, created from data based on other sources, retrieved from the Web). The bibliography from the proposal should be carried over, and adjusted as needed.
• Initial Draft Version: The extended outline is converted into fully formulated sections, subsections and paragraphs. Artwork is included with appropriate identification of sources. The bibliography reflects the actual content of the document: All sources that were used and contributed content either directly (quotations, data, diagrams) or indirectly (ideas, methods) must be included. It may still have language and formatting issues, but of course the fewer the better.
• Final Draft Version: For a publication submitted to a journal or conference, this would be the version of the document that submitted for publication. In our context, it is a revised and cleaned-up version of the initial draft. It should address concerns expressed by the internal reviewers, both concerning content as well as formatting. This version must adhere to the formatting requirements of the publication (see below for the one we’ll use here), and should be fully edited and proofread.

Structure

You paper should contain the information listed below. You may use a different structure if you believe that it is better suited for your topic.

• Cover Page: Title, author, affiliation of the author, date, and abstract (5 - 10 sentences, about 150 words is typical)
• Introduction Section: an 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 section 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 reference 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 formally published, however, and this is not a formal publication either, I chose to give credit via a direct acknowledgement; such an acknowledgement is also often placed in a footnote or endnote, or in a separate Acknowledgements section.)

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]).
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.

While I personally prefer the second scheme since the anchor in the text is more meaningful, both ACM and IEEE publications usually require a numbered bibliography. You can choose either style in your document.

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). And of course you should be especially careful with the reliability and trustworthiness of Web pages.

Format

Sample formatting instructions and templates can be obtained from the IJCAI 2018 conference site; their author kit contains templates for Microsoft Word and LaTeX formats. This format is failry typical for a conference publication in the area of Computer Science. Your paper should be 6 pages long in the above format, which corresponds to about 4,000 words. It may include images equivalent to a maximum of one page.

Presentation

The presentation should last about ten to fifteen minutes, and you can use Powerpoint slides or similar. Unless you’re talking about material that you developed completely on your own, you should include a bibliography at the end, with at least five references for sources you used (these can be the same as in your proposal). If you’re using material created by others, such as diagrams, photos or videos, you need to identify the source. There are several ways of doing this; I suggest to place a visible link in close vicinity of the item. Alternatives are links connected to the item, or a pointer to an entry in the bibliography.

Submission

The submission of the materials for this activity as well as the registration for a presentation date is done through the Piazza link for the 486-S19 Research Activity Spreadsheet. Enter your selected topic under an available date, and then submit the material by providing a link to the document in the respective column.

Grading Criteria

The grading of the assignment will be done in three different parts: Proposal, presentation, and documentation.

The distribution of points I intend to use for the evaluation of this assignment is as follows:

• Topic Knowledge 50,
• Topic Relevance 10,
• Topic Difficulty 10,
• Document Structure and Material 10,
• Supporting Evidence 10,
• Presentation Delivery or Document Appearance 5,
• Timing and Length 5

Presentation Hints

If you don't have much experience giving presentations, follow this link to some presentation hints.