CS378 Term paper 2007

The paper should be 10-15 pages, on a topic that is not simply a rehash of material in the class, but that connects it to something beyond it: a human-computer design issue, a related body of research, the work of another author, a potential application to some professional field, or the like. It should integrate insights that you have from reading or learning in addition to what we have read for class, and it needs to be more than just your opinions about the issues of the course. It should also be more than a "book report," in that you make an effort to discover and describe relationships between the material you are covering and what we have been talking about in class. Within these broad guidelines, you are free to take on whatever topic you find interesting. We will provide some more examples and discussion after the course starts.

In order to give feedback in depth, the paper will be done in three cycles:

• Monday, February 5, by email and hardcopy in class: A one page description of a proposed topic.
  This should include a general discussion of what you want to achieve in the paper, and a listing of some sources (books, articles, etc.) that you plan to read and incorporate material from. In responding to the proposal we will be looking for other materials we can suggest, and for ways to help you focus the topic. If you have more than one alternative, feel free to discuss several. I will get comments back to you by the end of the week and we can iterate.
• Thursday, March 1: A first full version of the paper.(note, this is a hard deadline since I am leaving on a trip that night and want to read on my flights).
  This should be a complete paper, not an outline or sketch. I will provide comments by the following week that might lead to extensive rewriting.
• Friday, March 16: Final version of the paper due at my office, Gates 388 by 5pm.

In looking for topics, first take a quick glance through the schedule of readings to get a feel for the range of issues in the course. Although the criteria for a topic are fairly open, it should be in the spirit of the kind of inquiry the course is intended to promote - examining basic assumptions (implicit and explicit) in a body of work, a practical endeavor, etc.

Some examples of titles from previous years:

• Agathonic Design
• Art and Technology (from a phenomenological perspective)
• Artificial Life
• Beyond rational choice theory
• Bormann’s critique and corporate environment
• Building the lived experience and the possibilities of social change into interactive agents using the social theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Clifford Nass
• Computer-aided language learning
• Computer Vision
• Computer-generated illusions
• Computers and law (issues of truth and the meaning of language)
• Construction industry
• Context-Aware computing
• Corporate Knowledge Management (its claims about the nature of knowledge)
• Creating emotion in a Computer: Evaluating the link between emotion and physiological functioning
• A Critical View of Graph Conventions (interpretation in information visualization)
• Culture in HCI
• Design patterns
• Directing attention
• Disembodied Learning
• Educational Equity
• The Experience of Persuasive Technologies
• The experience of place vs. space in virtual environments
• Expertise and education
• Extending the Body through Tool-like Technology
• Feminism and phenomenology
• File Sharing
• Genetic Programming
• Husserl, Empathy and the New AI
• An Improvisational Computer Program
• Language and the evolution of consciousness
• Language in Interface Design (interface as communication vs. representation)
• Languages to Express Uncertainties (in decision support tools)
• Linguistic Commensurability
• New Possibilities in the History of Computing
• Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital
• The Paradigm Paradigm (further exploration of Kuhn's notion of paradigm)
• A phenomenological approach to natural language syntax
• Phenomenological limitations of semantic modeling (in civil engineering applications)
• Phenomenological Understanding of Double Disembodied Language
• The Programming "Language"
• The Role of Mental Representation in our Understanding of Character Animation
• The Science of persuasion
• A structural approach to education (based on Maturana)
• To be or Not to Be in MUDS
• Understanding Realism in Computer Games Through Phenomenology
• Using Natural Models to Understand the Internet
• What Makes Natural Language Processing Hard?
• Wittgenstein (on language, truth, etc.)

Last updated January 5, 2007