CPSC 689-602: Intelligent User Interfaces

Fall Semester, 2001
Time and place: T-Tr 12:45 - 2:00 Room 104 HRBB
Instructor: Dr. Frank Shipman
Office hours: HRBB 402B, T-Tr 2-3 pm, or by appointment

Description of Course

This course looks at embedding AI mechanisms in user interfaces, interfaces for knowledge acquisition and representation, issues concerning computational agents, and developing cooperative problem solving systems. Additionally, this class will discuss the applicability of AI techniques by reading and discussing works by Herb Simon and Lucy Suchman. Through projects students will learn how to work with a user community to identify the potential for intelligent support, design and instantiate that support, and evaluate the resulting application.

Prerequisites

Students should have some knowledge of artificial intelligence (AI) and computer-human interaction (CHI). It is good to have taken one AI class and one CHI class but this is not required. See the instructor if you are unsure.

Readings (all required) (discussant list to appear)

Sciences of the Artificial, Herb Simon, The MIT Press

Plans and Situated Actions, Lucy Suchman, Cambridge University Press
available at the campus book store

collected journal and conference papers
copies of these will be purchased from the copy center during the semester

Major Topics

Topics to be included in the course are:

interfaces for knowledge acquisition and knowledge representation,
user modeling,
intelligent interface agents,
natural language and non-textual interfaces,
explanation and presentation generation, and
programming by demonstration.

Class Work

The class will include projects, readings, and short assignments. (No exams.) Projects will include selecting a user community and specific tasks to support, designing an intelligent user interface to support the task, development of an initial prototype, and planning an evaluation of the prototype's success or failure to support the task.

Grading

Grading will be based on reading and participation in class, homeworks, and projects. Project grades will combine the overall grade for the project and team members relative effort.

    class participation    25%
    homeworks              25%
    project                50%

Final Report Format

Your final project reports is to be 8-10 pages formatted according to the ACM Conference Format. You can cut and paste into this format and use the paragraph styles provided. Here is a link to the MS Word Template. You can find RTF and Maker Interchange File formats at this ACM SIGCHI page.