CPSC 634: Intelligent User Interfaces

Fall Semester, 2007
Time and place: T-TH 5:30pm - 6:45pm Room 126 HRBB
Instructor: Dr. Frank Shipman
Office hours: HRBB 404, TBA, 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)

Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd edition, Herb Simon, The MIT Press

Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions, 2nd edition, Lucy Suchman, Cambridge University Press

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, quizzes, and short assignments. (No exams.) Projects will be group projects (2-4 members, with more members indicating a larger project.) Individual student's grades for projects will be influenced by their teamwork as evaluated by the other project group members. Projects are to 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. Project topics must be approved by the instructor.

Grading

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

    class participation    10%
    quizzes                30%
    homeworks              20%
    project                40%

Final Report Format

Your final project reports is to be 8-12 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.