HCI Qualifier 2011-1012


1 Purpose of the Examination

The purpose of the qualifying examination in HCI is to determine whether a student is qualified to begin work on Ph.D.-level research. To that end, the exam is designed to test:

  • Reading: the ability to critically read and analyze significant research articles in the field of HCI
  • Writing: the ability to write clear, thoughtful, persuasive, and original discussion, analysis, and ideas about HCI topics
  • Depth: the ability to obtain and demonstrate a reasonable depth of knowledge in a limited number of HCI-related subfields

The exam is not designed to test breadth of knowledge in HCI, so students with little HCI background can still succeed on the exam. Breadth will be achieved by requiring all HCI Ph.D. students to take relevant introductory and advanced HCI courses. Coursework does not have to be completed prior to attempting the qualifying exam.

2 Examination Procedure

Students wishing to qualify for the PhD in the area of human-computer interaction (HCI) will follow a three-step procedure:

  • Announce the intention to take the qualifier in the area of HCI during the time period mandated by GPC (the Graduate Program Committee)
  • Obtain a copy of the current HCI qualifier focus areas and reading list and study the papers listed there. These papers constitute a starting place for research relevant to answering the question(s).
  • Receive one or more written questions and submit answer(s) before the deadline.

2.1 Focus Areas and Reading List

Students who consider themselves to be deficient in their general HCI knowledge should study one or more of these books before attempting to understand the articles on their subarea reading list.

  • Erickson, T. and McDonald, D., HCI Remixed
  • Sharp, Rogers, and Preece, Interaction Design

While students are not to consult with others during the writing of the exam, they are encouraged to organize study groups to better understand the assigned reading.

The HCI subarea qualifying committee (this year Deborah Tatar, Francis Quek, and Doug Bowman ) has decided to focus on physical computing as a focus area: a small subfield of HCI that is relevant to the research interests of the faculty on the committee. Below is a reading list of a number of relevant and important scholarly articles within that focus area. Students will be expected to read these articles and understand the concepts described therein. Students must also do further reading in the focus area (starting with the references in the reading list papers) if the area is unfamiliar to them. One strategy that has proven successful for students in the past is to form a reading group.

2.2 Written Questions

In early January, the committee will post this year's question(s) on this website. Students will provide written answers to the question(s). The question(s) will not simply ask students to summarize the reading list papers. Rather they will require students to integrate and synthesize their knowledge, come up with novel solutions to a problem, or do a critical evaluation of some published research.

Each student has two weeks (deadline is Feb. 1, 2012) to develop written answers to the question(s). Answers should be emailed to the committee members as instructed on the list of questions.

Answers should be given in the ACM SIGCHI conference proceedings format (here is a link to templates for this format), and be no more than 10 (ten) pages. The answers should include references.

The answer is to be completed by each student individually; students are not allowed to consult with others in preparing their paper (excepting clarification questions to the committee members). Students are expected to read and use the reading list papers and other sources, but all sources must be appropriately cited. The Virginia Tech honor code is in effect.

NOTE: There will be no oral exam.

QUESTION: HCIQualifierQuestion2011-2012.

2.3 Reading List

NEW NEW NEW AND UPDATED!

Iwata, H., Yano, H., Fukushima, H., & Noma, H. (2005). CirculaFloor: A Locomotion Interface Using Circulation of Movable Tiles. Proceedings of the IEEE Virtual Reality.

Wilson, A., & Shafer, S. (2003). XWand: UI for intelligent spaces. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA.

Hornecker, E. (2011). The role of physicality in tangible and embodied interactions. interactions, 18(2), 19–23. ACM. Retrieved from http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1925826

Hornecker, E., & Buur, J. (2006). Getting a grip on tangible interaction. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems CHI 06 (p. 437). ACM Press. Retrieved from http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1124772.1124838

Carsten Magerkurth, Adrian David Cheok, Regan L. Mandryk, and Trond Nilsen. 2005. Pervasive games: bringing computer entertainment back to the real world. Comput. Entertain. 3, 3 (July 2005), 4-4. DOI=10.1145/1077246.1077257 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1077246.1077257

Matthew Chalmers, Marek Bell, Barry Brown, Malcolm Hall, Scott Sherwood, and Paul Tennent. 2005. Gaming on the edge: using seams in ubicomp games. In Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology (ACE '05). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 306-309. DOI=10.1145/1178477.1178533 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1178477.1178533

 
2.3.1 Other Suggestions!
I. Theory-Based Papers

Physicality

Israel, J. H. (2007). Physical Interaction: The Basis of Human-Computer-Interaction. In Proceedings of Second International Workshop on Physicality, pp. 83-86: Lancaster University, UK, July 2007.

Pervasive Computing

Saha, D., & Mukherjee, A. (2003). Pervasive computing: a paradigm for the 21st century. Computer, 36(3), 25-31. IEEE Computer Society. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/lpdocs/epic03/wrapper.htm?arnumber=1185214

Tangible Computing

Ishii, H., & Ullmer, B. (1997). Tangible bits: towards seamless interfaces between people, bits and atoms. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Vol. 5, pp. 234-241). ACM. Retrieved from http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=258549.258715

Shaer, O., & Jacob, R. J. K. (2009). A Specification Paradigm for the Design and Implementation of Tangible User Interfaces. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 16(4). Retrieved from http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~jacob/papers/tochi.shaer.pdf

Ubiquitous Computing / Embodied Interaction

Weiser, M. (1991). The Computer for the 21 st Century. Scientific American, 3(3), 94-104. {A}{C}{M} {N}ew {Y}ork, {N}{Y}, {U}{S}{A}. Retrieved from http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=329124.329126

Lyytinen, K., & Yoo, Y. (2002). Issues and challenges in ubiquitous computing: Introduction. Communications of the ACM, 45(12), 62-65. ACM Press. Retrieved from http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=585597.585616

Bird, J. (2011). The Phenomenal Challenge of Designing Transparent Technologies. interactions, 18(6), 20–23. ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2029983

Context-Aware Computing

Moran, T. P., & Dourish, P. (2001). Introduction to This Special Issue on Context-Aware Computing. Human-Computer Interaction, 16(2), 87-95. L. Erlbaum Associates Inc. Retrieved from http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&doi=10.1207/S15327051HCI16234_01&magic=crossref

[This is an introduction to a journal special issue, but it gives a sense of the field]
Dey, A. K., Kortuem, G., Morse, D. R., & Schmidt, A. (2001). Situated Interaction and Context-Aware Computing. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 5(1), 1-3. Springer-Verlag. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/PL00000013
II. Design-focused Papers

Bruns Alonso, M., & Keyson, D. V. (2005). MusicCube: a physical experience with digital music. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 10(2-3), 163-165. Retrieved from http://www.springerlink.com/index/10.1007/s00779-005-0009-8

William Gaver, John Bowers, Tobie Kerridge, Andy Boucher, and Nadine Jarvis. 2009. Anatomy of a failure: how we knew when our design went wrong, and what we learned from it. In Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2213-2222. DOI=10.1145/1518701.1519040 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1518701.1519040

Zeynep Ahmet, Martin Jonsson, Saiful Islam Sumon, and Lars Erik Holmquist. 2010. Supporting embodied exploration of physical concepts in mixed digital and physical interactive settings. In Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction (TEI '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 109-116. DOI=10.1145/1935701.1935723 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1935701.1935723

Petra Sundström, Elsa Vaara, Jordi Solsona, Niklas Wirström, Marcus Lundén, Jarmo Laaksolhati, Annika Waern, and Kristina Höök. 2011. Experiential artifacts as a design method for somaesthetic service development. In Proceedings of the 2011 ACM symposium on The role of design in UbiComp research & practice (RDURP '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 33-36. DOI=10.1145/2030031.2030041 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2030031.2030041

Orit Shaer, Guy Kol, Megan Strait, Chloe Fan, Catherine Grevet, and Sarah Elfenbein. 2010. G-nome surfer: a tabletop interface for collaborative exploration of genomic data. In Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1427-1436. DOI=10.1145/1753326.1753539 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753539

3 Assessment


After the written exam period, each answer will be graded by the committee members. The score is either 0, 1, 2, or 3 points. These points may be applied toward the total score of 6 points necessary to qualify for the Ph.D. The assessment criteria, as defined by GPC, are as follows:


3: Excellent performance, beyond that normally expected or required for a PhD student.

2: Performance appropriate for PhD-level work. Prime factors for assessment include being able to distinguish good work from poor work, and explain why; being able to synthesize the body of work into an assessment of the state-of-the-art on a problem (as indicated by the collection of papers); being able to identify open problems and suggest future work.

1: While the student adequately understands the content of the work, the student is deficient in one or more of the factors listed for assessment under score value of 2. A score of 1 is the minimum necessary for an MS-level pass.

0: Student's performance is such that the committee considers the student unable to do PhD-level work in Computer Science.


The committee chair for this year is Deborah Tatar (dtatar (at) vt (dot) edu). Email her with any questions.