HCI Qualifier Spring 2021

Overview

The HCI Qualifying Exam tests students' ability to read and analyze HCI literature around a certain theme, find and analyze more literature related to that theme, synthesize their knowledge to demonstrate a deep understanding and interpretation of that literature, and develop their own novel ideas related to the theme. The format of the exam is a written response to one or more related questions in the style of a technical conference paper. There is no oral component to the exam.

Faculty Committee

Registered Students

Registration and Withdrawal

Students must register by emailing the chair by the commitment deadline (see below).

Students may withdraw from taking the exam at any point prior to the public release of the exam questions (see dates below). Once the exam questions are released, the exam is considered "in progress" and withdrawal is prohibited. To withdraw or to ask questions about this policy, please email the exam chair.

Academic Integrity

Discussions among students of the papers identified for the HCI Qualifier are reasonable (and strongly encouraged!) until the date the exam is released publicly. Once the exam questions are released, we expect all such discussions will cease as students are required to conduct their own work entirely to answer the qualifier questions. This examination is conducted under the University's Graduate Honor System Code. Students are encouraged to draw from papers other than those listed in the exam to the extent that this strengthens their arguments. However, the answers submitted must represent the sole and complete work of the student submitting the answers. Material substantially derived from other works, whether published in print or found on the web, must be explicitly and fully cited. Note that your grade will be more strongly influenced by arguments you make rather than arguments you quote or cite.

Exam Schedule

Reading List

HCI qualifier exams ask that you reflect on important areas within HCI that are relevant to the research interests of the faculty on the committee and important to HCI and VT's CHCI. The committee identifies a reading list of relevant and important scholarly articles within these focus areas. Students are expected to read these articles closely and familiarize themselves with the ideas, concepts, and technologies described. It is expected that many of these articles will be referenced in the written qualifier exam. It is strongly recommended that students develop an understanding of these texts through discussions with fellow students who will be taking the exam. These discussions should take place PRIOR to the exam period, as the exam must be taken individually.

The themes of this year's qualifier exam are immersive analytics and collaboration. The reading list follows:

  1. Hollan, J., Hutchins, E., and Kirsh, D. (2000). Distributed cognition: toward a new foundation for human-computer interaction research. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 7(2), 174-196.
  2. Skarbez, R., Polys, N. F., Ogle, J. T., North, C., and Bowman, D. A. (2019). Immersive analytics: Theory and research agenda. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 6, 82.
  3. Marriott, K., Chen, J., Hlawatsch, M., Itoh, T., Nacenta, M. A., Reina, G., and Stuerzlinger, W. (2018). Immersive analytics: Time to reconsider the value of 3d for information visualisation. In Immersive analytics (pp. 25-55). Springer, Cham.
  4. Andrews, C., Endert, A., Yost, B., and North, C. (2011). Information visualization on large, high-resolution displays: Issues, challenges, and opportunities. Information Visualization, 10(4), 341-355.
  5. Reipschläger, P., Flemisch, T., and Dachselt, R. (2020). Personal Augmented Reality for Information Visualization on Large Interactive Displays. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
  6. Erickson, T., and Kellogg, W. A. (2000). Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes. ACM transactions on computer-human interaction (TOCHI), 7(1), 59-83.
  7. Scott, S. D., Carpendale, M. S. T., and Inkpen, K. M. (2004, November). Territoriality in collaborative tabletop workspaces. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 294-303).
  8. Fisher, K., Counts, S., and Kittur, A. (2012, May). Distributed sensemaking: improving sensemaking by leveraging the efforts of previous users. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 247-256).
  9. Tam, J., and Greenberg, S. (2006). A framework for asynchronous change awareness in collaborative documents and workspaces. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 64(7), 583-598.
  10. Isenberg, P., Elmqvist, N., Scholtz, J., Cernea, D., Ma, K. L., and Hagen, H. (2011). Collaborative visualization: Definition, challenges, and research agenda. Information Visualization, 10(4), 310-326.

Question

Write a research proposal paper on a topic of your choosing related to collaborative immersive analytics. The goal of the paper is to propose research addressing one or more specific research questions within the topic.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

You are welcome to choose a topic that is related to your own research and interests, but this is not required.

The proposal should be centered around one or more research question(s). Motivate and explicitly state your research question(s) in the introduction of the paper. Be sure that your proposed research actually addresses these questions.

The proposal should also include at least the following components:

You may choose to address each of these three components equally, or to emphasize one of them. Be explicit about the proposed contributions of your work and where your emphasis lies.

The paper should be no longer than eight (8) pages in the IEEE TVCG format. The 8-page limit does not include references.

Submission

Submit your paper in PDF format by email to the committee chair. Submissions are due by 11:59 PM EST on January 19.

Assessment

After the written examination, the examining faculty will determine the student's score for the examination process. The score is between 0 – 3 points, depending on the student's performance on the written exam. (Note that there is no oral exam for the HCI qualifier.) These points may be applied toward the total score necessary to qualify for the Ph.D. The assessment criteria, as defined by GPC, are as follows.

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.