CS 6724 -- Advanced Topics in HCI:
Communicating Information Using Peripheral Displays

Fall 2000
Thursdays 5:00 pm - 7:45 pm
Randolph 206

Instructor
Scott McCrickard
mccricks@cs.vt.edu
623 McBryde Hall
Office Hours: MW 2:30-4:30 or by appointment

Course Description
Peripheral displays are appearing everywhere: on our computer desktops, in our pockets, on our bodies, and hanging from the wall and ceiling. This class will address the HCI concerns relating to peripheral displays with a focus on support for monitoring and awareness tasks.

Topics we will cover include design guidelines for peripheral displays both on and off the desktop (including ubiquitous and hand-held displays), tasks best suited for peripheral displays, peripheral interfaces for Web-based software agents, supporting and evaluating peripheral tasks making use of text, audio, video, and images.

By the end of the class, students will be able to

Students should have a fair amount of programming expertise and basic knowledge of HCI. If you have not had and are not taking Usability Engineering, plan to become familiar with one the introductory HCI texts.

This is a research course with no standard curriculum or textbook. We will learn some basic skills and toolkits useful in building peripheral displays, but most of the course will be spent critically analyzing the work of others. A large component of the course will be participation in newsgroup and in-class discussions.

Resources
Short announcements and reading summaries will be posted to the newsgroup, vatech.class.cs6724. (To read and post news, be sure and configure your news server to server.cs.vt.edu or use a program like trn on csgrad.) Reading summaries (done by a selected student) should include the author and title in the subject line, a full paper citation, relevant background on the author, a 4-6 paragraph summary, and questions for discussion. This posting, which should appear by Monday at 4 pm, should lead to followup postings (led by a selected discussant) and interesting discussions in class. The student who wrote the summary will present a 10-15 minute review of the paper and of the subsequent discussion in class, and the discussant will post a summary of the discussion to the newsgroup by Friday at 4 pm.

The newsgroup is also the best place for you to post questions or comments that may be of general interest to the class. You should check for new news in this group at least once a day, especially as assignment due dates approach. Please follow proper news posting etiquette when posting; in particular, choose descriptive subjects, don't post HTML-augmented text, include short signatures no longer than 6 lines, and don't post URLs or short "me too" posts without some explanation.

A full syllabus will be maintained on the class Web page, http://classes.cs.vt.edu/~cs6724/. Information about lectures, assignments, and papers will be added to the class Web page throughout the semester. An outline of each lecture will be linked to the Course Topics section of the page. Assignments and exam review materials will be linked to the Assignment Due Dates section.

Course Topics

These topics can and will be updated at any time during the course. Be sure and check back regularly for changes and additions!

Assignment Due Dates (due via email by 4pm)

Sep 6 Programming Assignment 1a
Sep 13 Programming Assignment 1b
Sep 29 Programming Assignment 2
Oct 11 Programming Assignment 3
Oct 18 Project Proposal
Nov 30 Project Presentations
Dec 6 Final Project Writeup

Evaluation Summary

Project 40%
Programming Assignments 40%
Participation 20%

Contact Information:

Scott McCrickard
mccricks@cs.vt.edu
623 McBryde
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA 24061-0106