HCI Qualifying Exam

HCI Ph.D. Qualifier Exam

Spring 2017

Examining Faculty (direct all questions to the chair)

    Scott McCrickard (Chair), mccricks@cs.vt.edu
    Chris North
    Steve Harrison

Registered Students [Name (pid)] as of 1/3/2016

Tianyi Li (tianyili)
Sneha Mehta (sudo777)

Early Withdrawal Policy

Once students have notified the Computer Science Department of their intention to take the HCI Ph.D. Qualifier Exam, they may withdraw from taking the exam at any point prior to the public release of the exam questions. Once the exam questions are released, the exam is considered "in progress" and withdrawal is prohibited. Students with questions about this policy should contact the exam chair directly.

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

    12/5/2016: release of reading list
    1/9/2017 : release of written exam
   1/23/2017 (11:59PM): student solutions to written exam due

Reading List

HCI qualifier exams ask that you reflect on an emerging and important theme or subarea within HCI that is relevant to the research interests of the faculty on the committee and important to HCI and VT's CHCI. This year's qualifier exam focuses on the CHCI theme "technology on the trail", examining HCI issues related to the use of and reflection with personal technologies. The committee has identified a reading list of several relevant and important scholarly articles within that focus area. Students are expected to read these articles and understand the concepts described therein. It is strongly recommended that students develop this understanding 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. Papers for this year's qual include:

Dana Cuff, Mark Hansen, and Jerry Kang (2008). Urban sensing: out of the woods. Communications of the ACM 51, 3 (March 2008), 24-33.
Yvonne Rogers (2011). Interaction design gone wild: striving for wild theory. interactions 18, 4 (July 2011), 58-62.
Alan Dix (2013). Mental Geography, Wonky Maps, and a Long Way Ahead. In Proc. GeoHCI (workshop at CHI 2013).
Ellie Harmon and Melissa Mazmanian (2013). Stories of the Smartphone in everyday discourse: conflict, tension & instability. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 13). 1051-1060.
Maaret Posti, Johannes Schög, and Jonna Häiläw (2014). Unexpected journeys with the HOBBIT: the design and evaluation of an asocial hiking app. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems (DIS 14), 637-646.
Elizabeth Bonsignore, Alexander Quinn, Allison Druin, and Benjamin Bederson (2013). Sharing Stories "in the Wild": A Mobile Storytelling Case Study Using StoryKit. ACM TOCHI 20, 3.

Core HCI Materials

If you wish to review core material related to HCI, one or more of the following books are recommended:

Hartson and Pyla, The UX Book.
Sharp, Rogers, and Preece, Interaction Design.
Shneiderman et al., Designing the User Interface.

Written Questions

Each year, the HCI faculty publishes a reading list of papers by the end of the fall semester and an integrative research question before the start of the spring semester to be answered within a 10-14 day period. The goal of the written exam is to evaluate the student’s ability to creatively integrate content from the HCI research areas. The question will be posted here by the exam start date.

QUESTION: One focus of the Center for HCI's "Technology on the Trail" initiative is to explore ways that information and data generated on hiking trails can be used for reflection and planning. The information and data can be generated explicitly through pictures or journals created by hikers or implicitly through step counters and biometrics. Reflection and planning can take place by individuals with their own data or by people and groups with data from one or more hiking adventures.

Identify ONE promising type of reflection and planning, and describe an HCI-related approach that you would undertake to explore it. Possible approaches could include analysis of technology use in hiking, design of tech-related mobile applications, crowdsourced image geolocation, synthesis of diverse information, or something else. While you are not expected to do the work that you are proposing, make sure to describe your proposed approach and argue why your approach is interesting and has promise for success.

It is expected that you will build on some of the papers from the reading list as well as other papers that you identify as important. It is recommended that you leverage your own skills and interests in undertaking the qualifier. Your qual response should be written as a paper in ACM SIGCHI format that is no longer than 8 pages, not including references. Email your response to the committee by the due date.

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:

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.