CS 6724:  Distributed Coordinated Behavior

Course Description

Coordination is, at base, how social creatures get social things done in
the world. We are social creatures.  The topic of this class is using
wirelessly connected technology to support multi-user, face-to-face
interaction. It will involve students in the design, implementation, and
exploration of loosely-coupled, delay-insensitive collaborative tasks,
especially learning tasks and coordinative games, utilizing Tuple-Spaces,
a Java-based language for coordination.

Students, singly or in teams, will either (1) identify an activity,
create a program, and pilot it with users, or (2) conduct a substantial
user study of an existing program.  Such a sustained study might, as
time and availability permit, be conducted in actual learning settings,
either K12 or university.

We will examine coordination from the point of view of formal description,
such as that provided by trace theory analysis, by analogy to other
highly coordinated human activities such as conversation and playground
games and with respect to value-sensitive design.

Students will be graded on teamwork, class participation, and the
quality of the final research produced.  Papers will be of quality and
will be expected to be submitted to the Computer-Supported Collaborative
Work conference.

Instructor: Deborah Tatar