Human-Centered Computing Course Project Reports
Monday, Dec 11th, in 405 Soda: 

10:00am Guochun Liao	
In this project, I designed a scheme to analyze the personality and
emotional content for web pages. I implemented a web-based application to
evaluate personality and emotion of some web pages based on their text
content. I also analyzed the usage of color and image to
study the correlation between verbal cues and non-verbal cues (color,
image, etc.)

10:30am Nicolas Ducheneaut
Email has become the main conduit for coordination and collaboration in
organizations. It is now the source of many different office tasks, serving
as the place in which work is received and delegated. This paper is
concerned with the nature of the work processes that are being managed in
email, and the extent to which these processes could be modeled and
supported by software. Numerous attempts have been made in this direction,
the most famous of which may be The Coordinator (Winograd and Flores, 1986),
an application of Speech-Act Theory (Austin, 1962) to IT design. Drawing on
the results of two months of fieldwork conducted in three companies, I will
illustrate the shortcomings of such an approach, and highlight the
contingent and dynamic nature of the work processes managed in email. The
approach is original in that it considers not only the content, but also the
structure of email exchanges. This leads me to propose a re-conception of
the kind of tools that should be designed to support email interactions in
the workplace.

11:00am Tom Duan
Inventing the Future Where and How Far Should Ubiquitous Computing Go
"The best way to predict future is to invent it."
-- Alan  Kay
This paper identified some of the issues, both technological and social,
that are related to Ubiquitous Computing and proposed possible
solutions. It argued that computers are fundamentally different from
those influential innovations in human history, such as literacy and
electricity, which changed our lives dramatically and are serving us
ubiquitously and invisibly. These differences may make the full adoption
of Mark Weiser’s vision of ubiquitous computing in our daily life not
desirable. However, it agreed that ubicomp still remains extremely
promising, especially in some special tasks such as space traveling, and
will certainly dominate computing in the future.

11:30am Anoop Sinha
I will discuss the usability evaluation of MultiPoint, a multimodal user
interface for building presentations, with particular focus on participants
use of speech commands.  I will propose the new concept of Computer Speech
Acts, a categorization of speech input commands, and relate it to
traditional Speech Act Theory.



1:00pm Dan Glaser
I have videotaped designers at their workplace to provide a fine-grained 
analysis of what they are actually doing.  From this I hope to better define 
the role of simulation tools, identify metaphors that enable people to 
solve their problems, and mock up a new interface for them.

1:30pm Andrew Hill
Title: Identifying Voice
Subject: Determining if a speakers voice can be identified using
latent semantic analysis(LSA). 

2:00pm Shankar Sitarama
Application of the Speech Act theory in the analysis of the 
classroom interactions of a business case-study discussion.
Case-study method of instruction is an essential skill building 
exercise for the engineers / managers in their curriculum and relies on 
the collaborative learning that takes place in the student through the 
discussions on the case. Students get an insight into the 
decision-making process, the factors and parameters involved and the 
implications of the decisions through such real life cases from 
organizations. This learning takes place collaboratively through a 
meaningful discussion among peers mediated effectively by the instructor.
The utterances by the students and instructor are key to the learning 
process and the learning process, which is essentially collaborative in 
nature, is embedded in the discussions. An analysis of these utterances 
by the students and the instructor and their intentions (locutionary 
and illocutionary aspects of their speech acts) provides us with 
valuable insights into the learning process.
An attempt is made in this project to apply the Speech act theory to 
the utterances of the students and instructors in one such discussion of a 
case-study and an analysis performed.

2:30pm Matthew Kam
Livenotes: a system for live, collaborative, small-group note-taking. Small group 
learning is a proven method for enhancing student attention, participation and 
understanding. Livenotes allows groups of students to work collaboratively in a
conventional classroom. It is a peer-to-peer Java program which runs on inexpensive
pen computers (Clios). 

3:00pm Shuang Song
Title: Identifying User Information Needs in SMETE Digital Library
Identifying user needs and providing an efficient and effective 
information retrieval to meet these needs is a difficult challenge. This 
project aims at learning user information need by Latent Semantic 
Analysis. The experiment was conducted in SMETE library ( a digital library 
for Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education).