COSC494: Final Team Project

Overview

Our world is becoming increasingly populated with interactive systems that fundamentally change the way we live our lives. The COSC494: Human-AI Interaction team project requires that you explore a new opportunity for interactive intelligence. You will be evaluated both individually and as a team. The project spans an 12-week period, separated by 4 milestones:

Goal	Description	Value	Due Date
Milestone 1: Use-Case	Identify a use-case and setting.	25%	Feb 23
Milestone 2: Needfinding	Understand user needs.	25%	Mar 16
Milestone 3: Prototype	Design your prototype.	25%	Apr 6
Milestone 4: Dissemination	Final report + presentation.	25%	Apr 27

Milestones

Below, you can cycle through the various Milestone tabs to see their requirements.

The objective of the Milestone 1 (M1) is identifying an opportunity and a setting. Historically, some of the most significant leaps and bounds in technology have been underminded by an inability to ``solve a problem''. Your project should hone in one specific opportunity for a new intelligent and interactive system.

I. Milestone Requirements

This milestone requires that your team successfully identifies a setting for your project. The requirements of this milestone are as follows:

Your team must have the instructor's permission that a topic is suitable for the course.
Your team's setting must be compliant with the constraints (see II. Use-Case Constraints).

Slide 1: A use-case with a clearly articulated domain and task.
Slide 2: A user modelling approach with a detailed feature set.
Slide 3: A high-level technical architecture of your system.
Slide 4: An overview of AI potentials and risks.

II. Use-Case Constraints

To guide you in identifying your problem setting, your team's problem must fall into one of the following thematic areas:

Theme I: Recommenders for Productivity

Productivity is a frontier for intelligent interaction. Organizations care about maximizing peoples' output when they're on the job. The more people productive or efficient that people are in their job, the closer a company is toward reaching its output goals.

Example use-cases include:

A recommender system that helps programmers choose which functions to implement first in a new file.
A reccommender system that helps authors write paragraphs of next.
A recommender system that helps people manage their time.

Reference Publications

Theme II: Recommenders for Wellbeing

Research research suggests that productivity is intwertwined with peoples' well-being. Burnout, for example, was recognized as public health epidemic in 2018. Today, we're currently operating in a near-virtual world under the Coronavirus pandemic, which continues to challenges in new and surprising ways.

Example problems include:

A recommender system that helps people with predisposed conditions avoid COVID-19.
A recommender system that helps students master material for a course.
A recommender system that helps parents manage children's physical development.

Reference Publications

Methods in Predictive Techniques for Mental Health Status on Social Media: A Critical Review. Nature, 2020.
Gait can reveal sleep quality with machine learning models. PloS one, 2019.

Theme III: Recommenders for Online Discourse

From heated exchanges in political niches to simple disagreements on Facebook updates, online discourse has remained just about anything, but "friendly". Our efforts to have meaningful discourse on the Internet are amplified by third-party actors who leverage the open nature of the Internet to disinform and confuse.

Examples problems include:

A recommender system for helping people identify truthful information.
A recommender system for helping people avoid toxic interactions in online gaming.
A recommender system for helping people speak in a toxic manner online.

Reference Publications

III. Grading

This milestone is worth 25% of your final project grade. The 25% is calculated like so:

Deliverable	Description	Value
Presentation	Use-case is clearly articulated.	10%
	User modeling approach is feasible and clear.	5%
	Technical architecture is appropriate.	5%
	AI Risks and Benefits are thorough and well-thoughtout.	5%

The objective of the Milestone 2 (M2) is broadly understanding the needs of the user population that your system will engage with. Intelligent systems should be focused on supporting a particular task, and they should support it well. Through Milestone 2, you should adequately develop and carry out a needfinding plan for your system. If nothing else, you should understand the importance of understanding user needs before you consider implementing or prototyping any technical component within your system.

I. Milestone Requirements

This milestone requires that your team successfully identifies a setting for your project. The requirements of this milestone are as follows:

Your team must give a three-slide presentation on March 16 that has the following information:

Slide 1: A set of five unique personas of system users.
Slide 2: A needfinding study for motivating system design.
Slide 3: An overview of learned challenges and opportunities.

Your presentation is limited to three minutes with one minute of Q&A.

II. Grading

This milestone is worth 25% of your final project grade. The 25% is calculated like so:

Deliverable	Description	Value
Presentation	Personas are unique and clearly presented.	5%
	Needfinding study is well-designed, sensible, and clearly presented.	10%
	Challenges and opportunities have been learned through study.	5%
	Miscellaneous (Time constraints, format, etc.)	5%

The objective of the Milestone 3 (M3) is prototyping an intelligent interface. In Milestone 2, you used personas to motivate your system design. You also engaged a small number of users to better understand the challenges and opportunities of bringing your system into practice. Your intelligent interface prototype for Milestone 3 should be motivated based on findings in the needfinding examination in Milestone 2. Protoyping can take place in one of three ways described below.

I. Milestone Requirements

This milestone requires that your team successfully produce a prototype following one of the pathways described in Section II: Prototype Pathways. The requirements of this milestone are as follows:

Your team must give a four-slide presentation on March 16 that has the following information:

Slide 1: A very brief review of your use-case and what was learned in Milestone 2.
Slide 2: An overview of your initial prototype.
Slide 3: An overview of your approach to iteration.
Slide 4: An overview of your final prototype.

Your presentation is limited to three and a half minutes with one minute of Q&A.

Note: Your report must be submitted by 11:59pm on April 6 via Canvas.

II. Prototype Requirements

Your prototype should clearly show the following:

Interaction Foundation: How users fundamentally engage with the intelligent interface. For example, if your intelligent interface is conversational (e.g., uses human language to engage users), your prototype should include clear visual examples of this interaction.
Onboarding Interaction: How users are introduced to the intelligent interface. What is the mechanism your interface uses to introduce "itself" and make its functionality known? For example, does your intelligent interface proactively engage new users? If not, how are users made aware that it exists? You can assume the user is familiar with the base application, e.g. Google Maps in the Map Assistant example.
Recommendation Interaction: How users are given recommendations and what options they have when receiving them. Is the interaction as simple as "Accept" or "Dismiss"? Some recommendations, for example, come at inopportune times. Are there options for deferring recommendations? Consider your options for what is appropriate for your use-case.
Feedback Interaction: How users are capable of giving feedback for recommendation improvement. Is feedback given to the agent directly (e.g., "Hey Siri, you're doing terribly.") or through a separate free-text form box. What does your interface say after feedback has been provided?

III. Prototype Pathways

There are three possible pathways that you can take for creating prototypes for Milestone 3: (1) Lo-Fi Protoype, (2) Hi-Fi Prototype, and (3) Hybrid Prototypes. Your team should pick one pathway.

Pathway 1: The Lo-Fi Prototype

The Lo-Fi Prototype pathway requires that you create an initial low-fi prototype, iterate on it by engaging potential users for feedback, and then revising your low-fi prototype based on what you observe or discover in your user feedback.

Pathway Requirements

For this pathway, your team should create three supplementary documents:

A low-fi prototype that clearly shows the four aforementioned interaction requirements. The various parts of the prototype should be saved as an independent PDF file.
An Interface Schematic with annotations/comments that describe what each component of the Interaction Foundation of the interface. An example schematic can be found on Slides 28 and 29 of Lecture 12. The Interaction Schematic should be saved as an independent PDF file.
A revised low-fi prototype that clearly shows how the four aforementioned interaction requirements have been updated after engaging potential users. The various parts of the prototype should be saved as an independent PDF file.

Low-Fi Prototyping Guidelines and Tools

Example low-fi prototypes include:

Paper Prototypes
Wireframes or Mock-Ups

There are no constraints around which tool you can use to create your low-fi prototypes. Here are several openly available tools that you can use to help with your prototyping:

References

Low fidelity prototype testing of the EE app. YouTube Video from UX Playground.
Mobile Application Design : Paper Prototype Video. YouTube Video from Cormac Reidy.

Pathway 2: The Hi-Fi Prototype

The Hi-Fi Prototype pathway requires that you create an initial low-fi prototype, iterate on it by engaging potential users for feedback, and then create a Hi-Fi prototype based on what you observe or discover in your user feedback.

Pathway Requirements

For this pathway, your team should create three supplementary documents:

A Hi-Fi prototype that clearly shows the four aforementioned interaction requirements. The various parts of the prototype should be saved as an independent PDF file.
An Interface Schematic with annotations/comments that describe what each component of the Interaction Foundation of the interface. An example schematic can be found on Slides 28 and 29 of Lecture 12. The Interaction Schematic should be saved as an independent PDF file.
A revised Hi-Fi prototype that clearly shows how the four aforementioned interaction requirements have been updated after engaging potential users. The various parts of the prototype should be saved as an independent PDF file.

Hi-Fi Prototyping Guidelines and Tools

Hi-fi prototypes are prototypes that very closely resemble the interface that users would use. They can be high-definition mock-ups or implementations of your intelligent interface that are fully implemented or implemented through simulated means. For Hi-Fi prototypes, you may simulate the following:

Database interactions, e.g. querying for information, etc.
Intelligent behavior, e.g. simulating a recommender system

An example of a Hi-Fi prototype is the Volflix starter code that you received for Project 2. The Volflix UI was functional, despite simulating "intelligent recommendations" with a static set of data being returned from the server. There are no constraints around how you create your Hi-Fi prototypes. If you choose to implement a hi-fi prototype, it is recommended that you use HTML, CSS, JavaScript for your prototype. You may also use CSS frameworks and libraries (e.g. Bootstrap, Material UI, etc) to build interfaces that are stylized nicely.

References

Pathway 3: The Hybrid Prototype

Pathway Requirements

For this pathway, your team should create three supplementary documents:

A low-fi prototype that clearly shows the four aforementioned interaction requirements. The various parts of the prototype should be saved as an independent PDF file.
An Interface Schematic with annotations/comments that describe what each component of the Interaction Foundation of the interface. An example schematic can be found on Slides 28 and 29 of Lecture 12. The Interaction Schematic should be saved as an independent PDF file.
A Hi-Fi prototype that clearly shows how the four aforementioned interaction requirements have been updated after engaging potential users. The various parts of the prototype should be saved as an independent PDF file.

Low-Fi & Hi-Fi Prototyping Guidelines and Tools

Database interactions, e.g. querying for information, etc.
Intelligent behavior, e.g. simulating a recommender system

Lo-Fi Prototype: There are no constraints around which tool you can use to create your low-fi prototypes. Here are several openly available tools that you can use to help with your prototyping:

Hi-Fi Prototype: There are no constraints around how you create your Hi-Fi prototypes. If you choose to implement a hi-fi prototype, it is recommended that you use HTML, CSS, JavaScript for your prototype. You may also use CSS frameworks and libraries (e.g. Bootstrap, Material UI, etc) to build interfaces that are stylized nicely.

References

See the references for P1 and P2.

III. Grading

This milestone is worth 25% of your final project grade. The 25% is calculated like so:

Deliverable	Description	Value
Submission	ZIP file includes presentation file.	5%
	ZIP file includes Pathway Requirement files.	5%
	Pathway Requirement files are appropriate and correct.	10%
Presentation	Presentation includes appropriate information and is rehearsed.	7.5%
	Presentation meets time constraints.	2.5%

The objective of the Milestone 4 (M4) is writing-up the examination of your intelligent interface in a formal document and presenting your findings to the class. Your document should be written with the AAAI 2020 Author Kit. It is advisable that your team write in LaTeX. The easiest way to collaborate on LaTeX documents is through Overleaf.

I. Milestone Requirements

The requirements of this milestone are as follows:

Final Report: Your team must submit a four-page document in the AAAI format, by the due date, that includes the following:

Your document should include five sections:

Introduction: Describe your use-case and why it matters. Summarize what you've done and learned.
Needfinding: Describe your personas and needfinding study.
Prototype: Describe your prototype approach, describe what you learned from engaging potential users, and describe how you iterated.
Future Work: Describe what could follow your prototype work.
Contributions: Describe the contributions of each team member.

Final Presentation: During class time, you will present your work. Your team must prepare a 3-minute presentation that must include six slides:

Slide 1: State your project's title and your team members.
Slide 2: Describe your use-case.
Slide 3: Describe needfinding approach.
Slide 4: Describe your prototype approach.
Slide 5: Describe your iteration approach and what you observed.
Slide 6: Describe what work could follow your findings.

You can use Slide 6 to describe other important aspects tied to your project, such as ethics, interpretability, trust, etc, that you wished you could've explored.

Note: Your report must be submitted by 11:59pm on April 27 via Canvas. Note that it is perfectly permissible to re-use text from prior Milestone submissions for this final report. You should aim to submit a report that is well-written and clearly articulates all aspects of your team's work.

You may also be intersted in several resources, such as:

ShareLaTeX's Table Generator
Overleaf's LaTeX Tools list

II. Grading

This milestone is worth 30% of your final project grade. The 30% is calculated like so:

Deliverable	Description	Value
Final Report	Report presents all required information.	5%
	Report is grammatically well-written.	5%
	Report describes future work that is creative, thoughtful, and relevant.	5%
Presentation	Presentation articulates all aspects of project effectively.	10%
	Presentation meets time constraints.	5%