Assignment 2 - ISU570 Human Computer Interaction - Spring 2008

"Finding and critiquing two recent papers"

Posted 1/6/2008. Due in class, Friday, February 22nd.

Professor Futrelle, CCIS, Northeastern University

version of 1/6/2008


Introduction to Assignment 2

IMPORTANT: Your two papers should be ones published in the last five years, not any earlier. You may well find well-known papers published before that. If you do, find more recent papers that refer to the well-known ones. You can find the more recent ones using Google Scholar or CiteSeer.

IMPORTANT: One of your two papers must be retrieved through a Snell library link to a journal or a collection such as the ACM or IEEE.

This assignment will give you a chance to look into the research/review literature of Interaction Design. You'll be able to learn about topics in a way that goes beyond the way in which they're presented in your textbook. You will track down two papers, most likely on the same topic, from a high-quality journal or conference, papers published in the last five years. Pay particular attention to the rules about formatting and handing in your assignment, as described on the introductory Assignments page. This assignment #2 is Due in class, Friday, February 22nd, along with a hardcopy of each of the two papers you analyzed.

Your goal for this assignment

Briefly, your goal is to find and discuss papers that augment topics in our textbook or focus more deeply on topics in the book, or present experimental results on interaction design and users thereof, or papers that disagree with some parts of the book.

How to find papers

Snell Library has hardcopy and/or electronic subscriptions to thousands of journals. In addition, its links to ACM and IEEE publications can lead you to proceedings of conferences, such as the premiere HCI conference called CHI, e.g., CHI '07 has been published by the ACM. Two other excellent sites are Google Scholar, http://scholar.google.com/ and CiteSeer.IST http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/. Both of these sites allow you to assess the quality of papers based on the number of people who have cited each paper. Picking a topic or a paper mentioned in the textbook will get your started.

How to write up your assignment

Write up your assignment very much in the way you did Assignment #1. But for the most part, there's no need to put figures in your assignment, because typically there will be figures your can (and should) refer to that are in the two papers you are analyzing.

What to hand in on Friday, February 22nd

Your paper, plus a copy of each of the two papers you analyzed.


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