Weeks 3 and 4 (May 16-27)

Firstly, I want to apologize for not updating this blog more often. I will try to keep on top of it! 

The last 2 weeks have been very productive! I did 2 iterations of pre-study interview questions, which are almost finalized. I have done 1 iteration of post-study interview questions, which need a bit more work. I was not as concerned with the post-interview because I had to get the webpage up and running, and to do that I needed to flesh out the questions that will be in the online diary, so I  did 2 iterations of those as well. 

As for the webpage, I abandoned Javascript and servlets in favor of HTML and PHP. I was having a bit of trouble connecting to the database the way it was, but after the switch everything is connecting great and the webpage is almost finished! It looks a bit plain, nothing fancy, so I might try to add a little cosmetic flair to it this week. This is the first time any web code I have written will be live, so its pretty exciting for me!

This week, I plan to do another iteration of the post-study interview questions, add some cosmetic improvements to the webpage, and make any changes to the webpage that are needed after Andrea takes a look at it. I might also look at how we will start recruiting for the study, since the interview questions and the webpage are almost finished.

Week 2 (May 9-13)

This week, I continued to explore the existing research on IIS's and explanations by reading 1-2 research papers on related topics every day. I worked on the diary questions and experimental design a bit more, but by the end of the week I felt like I might have gotten as far on that as I could without some feedback from Dr. Bunt, who is currently in Vancouver at CHI. I also started to work on the code for the website that we will be using in the diary study.

A lot of my focus this week went towards working on the webpage. Even though we don't have the details completely fleshed out yet I wanted to start this a bit early since I only have a little bit of experience in web programming, and I wanted to get a head start on (re)learning html, servlets, and Javascript in case we need to to anything dynamic. Specifically, I worked on things like login screens, and hooking up the webpage to a database. I did run into a bit of a roadblock here because I had an issue with accessing MS SQL Server from my computer, and I had to wait for the IT guy to have time to come help me with that. 

Week 1 (May 2-6)

I started at the HCI lab at the University of Manitoba on Monday, May 2. The first day was all about getting keys, accounts, and computers set up, and getting introduced to the project that I will be working on for the summer (see below for a description of the project I will be working on). The rest of the week, I was reading papers related to the project, and trying to get up to speed on the topics involved. I also had a decision to make regarding the avenue of research I wanted to take regarding this project - whether I wanted to focus on creating a diary study to gather more user data in a longer term field study, or focus on creating prototypes for how to give users the explanations of how the applications they are using make their recommendations. Ultimately, I chose to go the route of the diary study.

To get started, I needed to gather a bit more research of field studies completed on similar topics (of which there are relatively few). I also started to brainstorm some ideas of questions that we would need to ask users in the study, and started outlining the general experimental design.

My Project:

I will be working on extending some previous work that Dr. Bunt has worked on regarding Intelligent Interactive Systems (IIS's), specifically ones that assist users in making low-cost decisions, and how these systems are perceived and understood by their users. Dr. Bunt is also interested in discovering whether or not explanations of how these IIS's work are desired by users, and whether or not these explanations help users make decisions  based on the recommendations of the IIS, or improve user interactions with the systems themselves.

To further this stream of research, I am working on implementing and running a diary study. This will involve generating and refining the questions to be included in the diary, determining how long the study will run for, coding the online diary system, figuring out who we should recruit for the study (and where we should recruit), how participants will be compensated for their participation, and possibly performing some data analysis on the results if there is time.