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.