Final Project Overview

In this course, you will complete a final project. You may work in groups of up to three.

These projects are intended to focus on the frontiers of HCI. They are not a typical human-centered design project, where you apply existing knowledge from HCI to a known problem. Instead, the goal should be to extend our knowledge of HCI in some way. The most successful projects will identify a gap in our knowledge and introduce a new idea to the world of human-computer interaction.

There are several common types of project in this class:

You can choose your own team members. When discussing a potential partnership with someone, you should discuss your background (e.g., programming proficiency or other skills you bring), availability (e.g., do you plan to primarily work evenings or mornings? weekdays or weekends?), motivation level (ambition for a Turing award? Or is this class not your main focus this quarter?), and grading (aiming for a ___). Set a regular meeting schedule. It's important to be honest with your partners up front, and to follow through on commitments you make.

A very good project will be a publishable or nearly-publishable contribution. Below are some examples of previous successful final projects from a similar course (also quarter length) at Stanford (CS 347). Because several of these projects are the eventual publications, their page length may differ from your final deliverable:

Team and Topic Selection

Your first deliverable will be to submit to gradescope your team and topic selection. You can submit one document and add on each member of your team as a group submission. In this document you should indicate your desired project type (e.g. system building or ethnographic study, etc...), the general topic area of interest (i.e. what kind of users and problems you will be looking at) as well as a first attempt at setting out the basic scope of your project. All of these things can be changed later as you work toward the formal project proposal, but starting now I can give you early feedback on your ideas to make sure they are both sufficiently novel and achievable.

Project Proposal

Once you have determined you general topic for your project, you will create and submit a more developed proposal. You will submit to gradescope a document in the standard ACM SIGCONF format. Your proposal should be a maximum of three pages, excluding references (It can be shorter, there is no need to pad! Just make sure it addresses everything in the assignment).

Getting support for proposed projects is an essential component of doing research in any setting. A good heuristic for a proposal it it's ability to answer the Heilmeier Catechism. This consists of 8 questions every proposal should be able to answer, 7 of which are relevant to your project. They are:

In your proposal you should explicitly answer each of these questions, with reference to the existing literature when relevant. In particular be sure to specifically state your plans both for development and evaluation and what kinds of empirical methodology you intend to utilize, including determination of the relevant independent and dependent variables (if using an experimental approach), or the relevant descriptive model being utilized or extended (if using a more observational approach). Finally you should include a brief team coordination plan: What is your team's meeting plan? When and where will you be meeting each other? Who is taking leadership of what? Who will do what if things run behind or someone gets sick, and do team members have other major deadlines this quarter that need to be accounted for? Has everyone agreed that this is a fair division of contributions? Finally you must have a section describing any potential ethical issues, either in the study or in the broader impacts of your proposed work. While you do not need to submit an IRB review for class projects, you should determine what level of IRB scrutiny would be relevant if this work was being done in a full capacity. Include the safeguards you will be taking to ensure all subjects are treated with respect,beneficence, and justice.

Your proposal will be graded based on whether it sufficiently answers the required questions, and presents an idea that is well motivated, well scoped, and well articulated.

Literature Review

After finalizing your general project plan. The next step in a successful project is a literature review to see how other people have addressed similar problems. Using the same template from your proposal, add a section titled Background and Related Work. In this section you will cover 4-5 pieces of published research from peer reviewed venues such as CHI. Remember that arxiv preprints are not peer-reviewed research (although many peer-reviewed papers are also stored on arxiv), nor are blog posts, news articles, or the outputs of large language models. You can peruse the proceedings of CHI directly if you want, or use tools like Google Scholar to find papers of interest, or look at the references sections of other papers that you find or are cited in class or in the textbooks.

For each of the selected papers, summarize their key findings, describe their methodology, and describe their relationship to your project. Papers may be related in a number of different ways such as

Your review will be graded based on:

  1. Sufficient inclusion of relevant peer-reviewed literature.
  2. Thorough summarization and description of the papers showing understanding of their relevance and findings.
  3. Clearly articulated analysis of connection of the papers to your project.

Draft Review

For the final review before the due date, you should focus on the paper itself. While your study may still be ongoing, and analysis incomplete, you can work on structuring out the rest of the final paper. This will involve getting comfortable with the format, the ACM LaTeX template, and the different sections the final paper will need to have. For the draft review you should have a basic outline of all of the required sections (Intro, Background which you should already have essentially complete, Methods, Analysis, Discussion, and Conclusion). In particular your methods section should be close to complete, including diagrams, photos, or other visual aids to fully explain your procedure as well as a table describing your participants. The analysis section should outline the different statistical tests you plan to perform, and include space for (or a sketch of) the plots you plan to use to communicate your findings. This is your last chance to get written explicit feedback on your paper, and so the more detail you include, the better the feedback and the stronger your final paper will be.

Your draft is intended to help make sure you are on the right track towards completing the final paper, and so it does not need to be flawless since you will have time to correct anything in the final paper. In particular, note that it will not be graded, but will be evaluated on whether it showcases sufficient structure, progress, and direction. However, please take particular note of any specific feedback even if you are not docked points, as it will be used to outline the key specs used to evaluate your final version and to point out the most important things you need to do for the final deliverables.

Final deliverables

For your final deliverables you will both be submitting a fully written-up research paper, as well as presenting your findings at the CSC486 Final Research Symposium, March 16th from 1:00PM-4:00PM. You must submit your final paper on Gradescope by 11:59PM on March 15th, the night before the symposium. Of course you very much should be well finished beforehand, and you obviously need plenty of time to prepare your presentation.

Final Paper

Your paper should, like your earlier intermediate artifacts, utilize the correct LaTeX template. It should include all of the relevant sections described in the lecture on scientific publishing:

  1. Abstract
  2. Introduction (You should have most of this done already)
  3. Background (You should have most of this done already)
  4. Methods
  5. Results
  6. Discussion
  7. Conclusion

Make sure to include exhaustive detail on your experimental process and procedure (including photographs if possible) and detail about your sample population. Include appropriate tables and figures when relevant to communicate the data you have collected. While there is no page/word limit or minimum, generally I expect the final papers to be around 4000-5000 words (not including references).

Finally, here are some tips that I have found useful in paper writing in the past:

Your paper will be graded based on:

Final Presentation

For your final presentation during the CSC486 Final Research Symposium on March 16th from 1:00PM-4:00PM, you will have 10 minutes to present your teams work, followed by 5 minutes for questions and answers. You should be sure to include in your presentation the justification and background for your project, a thorough description of your study design and procedure, summary of your analysis, and discussion of the implications of any relevant or significant findings (essentially every main section and figure in your paper should be represented in your presentation).

You must submit your slides to Gradescope by 11:59PM on March 15th. Your grade for the presentation will not be based off of how pretty your slides are, but rather how well you are able to explain the key findings from your project, as well as your ability to effectively respond to relevant questions.