Opening Skinner's Box Blog

Chapter 1
This chapter was about B.F Skinner's experiments and what the author thought about them. The author also conveys Skinner as a crazy guy that raised his children in boxes. She then explained Skinner's experiments from different points of view and explained that overall his contribution to science was actually a really good thing. I personally did not like the way the author wrote this chapter and the information in it. She was kind of all over the place in her writing and although the content was interesting it was sometimes hard to follow what she was saying because of how she wrote it.

Chapter 2
In this chapter the author educates the reader on Stanley Milgram's experiments on obedience which was the main topic of the book we read right before this. He had people "electrocute" people and saw how many people would not obey under different circumstances. The author finds people that participated in the study and asked questions about their lives so far since the study. It was interesting to see how the participants lived since the experiment

Chapter 3
In this chapter a psychologist by the name of Rosenhan decided to see what would happen if completely sane people got into a mental hospital and said they were fine after getting admitted. This chapter was actually pretty interesting to me, the results fascinated me. The fact that completely sane people would not be allowed to leave was eye opening to the way hospitals like that work. Also it was funny to see how the hospitals responded, they told Rosenhan to send more people and they would be able to find them easily now that they new he was sending people. The funny part was that they found a number of people over the allotted time period and Rosenhan had actually sent no one to the hospitals.

Chapter 4
 It is crazy to hear about the murder that occurred in the first part of this chapter, people not lending aid to a woman who was crying for help. The author explains the 5 stages of lending help. They are: notice an event is occurring, interpret the event as one that needs help, assume responsibility, decide what action to take, and then take that action.

Chapter 5
This chapter was all about Cognitive Dissonance which is something along the lines of someone would change ones behavior to fit their beliefs rather than the other way around which is what people thought. The author starts of by describing an event that happened where people formed a cult surrounding the supposed end of the world. She explains how the cult came about and how someone sent people in to study the cult and their behaviors when they found that the world was in fact not ending.

Chapter 6
Chapter 6 was all about Harry Harlow and his experiments with monkeys and how they formed relationships with mothers. He had surrogate mothers that were made of different materials, the purpose of this was to see how the young monkeys would react to a different mother than a regular monkey. It was interesting to see how the monkeys would react to the different surrogate mothers and what they would do in response.

Chapter 7
The main focus of this chapter was addiction, the author goes over several different studies on addiction that were administered on both humans and rats. Overall the author comes to no definitive conclusion about addiction but has some insight on it from the studies.

Chapter 8
This was one of the two chapters about memories, in this one Loftus the main mention of this chapter thought that memories were actually a bad representation of what actually happened, she even thinks that memories can be implanted in people. This theory was pretty interesting as I always thought that my memories were pretty accurate in what happened to me.

Chapter 9
The other chapter about memories, this one starts of with the author telling a story about a guy who had his hippocampus sucked out to cure his epilepsy but ultimately losing his short term memory. She goes on to talk about a scientist who discovered the chemical responsible for connections between neurons.

Chapter 10
This chapter is all about psychosurgery, which is the different surgeries that deal with the brain and things like that. It goes over lobotomies and other common surgeries performed. The author states that although these are dangerous procedures that are very reliable when it comes down to it. This chapter was pretty interesting since I didn't know how the idea of a lobotomy came about and how it was discovered. 

Gang Leader for a Day

Chapter 1
This was a good introduction to the book, it helped me get into the story and want to read further. He had a way of pulling me into the story with how he got into the whole predicament on the stairs.

Chapter 2
I was surprised that J.T would allow him to come back and continue his study. It was interesting to see how Sudhir went about conducting his research, how he told J.T it was a biography about him but he didn't even know what he was going to write. Also the end of chapter 2 was crazy since J.T beat up C-Note and Sudhir saw everything.

Chapter 3
This chapter had a lot of information in it, from the lady screaming at the store owner to Sudhir finding another person to talk to about the gang activity in Aultry. How J.T reacted to Sudhir finding someone else to talk to was actually kind of surprising, I thought he wouldn't care but he ended up making Sudhir not go to a certain meeting just cause he was there with Aultry and not him.

Chapter 4
This was one of the most interesting chapters, Sudhir got to lead the gang for a day. He didn't get to do everything of course but he did get to make a few decisions. I was surprised to see how much went into being a gang leader and getting instructions to people.

Chapter 5
This chapter was kind of surprising, it was weird to see what Ms. Bailey does and what kind of power she has over some people. It's almost like she is her own version of J.T, she is kind of like the leader of the tenants and collects what she has to when she has to.

Chapter 6
Sudhir continued to surprise me with how naive he could be, he interview a bunch of people about how much money they made and how they went about making it and then he told Ms. Bailey and J.T how much they made. People said that this was on the side so it should have been obvious that they didn't let them know everything about their financial situations.

Chapter 7
I was shocked to see that this was the first chapter where someone actually got shot, hearing the stories of gangs and stuff I assumed that someone would have gotten shot sooner. At the end I really wanted to know how the big meeting he was supposed to go to was going to go.

Chapter 8
Chapter 8 was just a closing chapter to me, it was one of the more boring chapters. It was basically just telling the reader what everyone ended up doing.

Book Reaction
Overall I thought this was a very good read, a lot better than what we have read so far in this class. It was interesting and I actually wanted to read the whole book to see what happend to the author. He presented his work very well and really pulled the reader into the story and helped the reader empathize with some of the characters. What I mean is that even though some of these people were in gangs I still could see where they were coming from and why they did the things that they did. I liked the way the author presented his findings, he created a story that the reader would be drawn into then along the way he would tell you his findings throughout the entire book and I just thought that it was a pretty good way to do that.

I did think that he wasn't entirely truthful in his book, some of the things that he did were just way too naive for someone to do. It was like he played off on that and just ran with it, like when he was surprised that J.T beat up C-Note, J.T was a leader of a gang in Chicago there was bound to be some violence and he really should have just expected it rather than be shocked by it. Other than that the book in my opinion was one of the best books we have read in this class so far and I probably would have read it outside of class had I picked it up and started reading it randomly.

Ethnography Idea

I was thinking that I could do one on people who are hardcore/professional gamers, people that make money to play games and things like that. Also I was thinking it would be cool to look into people that are really into the electronic dance scene, people that go to EDC, Lights all Night, and day glow.

Homework #7

It was pretty fun doing the videos of our set activity. I was more intrigued than I thought I would be, it was interesting to think how different people could do the same task so differently. Also it was cool to see how people reacted to someone wearing a hat with an obvious camera on, you could always tell when someone was looking straight into the camera. Watching my own video was weird since you could see how I walked and what I looked at in the process of doing our activity. It was also cool to hear what was being said at the time and the different sounds people heard even though we will not hear that in class when we see the videos. The only thing that sucked about doing our videos was we had to change our plan since the place we were originally going to go to was closed. With that though I thought it would have been interesting to go ahead and do your own thing and not tell the next person the place was closed and see how people treated the situation of the place being closed, whether they went somewhere else or they went back to the group to find out what they were supposed to do.

Things that I think you could notice that are non-obvious are the way someone walks or you can tell when someone is short or tall no matter where the camera was. You can also notice what they are looking at to maybe tell what gender they are. The speed of the walk could also be key along with where they are looking whether it was in front of them or down or somewhere else. You could also look at how people reacted to the person recording and whether or not they were familiar with a place. 

All in all I think looking at the classes videos will be fun and figuring out who is who will be a challenge. Using the non-obvious things in the video will be tough for some people I think, including myself, but will be entertaining for everyone 

Homework #5: Ethnography

The first 2 articles were just describing and defining what ethnography was, the 3rd one was about a woman named Margaret Mead who used Ethnography to write a book about a culture in Samoa. Since we had already talked about what an ethnography were in essence in class the first 2 were pretty much just refreshers on what it was. The second was was a little more interesting since it was about a book someone wrote and how she went about gathering information for it.

The first article was just a page with different definitions for ethnography from different sources like Merriam-Webster and The New Oxford American Dictionary. They all pretty much said the same thing about ethnography, that it was a process in which people try to understand a society that they may not be familiar with.

The second article was just the wiki page about ethnography going over the definition and the basics of ethnography. It also have the insight from different fields of study and how ethnography pertained to that field. It also elaborated on the ethics and ways to evaluate ethnography.

The last article was the most interesting as it was about a book that was produced using ethnography. The book she wrote was top book in the world of anthropology for a while, even though a guy named Derek Freeman said her work was false.

All of these articles were pretty interesting to read and really gave me a different look at what all ethnography entailed and how it has been used in different fields of study. It was interesting to see how Mead gathered her research and how it was received by different people.

Book Reading #2: Emotional Design

In the book emotional design the author presented the idea of design based on how things look and the fact that if they looked better they would be more usable. This seemed to me to be a complete opposite idea of what the same author presented in the book Design of Everyday Things. In the the previous book I remember reading that the author thought that making things aesthetically pleasing was not the way to go when designing things for the user, but in this book Chapter one is all about designing things that way and the pros of it.

The main idea of this is that emotions are a big factor when people are thinking about ways to solve things. The author mentions studies where people were found to brainstorm/problem solve better when in a good mood rather than when they were in a bad mood. The purpose of mentioning that was because he hypothesized that people would be able to figure out something they were getting wrong easier if the thing they were working with made them happy. He also mentioned a study about ATMs where the buttons were arranged "attractively", the study found that people like the ones where the buttons were arranged in an attractive way rather than a normal way.

The main difference in the 2 book written by this author was the way he said to go about designing things and the way he said people should be able to figure things out. In Design of Everyday Things he said that things should come natural to people and that designers should think of that rather than what the device looked like. He even came up with examples that looked good but were terrible designs. In this one chapter of Emotional Design he stated that attractive things work well, which to me means that designers should focus on what the device looks like rather than the usability for the user.

The Design of Everyday Things

Chapter 1
Chapter 1 was a very good introduction to the book and what the author was going to talk about. He made the first few pages very interesting to keep the reader going. When reading through the chapter the examples of he made for good and bad designs made sense once I thought about it and read more. The terms in the chapter were very informative and made it easy to follow along

Chapter 2
The falsely blaming yourself section of the chapter was very eye opening, I realized that people do that all the time and even I do it. Learned helplessness and taught helplessness were terms I had never heard of but upon reading the definition and explanation made complete sense.  It was also interesting to see how the author explained how people do things, the seven stages of action that he explained was pretty accurate.

Chapter 3
The penny thing towards the beginning of the chapter was pretty cool, I actually couldn't remember what the penny looked like I had to get one to see which one was right. Overall this chapter was a good read, it was interesting reading about how people retrieve things from memory and when that is needed and not needed. The three aspects to mental models, design, user;s, and the system image was interesting to read.

Chapter 4
Before reading this chapter I had no idea that constraints were put in place to help people know what to do, let alone that there were several different kinds of constraints. After reading the chapter I started seeing the different types of constraints in everyday things. Like keyholes, they all have physical constraints, normally if the key does not fit it to the key hole then it's obviously not for that door.

Chapter 5
There is a difference between slips and mistakes, mistakes are making a wrong goal and slips are just messing up on the way to the correct goal. I was surprised to see the amount of different kind slips that were possible. The other main topic, human cognition, was very interesting to to read about. The deep vs shallow and the narrow vs wide concepts were explained well with the chess/tic tac toe example.

Chapter 6
Saying that there was a struggle for designers to make their product more aesthetically pleasing or make it more usable made perfect sense to me. It must be hard for someone making a product to think about the user and what they think looks good vs what they would think is easy to use.

Chapter 7
This chapter was a good overview of the main points in the book and a little further explanation of a few of them. This was a very good idea by the author since there was so many different things in the book that were helpful and an entire chapter on the summation of all those things was good and made it easier to remember some of the more important points he was trying to make.

Good Designs

I use glasses everyday whether it they are sunglasses or eyeglasses. They are pretty simple you put them on and they stay on with the thingys in the back. Designed well since its really really difficult to mess up when using your glasses.

Mouses are used throughout the world by millions of people, clearly its made well since so many people have adopted the use of it. Simple 2 button 1 wheel design makes operating a mouse pretty simple. Left click to click on something, right click to bring up a menu, a flick of the wheel will make scrolling easier.

There is one of these at work it makes brewing coffee extremely easy. Since the one at work is hooked up to a water supply all you have to do is pick whatever coffee you want and press the size of cup you have and hit brew, then you are a few seconds away from a freshly brewed single cup of coffee. The things that the coffee are in make it easy to brew the coffee, they are all one size and you just throw them away after the brewing is done. This is a great design as it walks the user through the process of brewing a cup of coffee and makes it hard to mess it up.

Every guy has a wallet, it makes organizing money, gift cards, credit cards, and other things very easy. It has separate places for money and cards so its designed well. There isn't really a wrong way to use a wallet so in my opinion its pretty well designed

Rubber bands can be used in many different ways, its impossible to use them in a wrong way, and they come  in many different sizes. If that's not a good design for something I don't know what is.

Bad Designs

When Nintendo came out with the N64 they shipped with it the N64 controller of course. When I first got this system I was expecting a newer variation of the SNES controller, which had 2 shoulder buttons, a d-pad, and 4 buttons that were used for various things, what I got was 2 shoulder buttons, a joystick, a d-pad, 6 buttons, and a hidden button under the controller. This was poor designed in my opinion even though I eventually got used to it, it was very bulky and figuring out how to hold it depended on what game you were playing which makes no sense to me, I feel you should hold it the same way for each game.

Universal remotes are designed to make life easier and they kind of accomplish that since they do help when you don't have a remote for the TV at hand, but what isn't great about them is the fact that the buttons don't always line up with what you want to do with you TV. The remote is made to be used with every type of TV but different TVs have different functions so the remote can't of course have all the buttons needed to operate your TV to its max potential. So even though it is a little helpful the universal remote isn't particularly designed well. 

Medians are not what I mean by the picture, what I mean is roads with medians. Think of Texas AVE for a minute and think about how when you first got here and didn't know any better you were constantly passing your destination and having to turn around because there was a median in between you and where you wanted to be. I think that Texas could have been structured a lot better in the sense of thinking of where the driver would want to go and what would  be in their way like a median for instance, it's just annoying to have to turn around because I passed where I wanted to go and I know it happens to everyone because every time it's move in weekend you always see freshman turning around on Texas.

 This is what the doors in my house look like, there is a lock on the inside of course but there is also a hole on the other side that someone can stick a finger in to unlock. So if you want some privacy and you lock the door someone can easily unlock the door. Granted it does help if you accidentally lock the door but if you want to keep it locked someone can easily prevent that.

This is a cup holder in one of my friends cars, as you can see you have to move the little black thing to put your drink in the holder. It was very annoying and problematic to keep having to pull that thing every time I took a drink to put it back.

Overall Summary

Homework 3

            This could have been a very interesting paper had the author written it very differently. I did not like the style he wrote the paper and the way he explained his points. This paper was about minds brains and programs. What the paper was about was the author attempting to differentiate between strong and weak AI and explaining what he thought would be strong AI. Weak AI is mainly just a tool but according to the author strong AI is a mind and can learn and think for itself. He starts the paper by explaining in detail what he thinks the definition of strong AI. He mentions a something about humans understanding stories; he tells a story about a man in a restaurant and explains that even if something is not said in a story a human would be able to infer that something happened and that strong AI would be able to do the same thing.

            After that he explains a way that would test the theory, the way to test it is called the Chinese room. What that is is lock a person into a room who does not understand Chinese and you give them papers with Chinese writing on them. Then after this first batch of papers you are given a second batch but with this one you are given a sheet of rules on how to match up the symbols in English. To someone sitting outside the room it looks as if you understand Chinese and are able to read the stories that are presented. The point of this is to show the basic way programs would work in “understanding” things. In this situation you are the program, matching symbols with a list of rules and the user is the person giving you those symbols and rules.

            After this example and explanation the author decides to poll different people in the AI field as to what strong AI is exactly. Then he basically shoots everyone who replied down saying that he was right and there was no way that they were right. At one point he says “This objection really is only worth a short reply” and gives a very short paragraph of how he was right and that the reply was just pointless.

            The objection he said that to, in my opinion was actually one of the better ones, what it said was "How do you know that other people understand Chinese or anything else? Only by their behavior, now the computer can pass the behavioral tests as well as they can (in principle), so if you are going to attribute cognition to other people you must in principle also attribute it to computers.” This statement actually makes sense to me, what I get from it is that you don’t see the people understanding what you are saying or in what language you know by their behavior that they do in fact understand you and if a computer can do that then that means that the computer is understanding you.

            Overall I didn’t really like this paper, it was not well written and the author seemed like he didn’t care what the other people he polled said they were wrong and he was right. So that kind of took away from the paper and made it not a very good read for me.

Paper Reading #6: Implanted user interfaces

Introduction
Title: Implanted user interfaces
Author Bios:

• Christian Holz-Autodesk Research, Toronto, Ontario, Canada & Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam, Germany
• Tovi Grossman-Autodesk Research, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• George Fitzmaurice-Autodesk Research, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• Anne Agur-University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Summary

In this paper they discussed implanting user interfaces underneath human skin. They went over 4 of the main obstacles that are coupled with implanting devices under the skin, they were input, output, communication, and power supply. They came up with several solutions for each category and tested them on a cadaver. For input they tested a button, pressure sensor and a tap sensor. For output they tested LED, a vibration motor, and a speaker. They only tested Bluetooth for communication even though they though WiFi would work also. For a power source they had an inductive charger recharging a battery. This was not the actual study, all of this testing was to make a prototype that could be tested on users. The prototype was placed under artificial skin and users tested it out while doing other activities.

Related Work

The papers they referenced in the paper were more or less explanations of how this is a novel idea and things that explained an idea that they had in the paper so there are not many papers on related work to implanted user interfaces. There are papers on user interfaces but none on implanted user interfaces even in the paper they say "Despite these potential benefits there had been little or no investigation of implanted user interfaces from an HCI perspective."

• A miniaturized tunable microstrip antenna for wireless communications with implanted medical devices
• Wireless monitoring of electrode-tissues interfaces for long term characterization
• Towards an activity-aware wearable computing platform based on an egocentric interaction model

Evaluation

The way they evaluated the actual study was they had 4 users wear the artificial skin with the prototype underneath it and had them go out and public and do certain things. The prototype would interrupt them with a game that it had set up and they would try to get a high score. After about an hour they asked the user how easy it was to use the device and which input/output devices they liked the most. So the overall evaluation was qualitative, they asked the users what they thought of the device. What they found was that people disliked the pressure sensor and the LED was hard to see in the light.

Discussion

 I thought that the idea of implanted user interfaces was very interesting. I pictured people walking around texting on their arm, or checking email in their hand. They explained in the paper that this was a novel idea, people had looked into worn interfaces and things like that but never implanted interfaces that provided some sort of feedback.  

Paper Reading #4: Profanity use in online communities

Introduction
Title: Profanity use in online communities
Author Bios:

• Sara Sood-Pomona College, Claremont, CA, USA
• Judd Antin-Yahoo! Research, Santa Clara, California, United States
• Elizabeth Churchill-Yahoo! Research, Santa Clara, California, United States

Related Work

• Designing for improved social responsibility, user participation and content in on-line communities
• Automatic satire detection: are you having a laugh?
• A life-cycle perspective on online community success
• A multilevel analysis of sociability, usability, and community dynamics in an online health community
• User loyalty and online communities: why members of online communities are not faithful

From what I read this isn't really a novel idea, people have known that online communities have bad systems that regulate profanity and things like that.

Summary

In this study the authors took comments from a now non-existent website (Yahoo! Buzz) and had people comment on whether or not there was profanity in the comment or if it was an insult and if it was an insult who was it towards. They took about 6500 comments from that website and had about 200 people go through a few at a time and answer those 3 things, they had a thing called gold comments that had correct labels on them so they would know if the people were confused or not doing the study right. If they got too many of the gold comments wrong they would throw out their data. After they got the results from that they took lists from a couple of sites of profane language and setup a detection system so they could test how accurate the systems people employ now are. 

Evaluation  

To evaluate they took the answers from the people actually going through each comment and compared that data to the system that they set up to go through the comments. I would say that this is a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods since they got data by asking questions and compared the data using numbers. They found that the systems that websites use today aren't really as good as they need to be since they miss things that are spelled wrong or when people use symbols to finish spelling the words. They also explained why the current systems are not adequate. 

Discussion

This was a little interesting but not much since it is obvious everywhere on the internet that people easily get by systems that ate supposed to find profanity and get rid of it. It was interesting to see why they miss those things though, I didn't know that they use set list that rarely get updated with the new slang that comes out all the time which makes sense since you always see people finding new ways to insult other people on forums and things like that. It also didn't seem very novel as they mentioned people who had already gone over some of this stuff.

Paper Reading #5: Looking glass: a field study on noticing interactivity of a shop window

Introduction
Title: Looking glass: a field study on noticing interactivity of a shop window
Author Bios:

• Jörg Müller-TU Berlin, Berlin, Germany
• Robert Walter-TU Berlin, Berlin, Germany
• Gilles Bailly-TU Berlin, Berlin, Germany
• Michael Nischt-TU Berlin, Berlin, Germany
• Florian Alt-University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

Related Work

• Through the looking glass: you can play against your own reflection
• The Looking Glass IDE for learning computer programming through storytelling and history exploration: conference workshop
• Alice on both sides of the looking glass: Performance, installations, and the real/virtual continuityThrough the looking glass: the use of lenses as an interface tool for Augmented Reality interfaces
• Through the looking glass: the use of lenses as an interface tool for Augmented Reality interfaces
• Through the looking glass of immaterial labor
• Through the looking glass: game worlds as representations and views from elsewhere
• Chained displays: configurations of public displays can be used to influence actor-, audience-, and passer-by behavior
• How to evaluate public displays
• Interactive television: new genres, new format, new content
• Exploring factors that influence the combined use of mobile devices and public displays for pedestrian navigation

This work doesn't seem very novel as there are a lot of papers out on this subject, but they did talk about related work well in the paper.

Summary

This study was mainly about seeing what factors contributed to noticing the interactivity of something. They had 3 separate studies from which they collected data. They had a pre-study where they set up a prototype at a university to see how people would notice and what they would do. What they got from the pre-study was that people tend to interact in groups and they stopped to interact rather than doing it as they passed by. The next study was a lab study where they just tried to see how long it would take for someone to realize that a display was interactive. The final study was a field study where they set up a interactive display in a public area for 3 weeks and changing it a little each week to see how different user representations effected the time it took to realize the interactivity.

Evaluation

In the paper they said that they collected both qualitative and quantitative data. Qualitative from observations, interviews, and video recording. Quantitative from complete interaction logs and videos from a depth camera. What they found was that between a mirror image, a silhouette, and an avatar representation the mirror image was the thing that got the most attention the quickest. They also found that if one person starts interacting that more and more people will start to interact with the display since they see that it is interactive so easily. 

Discussion

This topic was very interesting, it didn't seem very novel as there findings seem to have been obvious. It takes awhile for people to notice something is interactive and if they see someone else interacting with it then of course they are going to go play with it too, it seems like human nature to me. The only novel part was that  instead of having something on the screen saying that it was interactive they tried to see how long it would take without that. Overall it was a very interesting study though, I would like to see what else they do with things like this.

 

Paper Reading #3: Protecting artificial team-mates: more seems like less

Introduction
Title: Protecting artificial team-mates: more seems like less
Author Bios: Tim Merritt National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore
Kevin McGee National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

Summary

In this study they had participants play a video game with a AI and then had them play with a presumed human(PH) which was actually the same AI doing the same exact thing. The purpose was to see how the players played when they thought they were on a team with an AI versus when they thought they were on a team with another human. The point of the game was to have both players touch the gunner in the middle, they didn't have to touch at the same time but both had to touch to move on to the next level. The gunner scanned in a circle until it reached a player and then fired, the player could distract the gunner with the 'W' key or they could run into the field of vision of the gunner. What the study was on was how much the player hit the 'W' key to protect the AI or PH.

Related work

• A Failure of Imagination: How and Why People Respond Differently to Human and Computer Team-Mates.
• Proactive information exchanges based on the awareness of teammates' information needs
• Human-centered design in synthetic teammates for aviation: The challenge for artificial intelligence
• What we have here is a failure of companionship: communication in goal-oriented team-mate games
• Choosing human team-mates: perceived identity as a moderator of player preference and enjoyment
• Real-time team-mate AI in games: a definition, survey, & critique
• Using artificial team members for team training in virtual environments
• Can computers be teammates?
• The media equation: how people treat computers, television, and new media like real people and places
• Are computers scapegoats?: attributions of responsibility in human-computer interaction

This paper is novel as there is no other paper on this specific topic. They did reference papers correctly 

Evaluation

To evaluate the study they used several questions with a Likert-type scale so it was a quantitative and subjective approach to evaluate the results. They also used a qualitative question asking who the player protected more and why. What they found was that even though players protected the AI more they said in the questionnaire that they protected the human more. They then asked the Likert-type questions to observe stereotypes  and personal pressures. They also had players watch videos of 2 AI, 1 AI and 1 PH, and explain their behaviors in an open response so they could see how the players thought a human acted over how an AI acted.

Discussion

I thought this contribution was actually pretty interesting, since when starting the paper I thought that the players would naturally protect the human players more but was proven wrong when the opposite happened. Also they fact that the players thought they were protecting the humans more too even though they in fact protected the AI more. It is novel since no one has ever studied this field in this way.

Paper Reading #2: Touché: enhancing touch interaction on humans, screens, liquids, and everyday objects

Introduction
Title: Touché: enhancing touch interaction on humans, screens, liquids, and everyday objects
Author Bios: Munehiko Sato-Disney Research, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA & The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
Ivan Poupyrev-Disney Research, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Chris Harrison-Disney Research, Pittsburgh & Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States

Summary

What they did in this paper was they tried to find a different form of capacitive touch sensing, they called it Touché. Instead of using the normal capacitive touch sensing they used a novel form called Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing (SFCS). This is different because rather than having a conductive object excited by a signal at a fixed frequency it uses a range of frequencies which would let them measure a lot more data points. Using this they testing how Touché could be used in the world today and how it could improve touch based systems. They even tested making liquid a touch surface, seeing how many fingers were in the water or seeing if only the surface was touched. They tested 5 domains with their new system: making everyday objects gesture sensitive, sensing human bi manual hand gestures, sensing human body configuration, enhancing traditional touch surfaces, and sensing interaction with unusual materials.

Related Work


Evaluation
They used a qualitative unbiased approach to the evaluation. They had the people train gestures and then proceeded to see if Touché could pick up that certain gesture with slight differences and measure the accuracy that way. They then took out the worst gesture to see how good the system could be at different things. They tested a door knob, body configuration, enhancing a touchscreen, on-body gesture sensing, and touching liquids.

Discussion
I thought their work was very interesting and extremely novel, I have never heard of any system able to see if you are touching a liquid or if your hand is submerged. I think the research presented in this paper will help innovate the touch sensing world and make way for new ways to tell a computer what to do and what gestures can be recognized.

Paper reading #1: Oh, dear Stacy! Social interaction, elaboration, and Learning with Teachable agents

Introduction
Title: Oh, dear Stacy! Social interaction, elaboration, and Learning with Teachable agents.
Author bios:
Amy Ogan- is a postdoctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute. She works on virtual agents for learning with other students
Samantha Finklestein- is a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute.
Elijah Mayfield- is a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute.
Claudia D'Adamo-
Noboru Matsuada
Justine Cassell

Summary

What they did was basically observe how students from different grades interacted with a teachable agent that could supply a few different social responses to the child. They were trying to see what would have the most learning gain and how the way the children interacted with Stacy affected their learning gains. The hypothesis was: how do increased cognitive reflection moves, inside-system vs. outside-system language and increased social moves correlate with learning. The agent Stacy was to be taught linear equations from the child and the authors would observe how the child conversed with Stacy, if they called the agent "she" or "her" it was inside, if it was called "it" it was outside. They then evaluated the results by comparing how the student talked to Stacy and how much she learned or didn't learn and how much they learned.

Related Work

The work was novel and the way the authors talked about related work was appropriate and helped with the overview of what has already been looked at.

Designing learning by teaching agents: The Betty's Brain system

Virtual peers as partners in storytelling and literacy learning

A social-cognitive framework for pedagogical agents as learning companions

Measuring self-regulating learning skills through social interactions in a teachable agent environment

Modeling student behaviors in an open-ended learning environment.

A Science Learning Environment using a Computational Thinking Approach

Identifying Learning Behaviors by Contextualizing Differential Sequence Mining with Action Features and Performance Evolution.

Supporting Student Learning using Conversational Agents in a Teachable Agent Environment.

Relating Student Performance to Action Outcomes and Context in a Complex, Choice-Rich Learning Environment.

Identifying Students Characteristic Learning Behaviors in an Intelligent Tutoring System Fostering Self-Regulated Learning.

All of these papers do with learning from a teachable agent or interactive program, but none of them talk about what the authors of this paper talk about. Which is how social interaction can affect learning from a teachable agent

Evaluation
Their results were evaluated systemically, they took all of the data they collected from each child put it together and created a coding scheme that was applied to the things the children said aka "utterances" as they were teaching Stacy. The categories the utterances were put in were: a social utterance, a tutoring move, an alignment bases pronoun use, a cognitive assessment,a correctness evaluation and they also had a none category. Once they put all the utterances into the right category they looked for correlations between the categories and the learning gains. They also looked at shifts in behavior and how specific behaviors in the chilled affected upcoming alignment on a turn by turn basis. Since they took down the words the child said I think it was also evaluated quantitatively with a little bit of qualitative since they measured the learning gains with a pre and post test and found a normalized gain.

Discussion
I thought that the work and contribution were very interesting, I didn't think that teaching someone helped you learn but when I thought about it it made perfect sense. Also I didn't know that there were teachable agents that help with this. The way they evaluated the results seemed to be pretty appropriate to me since I couldn't think of another way to look at the data they acquired. The contribution was novel in my opinion the field has been researched but not in the way these authors did, the overall contribution should help with the future development of teachable agents to help kids learn in a different way.

Introduction

Email: gdbrown09@gmail.com
Class: 5th year Senior
I'm taking this class because I thought that it would be pretty interesting. I don't really bring much experience about this particular field to this class the only experience I have is the classes I've taken up to this course. Professional life goals are to have a career that I love and won't get tired of going to everyday, personal life goals are pretty much the same as most people good job, family, good house. After I graduate I want to get a job in the CS field so that I can start getting experience that will go toward getting the eventual career that I want. In 10 years I hope to have a good job and still be on my own in any city really. I have no idea what the next technology will be but I'm sure it will be great. I would go back and meet Abraham Lincoln, because he was a good president in my opinion. My favorite shoes are any shoes that are new shoes, because new shoes are always clean and they look great for a few days. I wouldn't want to speak a different but I would want to have a cool accent like Irish that would be pretty cool, I just really like the way irish people sound with their accents.
Interesting Fact: I tore my acl in high school