*Note that the course schedule is tentative.* Lecture slides will be posted after each class.
COMPSCI 692M, 1 Credit, Spring 20
Time: Mondays 1:25-3:25
Location: Room 140, Computer Science Building
Instructor: Narges Mahyar
Email: nmahyar@cs.umass.edu
Office: Room 322, Computer Science Building
Computing for the common good is a seminar course that explores new ways of utilizing computational technology for improving the quality of life and humans condition as well as making a positive impact on society. It allows students to apply computing to social and global causes such as democratic decision making, climate change, health, education, urban design, transportation, infrastructure, and civic engagement. In this course, students will read and discuss the state of the art papers, participate in group discussions, and carry out research projects that address real-world problems.
The course will involve discussion, presentation, and group work during class. For the first four weeks of the semester, the assignments will primarily be readings, but will quickly transition to project work thereafter.
Accommodation Statement
The University of Massachusetts Amherst is committed to providing an equal educational opportunity for all students. If you have a documented physical, psychological, or learning disability on file with Disability Services (DS), you may be eligible for reasonable academic accommodations to help you succeed in this course. If you have a documented disability that requires accommodation, please notify me within the first two weeks of the semester so that we may make appropriate arrangements.
Academic Honesty Statement
Since the integrity of the academic enterprise of any institution of higher education requires honesty in scholarship and research, academic honesty is required of all students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Academic dishonesty is prohibited in all programs of the University. Academic dishonesty includes but is not limited to: cheating, fabrication, plagiarism, and facilitating dishonesty. Appropriate sanctions may be imposed on any student who has committed an act of academic dishonesty. Instructors should take reasonable steps to address academic misconduct. Any person who has reason to believe that a student has committed academic dishonesty should bring such information to the attention of the appropriate course instructor as soon as possible. Instances of academic dishonesty not related to a specific course should be brought to the attention of the appropriate department Head or Chair. Since students are expected to be familiar with this policy and the commonly accepted standards of academic integrity, ignorance of such standards is not normally sufficient evidence of lack of intent (http://www.umass.edu/dean_students/codeofconduct/acadhonesty/).
Inclusivity Statement
In this course, each voice in the classroom has something of value to contribute. Please take care to respect the different experiences, beliefs, and values expressed by the students, faculty, and staff involved in this course. My colleagues and I support UMass’s commitment to diversity, and welcome individuals regardless of age, background, citizenship, disability, sex, education, ethnicity, family status, gender, gender identity, geographical origin, language, military experience, political views, race, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and work experience (cics.umass.edu/about/inclusivity-statement).
*This is a tentative schedule and is subject to change.
| Week | Date | Topics and Readings | Activities & Deliverables |
| 1 | Jan 27 | Introduction to Computing for Common Good Horst W. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber. Planning problems are wicked. Polity 4, 1973. Donald A Norman and Pieter Jan Stappers. DesignX: Complex Sociotechnical Systems. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 2016. Silberman, M. Six. “Information systems for the age of consequences.” First Monday 20.8 (2015). | |
| 2 | Feb 3 | HCI for Common Good Hayes, G.R. The Relationship of Action Research to Human-Computer Interaction. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum, Interact, 2011.
Carroll, J.M. Community computing as human-computer interaction. Behaviour & Information Technology. 2001.
Björgvinsson, E. et al. Participatory design and democratizing innovation, Biennial Participatory Design Conference, ACM, 2010.
| Form teams Presentation evaluation form |
| 3 | Feb 10 | Digital Civics Mahyar, Narges, et al. CommunityCrit: Inviting the Public to Improve and Evaluate Urban Design Ideas through Micro-Activities. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2018.
Mahyar, Narges, et al. UD Co-Spaces: A Table-Centred Multi-Display Environment for Public Engagement in Urban Design Charrettes. Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces. ACM, 2016.
Foth, Marcus et al. Fixing the city one photo at a time: mobile logging of maintenance requests. Proceedings of 23rd Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference. ACM, 2011.
Zimmerman, John, et al. Field trial of tiramisu: crowd-sourcing bus arrival times to spur co-design. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference. ACM, 2011. | Present your project idea in class |
| 4 | Feb 17 | Holiday-Class will be running on Feb 18th Crowdsourcing for Addressing Societal Problems Daren C Brabham. Crowdsourcing the public participation process for planning projects. Planning Theory 8, 2009. Joshua Introne et al. 2013.
Solving wicked social problems with socio-computational systems. KI-Künstliche Intelligenz 27, 2013.
Paul André et ql. Community clustering: Leveraging an academic crowd to form coherent conference sessions. HCOMP, 2013.
Le Dantec, et al (2015) Planning with Crowdsourced Data: Rhetoric and Representation in Transportation Planning, 2015. | Present your project idea in class |
| 5 | Feb 24 | Visualization for Communication What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Dashboards? Alper Sarikaya, Michael Correll, Lyn Bartram, Melanie Tory, Danyel Fisher, InfoVis 18
Bateman, Scott, et al. “Useful junk? The effects of visual embellishment on comprehension and memorability of charts.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. 2010.
Visual Narrative Flow: Exploring Factors Shaping Data Visualization Story Reading Experiences” by S. McKenna, N. Henry Riche B. Lee J. Boy M. Meyer from EuroVIS 2017
Arcia, Adriana, et al. “Sometimes more is more: iterative participatory design of infographics for engagement of community members with varying levels of health literacy.” Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 23.1 (2016): 174-183.
Siricharoen, Waralak V. “Infographics: the new communication tools in digital age.” The international conference on e-technologies and business on the web (ebw2013). 2013.
| Teams will present problem-solution statements
Project proposal due: submit a 1-page project proposal, share it with me via Google doc for easy feedback. It should include team members’ names, a statement of the problem (1 paragraph), a summary of related literature and/or relevant tools (1-2 paragraphs), and a summary of your plans and objectives (2-3 paragraphs).
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| 6 | March 2 | Mental Health Pendse, Sachin R., Kate Niederhoffer, and Amit Sharma. “Cross-Cultural Differences in the Use of Online Mental Health Support Forums.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3.CSCW (2019): 1-29.
Doherty, Gavin, David Coyle, and John Sharry. “Engagement with online mental health interventions: an exploratory clinical study of a treatment for depression.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2012. | |
| 7 | March 9 | Text Visualization Mapping Text with Phrase Nets. Frank van Ham, Martin Wattenberg & Fernanda Viégas. InfoVis 2009.
M. Hu, K. Wongsuphasawat and J. Stasko, “Visualizing Social Media Content with SentenTree,” in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 621-630, Jan. 2017.
Termite: Visualization Techniques for Assessing Textual Topic Models. Chuang et al., AVI 2012.
Chapter 11: Information Visualization for Text Analysis, in Search User Interfaces. Marti Hearst. 2009. | |
| 8 | March 16 | No class-Spring Break | |
| 9 | March 23 | Working Class and Prototype Review | Each team/student present their low-mid fidelity prototype for 3 min and discuss their top challenges to get feedback on their progress and direction. |
| 10 | March 30 | Collective Innovation Mark Klein. 2011. How to harvest collective wisdom on complex problems: An introduction to the mit deliberatorium. Center for Collective Intelligence working paper, 2011.
Chris Le Dantec. Cover: Design Through Collective Action/Collective Action Through Design, interactions, 2017.
Eric von Hippel. 2017. Free Innovation by Consumers–How Producers Can Benefit: Consumers’ free innovations represent a potentially valuable resource for industrial innovators. Research-Technology Management, 2017.
Shirky, C. Collective Action and Institutional Challenges, pp. 143‐160 in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. New York: Penguin, 2008. | |
| 11 | April 6 | Privacy Eiband, Malin, et al. “Understanding shoulder surfing in the wild: Stories from users and observers.” Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2017.
Barkhuus, Louise. “The mismeasurement of privacy: using contextual integrity to reconsider privacy in HCI.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2012. | |
| 12 | April 13 | Working Class: Prototype and Poster Review | Each team/student present their application/study results for 3 min to get a final round of feedback. Guidelines for poster design |
| 13 | April 20 | Holiday-Class will be running on April 22 | Poster and demo session at CS 140 |
| 14 | April 27 | No class-Attending CHI conference | Project Report due on April 30th |
Description:
Throughout the course, we will explore and apply different methods that are appropriate for designing and evaluating an interactive computational technology that closely meets human needs. Examples of potential technologies are mobile applications, online platforms, interactive 2D interfaces, interactive 3D devices, and so on. Your team will choose a topic from the list provided below which will seed your project. You will identify a clear problem to be addressed (or potential design opportunity), and will then create a working prototype that meets their needs, which you will evaluate. Following the design thinking process, there are approximately 6 project milestones, as well as a final demo session to showcase your working prototypes. Meeting the project milestones is crucial in completing the project successfully.
Team formation:
The first step in the research project is to form a team. There is not a lot of time for this, so you will need to move fast. You are free to work with whomever you choose, but you should strive for as multi-disciplinary a team as possible. Your team will choose a project topic.
Project Topics:
Potential design problems/opportunities/situations:
Category: Study
An app dedicated to finding available study spaces throughout UMass – which floors of the libraries are less crowded and/or which classrooms are empty.
An app that shows the number of computers available in the library or whether the resources (printers/scanners) are functional.
An App to form and organize Study Groups.
Tool for real-time student-teacher interaction during (office hours/scheduled).
A tool for better future projection for UMass graduates dependant on their course selections and majors to guide new students.
An app to help students study effectively.
Category: Traffic
Interactive campus map – with construction notifications, trash can locator, possible detours, and guidance to prevent getting lost inside the campus
Bus scheduling and deployment tool – Maintain real-time bus schedules, tracking, collect metrics to better predict congested times and deploy extra buses accordingly.
Campus congestion – Manage walkways between classes to reduce congestions
Category: Website and SPIRE Alternative
Better scholarship website allowing filters based on the student profile
Replacement for SPIRE that allows better navigation options
Centralize school websites – Most professors have to use multiple different websites for the same class because of their different features.
Tool for better class picker and schedule builder
Gym class signups rework (IMLeagues)
A tool for UHS appointment and waitlisting
Category: International and Out-of-State Students
Information for students: which store to go to for buying a specific item.
Information on non-academic activities such as banking, transportation, and housing.
A chat application with a discussion board
Anonymous emergency chat helpline
Category: Organization
A tool for organizing clubs
Campus event management app with student notifications
Tool for organizing information for on-campus resources (food pantry, care closet, stonewall center, etc.)
A tool for planning trips
Category: Communication
Tools for students to communicate with teachers
Campus Watch: an app that allows people to report stuff around campus (such as fire drills, damaged utilities, etc.)
Deliberation on Campus Constructions: An app where students can vote/give their opinions on certain campus renovations/construction projects before they take place
An app for reliable services to find and review local musicians and bands
Category: Dining
Interactive dining commons app with a map that provides the exact location of food being served on the menu.
App for easy check-in/out to accurately keep track of the number of people currently in the dining hall.
Online ordering at Blue Wall to reduce waiting at lunchtime
Category: Miscellaneous