Below is a list of elective courses offered by the HCI Institute in Spring, 2011.

05320/05820 Social Web

With the growth of online environments like MySpace, Second Life, World of Warcraft, Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, blogs, online support groups, and open source development communities, the web is no longer just about information. It is filled with social networks, multi-player games, and member-contributed content. This course will examine how the social web operates, teach students how to solve social challenges in building online communities, and help them understand the social impact of spending at least part of their lives online. We will examine what works and what fails to work in these online environments, and will use tools like Ruby on Rails and Drupal to build them. This class is open to advanced undergraduates and graduate students with either technical or non-technical backgrounds. Course work will include lectures and class discussion, homework, class presentations, and a group project.

05395/05832 Applications of Cognitive Science

The famous psychologist George Miller once said that Psychology should “give itself away.” The goal of this course is to look at cases where we have done so—or at least tried. The course focuses on applications that are sufficiently advanced as to have made an impact outside of the research field per se. That impact can take the form of a product, a change in practice, or a legal statute. The application should have a theoretical base, as contrasted, say, with pure measurement research as in ergonomics. Examples of applications are virtual reality (in vision, hearing, and touch), cognitive tutors based on models of cognitive processing, phonologically based reading programs, latent semantic analysis applications to writing assessment, and measures of consumers’ implicit attitudes. The course will use a case-study approach that considers a set of applications in detail, while building a general understanding of what it means to move research into the applied setting. The questions to be considered include: What makes a body of theoretically based research applicable? What is the pathway from laboratory to practice? What are the barriers-economic, legal, entrenched belief or practice? The format will emphasize analysis and discussion by students.

05432/05832 Cognitive Modeling and Intelligent Tutoring Systems

This course addresses the use of cognitive psychology and cognitive task analysis to create computer-based “intelligent tutoring systems.” Students will learn data-driven and theoretical methods for analyzing human problem solving. They will learn about the Cognitive Tutor technology that has been demonstrated to dramatically enhance student learning in domains like mathematics and computer programming. They will learn about methods for assessing robust learning. In addition to discussion and readings on methods and models of problem solving, learning, and tutor design, the course will have a substantial “learning by doing” component. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aleven/teaching/fall2008-05832.html PREREQUISITES 05-650 or 15-200 or 15-211 or 85-213 or instructor permission. Preferred: 05-410 or a course in AI.

05434/05834 Applied Machine Learning

Machine Learning is concerned with computer programs that enable the behavior of a computer to be learned from examples or experience rather than dictated through rules written by hand. It has practical value in many application areas of computer science such as on-line communities and digital libraries. This class is meant to teach the practical side of machine learning for applications, such as mining newsgroup data or building adaptive user interfaces. The emphasis will be on learning the process of applying machine learning effectively to a variety of problems rather than emphasizing an understanding of the theory behind what makes machine learning work. This course does not assume any prior exposure to machine learning theory or practice. In the first 2/3 of the course, we will cover a wide range of learning algorithms that can be applied to a variety of problems. In particular, we will cover topics such as decision trees, rule based classification, support vector machines, Bayesian networks, and clustering. In the final third of the class, we will go into more depth on one application area, namely the application of machine learning to problems involving text processing, such as information retrieval or text categorization.

05438/05838 The Role of Technology in Learning in the 21st Century

Computing is increasingly harnessed to address pressing educational challenges of the 21st century: under-performing inner-city schools, integrating immigrants into the school system, irregular school attendance in rural developing regions, and women empowerment in the developing world. This course is open to all undergrads and grad students, with technical or non-technical backgrounds. We will cover theory and practical applications of the Learning Sciences, Educational Technology and Human-Computer Interaction, framed around authentic problems such as the above. Students will apply concepts from the course to examine existing solutions such as Sesame Street’s The Electric Company, Leapfrog’s literacy gadgets and the $100 laptop. Students will work in teams on semester-length design projects to tackle educational problems of their choice, on platforms such as cellphones, interactive videos or gaming (Nintendo’s Wii/DS/$10 TV-Computer). Confirmed guest speakers include the World Bank’s Education Sector and Microsoft’s Global Learning Group.

05499A/05899A Developing iPad applications for visualization and insight

This project-based course will focus on the design and implementation of iPad applications that help users visualize and make sense of large data sets. Course content will bridge theory and practice, giving students a basic background in visualization and the cognitive processes involved in transforming visual representations into mental representations, insight and discovery; and showing how to implement these techniques in real applications for the iPad. Engineers from Apple’s Pittsburgh office will teach the software engineering topics, focusing on the latest technologies available in the newly released iOS 5. Prior programming experience is required, and object-oriented programming experience is recommended. This course will be open to graduate and undergraduate students.

05499B/05899B Designing mobile services

Attention entrepreneurs, designers, and engineers! This course teaches you to invent mobile information services. You will learn about value-creation in the service sector and a unique human-centered design process including improv brainstorming, story-boarding, interviewing, and video sketches. Students work in small, interdisciplinary teams to discover unmet needs of users. They create multiple concepts of a mobile service and assess their technical feasibility, financial viability, and desirability. Then they choose a single service idea and produce a plan with a video that illustrates the user experience it is intended to support. Grades will be determined primarily by the quality of the team’s products.

05899 Understanding the creative process

Creativity may be the most important human resource of all. How can a deep understanding of the creative process lead us to be more effective designers? How can it help us design for designers, engineers, and other creative professionals? This course examines the cognitive, social, and organizational dimensions of creative problem solving, particularly in the domain of human-computer interaction. Students will read literature and engage in discourse around key aspects of the creative process. Course assignments include design activities, crowdsourcing, and Web-design analytics. Final projects will focus on observing and designing for a professional creative process. This course gives designers tools for more creative and effective collaboration, and provides researchers a theoretical foundation for supporting creative activities.

05540/05872 Rapid Prototyping of Computer Systems

This is a project-oriented course, which will deal with all four aspects of project development: the application, the artifact, the computer-aided design environment, and the physical prototyping facilities. The class consists of students from different disciplines who must synthesize and implement a system in a short period of time. Upon completion of this course the student will be able to: generate systems specifications from a perceived need; partition functionality between hardware and software; produce interface specifications for a system composed of numerous subsystems; use computer-aided development tools; fabricate, integrate, and debug a hardware/software system; and evaluate the system in the context of an end user application. The class consists of students from different disciplines who must synthesize and implement a system in a short period of time.

05833 Gadgets, Sensors and Activity Recognition in HCI

This course will cover new techniques and technologies for creating high quality user interfaces. It will consider current work in this area, emphasizing readings from the research literature as well as practical projects involving the implementation of new concepts in user interface software or other technology. Typical topics to be covered might include: advanced interaction techniques, ubiquitous computing, tangible interfaces, mobile and wearable computing, web-based interaction, information visualization, virtual and augmented reality, new input devices, audio, speech, and other new interaction modalities, Specific topics for each year will be chosen from the current research literature.