Overview

Human-Computer Interaction qualifier exams ask that you reflect on an emerging and important theme or subarea within HCI that is relevant to the research interests of the faculty on the committee and important to HCI and VT’s CHCI. This year’s qualifier exam focuses on the CHCI theme “HCI Outdoors”, examining the unique HCI challenges that arise when designing, using, and testing technologies in outdoor settings. 

Examining faculty (direct all questions to the chair)

• Scott McCrickard, chair (mccricks@cs.vt.edu)
• Brendan David-John
• Yaxing Yao

Registered students [name (email)] as of 1/7/2024 (email the chair by 1/7 to withdraw)

• Jixiang Fan (jfan12@vt.edu)
• Yusheng Cao (cyschris@vt.edu)
• Wei-Lu Wang (weilu@vt.edu)
• Nikki Ramirez (gnramirezsaffy@vt.edu)
• Alexandra Thompson (alexthompson06@vt.edu)
• Wei Liu (wliu3@vt.edu)
• Kaike Ping (pkk@vt.edu)
• Sunday Ubur (uburs@vt.edu)
• Tauhid Nabi (tauhidun@vt.edu)
• Fatemeh Sarshartehrani (fatemehst@vt.edu)
• Nawar Wali (nawarwali@vt.edu)

Early withdrawal policy

Once students have notified the Computer Science Department of their intention to take the HCI Ph.D. Qualifier Exam, they may withdraw from taking the exam at any point prior to the public release of the exam questions. Once the exam questions are released, the exam is considered “in progress” and withdrawal is prohibited. Students with questions about this policy should contact the exam chair directly.

Academic integrity

Discussions among students of the papers identified for the HCI Qualifier are reasonable (and strongly encouraged!) until the date the exam is released publicly. Once the exam questions are released, we expect all such discussions will cease as students are required to conduct their own work entirely to answer the qualifier questions. This examination is conducted under the University’s Graduate Honor System Constitution. It is highly recommended that students draw from papers other than those listed in the exam to the extent that this improves their understanding and strengthens their arguments. However, the answers submitted must represent the sole and complete work of the student submitting the answer, with material substantially derived from other works, whether published in print or found on the web, to be explicitly and fully cited. Note that your grade will be more strongly influenced by arguments you make rather than arguments you quote or cite.

Exam Schedule

• 12/1/2023: release of reading list
• 12/6/2023: deadline for committing to exam via email to chair
• 1/8/2024: release of written exam
• 1/21/2024: student solutions due

Reading list

HCI qualifier exams ask that you reflect on an emerging and important theme or subarea within HCI that is relevant to the research interests of the faculty on the committee and important to HCI and VT’s CHCI. This year’s qualifier exam focuses on the CHCI theme “HCI Outdoors”, examining the unique HCI challenges that arise when designing, using, and testing technologies in outdoor settings. The committee has identified a reading list of several relevant and important scholarly articles within that focus area. Students are expected to read these articles and understand the concepts described therein. It is strongly recommended that students develop this understanding of these articles through discussions with fellow students who will be taking the exam. These discussions should take place PRIOR to the exam period, as the exam must be taken individually. Papers for this year’s qual include:

• Dana Cuff, Mark Hansen, and Jerry Kang (2008). Urban sensing: out of the woods. Communications of the ACM 51, 3, 24-33.
• Ellie Harmon and Melissa Mazmanian (2013). Stories of the Smartphone in everyday discourse: conflict, tension & instability. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2013), 1051-1060.
• Maaret Posti, Johannes Schög, and Jonna Häiläw (2014). Unexpected journeys with the HOBBIT: the design and evaluation of an asocial hiking app. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems (DIS 2014), 637-646.
• Elizabeth Bonsignore, Alexander Quinn, Allison Druin, and Benjamin Bederson (2013). Sharing Stories “in the Wild”: A Mobile Storytelling Case Study Using StoryKit. ACM TOCHI 20, 3.
• Scott McCrickard, Michael Jones, Timothy Stelter (2020). Finding Human-Computer Interaction Outdoors. In HCI Outdoors: Theory, Design, Methods, and Applications., 1-16.
• Matthis, Jonathan Samir, Jacob L. Yates, and Mary M. Hayhoe. “Gaze and the control of foot placement when walking in natural terrain.” Current Biology 28.8 (2018): 1224-1233. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(18)30309-9.pdf
• Pfeuffer, K., Abdrabou, Y., Esteves, A., Rivu, R., Abdelrahman, Y., Meitner, S., … & Alt, F. (2021). ARtention: A design space for gaze-adaptive user interfaces in augmented reality. Computers & Graphics, 95, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cag.2021.01.001 
• Lages, W. S., & Bowman, D. A. (2019, March). Walking with adaptive augmented reality workspaces: design and usage patterns. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (pp. 356-366). https://doi.org/10.1145/3301275.3302278
• Kothari, R., Yang, Z., Kanan, C., Bailey, R., Pelz, J. B., & Diaz, G. J. (2020). Gaze-in-wild: A dataset for studying eye and head coordination in everyday activities. Scientific reports, 10(1), 2539. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-59251-5
• Hoyle, Roberto, Robert Templeman, Steven Armes, Denise Anthony, David Crandall, and Apu Kapadia. “Privacy behaviors of lifeloggers using wearable cameras.” In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, pp. 571-582. 2014. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2632048.2632079
• Adams, Devon, Alseny Bah, Catherine Barwulor, Nureli Musaby, Kadeem Pitkin, and Elissa M. Redmiles. “Ethics emerging: the story of privacy and security perceptions in virtual reality.” In Fourteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2018), pp. 427-442. 2018.  https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/soups2018/soups2018-adams.pdf

Core HCI readings

If you want to refresh your core knowledge about HCI methods, approaches, frameworks, and theories, one or more of the following books are recommended:

• Hartson & Pyla (2018). The UX Book.
• Sharp, Rogers, & Preece (2023). Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction.
• Schneiderman et al. (2016). Designing the User Interface.

Written question

Each year, the HCI faculty publishes a reading list of papers by the end of the fall semester and an integrative research question before the start of the spring semester to be answered within the written exam period. The goal of the written exam is to evaluate the student’s ability to creatively integrate content from the HCI research areas, leveraging core HCI approaches. This year’s question is as follows.

Craft a research plan to investigate how a common HCI research approach (technique, theory, model) might vary in its application and use in an outdoor setting.  A great many of the research efforts captured in papers on the qualifier reading list exemplify this type of investigation; you are encouraged to identify an approach and a setting of particular interest to you.  In crafting your plan, be mindful that many research approaches are intended for use in controlled indoor settings, and look for interesting opportunities to push the boundaries of your selected research approach in an interesting and valid new direction.

The proposal should be centered around at least one or more clearly stated research question(s). Motivate and explicitly state your research question (or questions) in the introduction of the paper. Be sure that your proposed research would provide data or insights that address these questions.

The proposal should also include at least the following components:

• A literature review: This should synthesize a summary of the state of the art, identify relevant findings and guidelines, and identify gaps in the literature. You are expected to include some of the publications on the qualifier list relevant to the proposed research, as well as drawing from your own extensive set of readings and papers that cite those in the qualifier list.  The literature review should cover multiple facets of your research effort, including but not limited to the setting and the approach. 
• A proposed design: This may be the design of a novel technique, approach, system, or application, or it may be the design of an experimental testbed (tasks, conditions). In either case, provide a detailed rationale for your design.
• One or more proposed research methods: The methods can be of any type (e.g., design validation, hypothesis testing, field study, phenomenological) and can use any relevant methods for user experience, assessment and collaboration aspects. Provide detailed rationale for your study design(s). You may choose to address each of these three aspects equally, or to emphasize one of them.
• Discussion: You should make a compelling case for the need for the proposed research and clearly describe and give some indication of expected outcomes, potential challenges or pitfalls, and the overall benefits of conducting the proposed research.

Be explicit about the expected contributions of your work and where your emphasis lies.

Limit your writeup to 4000 words, not including references. The paper format is up to you; it could be in the format of a favorite conference or journal, or in Virginia Tech’s dissertation format, if desired. Include a list of all references that you cite in any widely accepted (but consistent) format.  Appropriate pictures, figures, and tables that enhance the content of your submission are highly encouraged.  Submissions should be emailed in PDF form to the chair of the qualifier exam committee by 11:59 pm on January 21st, 2024.