The two main purposes of this seminar course are to involve students in current human-computer interaction (HCI) research and to learn to critique others' HCI research. Each offering of the seminar will center on a theme of applying HCI techniques to a particular type of interaction such as human interfaces for robots, pervasive computing, or social media. Students will be expected to read and critique a number of papers from the current literature in the designated topic area. Further, class members will form a research team (led by the course instructor) to perform original research in the topic area. Class members will co-author a paper based on their research results with the goal of submitting it to a conference. By the end of the course, students will be able to describe the state-of-the-art in the course topic, recognize examples of good and poor research techniques, document research to high academic standards, and become productive members of HCI research teams.
