CS295J/Assignments

Assignment 1 (out January 23, 2009)

• spend 10 hours adding to any part of the wiki you think is relevant
• by Monday noon add any potential readings. If you've got a tentative summary evaluation, go ahead and add it. It's ok to edit folks summary evaluations, but try to make the result more accurate or precise without losing information.
• by Wednesday noon finish with any summary evaluation and also identify at least one as-relevant-as-possible reading as yours. Put your name on that entry in the reading list as the "owner" so that there are no duplicates.
• by Wednesday 5pm -- select 2 additional relevant readings that are owned and that you will read by Friday and be prepared to discuss. Put your name as a "discussant" in the reading list; there should be a max of two discussants per reading.
• by Friday class -- author a summary description, less than 250 words, in the wiki of how the reading you own relates to our project. Be prepared to describe, in two minutes, how your reading relates to the project. Also be prepared for everyone in class to discuss after your description. You may bring notes for yourself, but no slides. The wiki page for your reading will be displayed while you talk.
• by Friday class -- read and be prepared to discuss the other two readings you choose.
• by Friday class -- make one more wiki page titled "<Last-Name> week 1" with a list of the keys for the citations you added, the readings you summarized, the reading you presented, the two readings you were a discussant on, and any other readings you did in detail.
• Let me know if you have any kind of problems. You should be spending right around 10 hours -- if that's a problem, let's talk.
• The How Tos page has some tips. Edit or add as you find others.

Assignment 2 (out January 30, 2009)

• Refine literature short summaries to include the relationship to our project.
• Draft by tuesday noon a subsection in the background section of the CS295J/Research proposal, making sure to include citations to the relevant materials in the literature page. Add any new references to the literature page.
• Read and comment/edit by Thursday noon all background sections
• Revise your background section by Friday noon (so David can print before class)

• Add to or refine one or more specific contribution in the CS295J/Research proposal; each contribution must have a list of ways it can be demonstrated. Some will become part of the preliminary results, others will be parts of the future work that will be proposed.
• Add to or refine one or more specific aim in the CS295J/Research proposal; make it consistent with the contribution you added.

• Identify the one additional most important paper for us to read this week also by Tuesday noon; be prepared to summarize relevance in 2 minutes in class
• Read those "most important" papers for class discussion.

• Be prepared to summarize to the class your contributions to the background, contributions, and aims sections.
• If there is preliminary work that will help to make decisions about contributions and aims, please get started on it (and be ready to report on what you'd like to do or what you have done).

Assignment 3 (out February 6, due February 13)

• Flesh out and support a contribution within the proposal
  • Add any new references to the literature section.
  • Many of our readings date from 8+ years ago; check to make sure your contribution hasn't already been done.
  • If any of the new references are "must reads", add to the CS295J/Literature to read for class 4 (2/13/09) page. You are "expected" to add 1/2 of a reference.
  • Estimate the impact of the contribution.
  • Estimate the risk and costs of the contribution.
  • Propose a 3-week (30 hour) result that you could create to demonstrate feasibility.
  • Bring a printout of your contribution concept to class. It should be legible from 2 meters away, so use big text. You can hand-write it on posterboard or paste together printouts.
• Bring a list of holes in the proposal -- e.g., "background section needs something on workflow capture."

Assignment 4 (out February 13, due February 20, 2009)

1. Be prepared to decide on a subset of applications to critique. Flesh out at least one potential application in CS295J/Application Critiques, including a specific workflow. Modify any others you want, particularly in terms of arguments for or against proceeding with them. These should be completed by Thursday noon.
   • Some possibilities: Google scholar, Mathematica, Tableau, Google notebook, Matlab, paper, media wiki, Ensight Gold, AVS, VisTrails. Note that a given piece of software could be represented more than once with a different workflow.
   • Possible criteria: main purpose is analysis, perhaps scientific; interative; scientific; amenable to cognition-driven improvemennts; interesting; fun
2. Bring your ranking of the subset of (application+workflow)s we should critique
3. Be prepared to decide on the CS295J/Model elements of cognition we will emulate to critique each application. Revise some part of this list so that it can be used as a concrete basis for evaluation.
4. Add any "must reads" to the CS295J/Literature to read for class 5 page. You are "expected" to add 1/3 of a reference.
5. Read the "must reads".