Final Project

The final project can be done alone or in groups of two or three. The requirements below are expectations for one person. Groups will be exepcted to produce larger projects such that each member has done as much work as if he or she had worked alone.

The goal of the final project is to select a set of users and choose an information need important to them. This could be a group discussed in class or one we did not discuss (e.g. teachers, students, patients, etc.). Then, you must create a new solution to help with that information need. This could be new technology, community effort, set of policies or legislation, etc.

The introduction to your project should cover the following:

• Users - who are the users and what defines them as a group (i.e. what is their social context)
• Information - what are the information needs of this group that you are addressing? What are the challenges the users face in accessing and using that information?
• Systems - What systems are available to support these information needs (if any)?
• Environments - What environmental factors in the users' social context affect their use of information?

• A report - do an analysis of the literature available on your topic to help you identify potential solutions. Describe those solutions and how they would be implemented. This should particularly focus on changes in systems and/or environments that will affect change. The solutions you propose must be your own new ideas, not reports of existing systems.
• A study - how to address these information needs may be unclear. As such, you may choose to conduct a study, interviewing a set of these users or running an experiment with them to help better describe the challenges and, potentially, a solution.
• A system - you may build a prototype system that would demonstrate a possible solution to the problems you identified.

Structure

Each paper should include the following:

• Users in social context - who are the users and what role are they playing?
• Information need - what is the need of your users that you are trying to address in this paper?
• Current state - what systems or support is available to help your users with their information needs now? Why is that insufficient to totally address their needs? Support this through interviews with users or through evaluating the existing support and citing literature to suggest that existing support is not good enough.
• Your proposed solution - thoroughly describe your proposed solution. Support your ideas with primary sources (papers, books, etc - not wikipedia / encyclopedia articles or other summaries).
• Evaluation (if applicable) - show why your idea works. If you've built a system, have some people try it and report on your findings. If you are doing a report, present some literature that suggests your approach is a good one.
• Conclusion
• Broader impacts - describe how the ideas you developed can be more broadly implemented. Are there lessons from your work that other people might benefit from knowing? Could your techniques work in other kinds of systems?
• Bibliography - you should include references to all the literature you cited. You should have at least 6 referenced sources.

To keep you on track, I require progress reports throughout the term. You will be graded on your progress.

• Feb 19th: Initial report due in class - this should state if you will be working alone or in a group, list the group members, and give some initial thoughts in who you might choose as your users or what information problems seem interesting.
• March 11th: Progress report due in class - you should have identified your user group and information issue. This report should state what track you are taking - report, experiment, prototype, or other. You should state what you believe you will accomplish at the end of the project.
• April 1: Progress report due in class - you should have a full outline of the text of your report. This should include strong detail on the main focus of your project. Students doing a report only should have a detailed outline on their analysis. Students doing an experiment should include their experimental design. Students creating a prototype should include sketches and implementation details.
• April 29: First draft of report or prototype due - this can be very rough but should show that you have everything in place and essentially finished. After this, you should be polishing the final draft and preparing for your presentation.
• May 6, 8: In Class Presentations - you must present a summary of your report with a focus on the interesting results you obtained.
• May 13: Projects due in class.

Grading

The final project will be graded as follows:

• 20% - progress reports (5% per report)
• 20% - in class presentation
• 60% - the final paper / prototype