Meeting Agenda

Date:	July 7, 2010
Location:	DC 1331
Time:	1:15
Chair:	Philippe Lamoureux

1. Acceptance of the Agenda - additions or deletions

2. Coffee Hour

Coffee hour last week:: CANADA DAY- thanks!
Coffee hour this week:: Volunteers?
Coffee hour next week:: Volunteers?

3. Forthcoming

Date:	July 14, 2010	July 21, 2010	July 28, 2010	August 4, 2010
Location:	DC 1331 1:30	DC 1331 1:30	DC 1331 1:30	DC 1331 1:30
Chair:	Ed Lank	Stephen Mann	Matei Negulescu	Alex Pytel
Technical Presentation:	Ben Lafreniere	Philippe Lamoureux	Ed Lank	Stephen Mann

4. Technical Presentation

Tovi Grossman	Title : Understanding and Improving the Learnability of Software Abstract: Despite the consensus that learnability is an important aspect of usability, there is little consensus among HCI researchers as to how learnability should be defined, evaluated, and improved within a user interface. In this talk I will provide an overview of the research we have been conducting at Autodesk Research on this topic. First I will outline a new taxaonomy of software learnability we have developed, and the "question-suggestion" protocol, which can be used to evaluate software against the various dimensions of learnability issues. I will then describe two of the new techniques we have developed to alleviate two of the specific issues. ToolClips aid in "Understanding", by providing contextual video assistance to help users understand how to use software tools. CommunityCommands aid in "Awareness", using recommender system technology to recommend new relevant commands to the user. In addition to describing the research behind these two projects, I will also discuss the implementations of the ToolClips and CommunityCommands components into Autodesk products.

Tovi Grossman

Title : Understanding and Improving the Learnability of Software
Abstract:
Despite the consensus that learnability is an important aspect of usability, there is little consensus among HCI researchers as to how learnability should be defined, evaluated, and improved within a user interface. In this talk I will provide an overview of the research we have been conducting at Autodesk Research on this topic. First I will outline a new taxaonomy of software learnability we have developed, and the "question-suggestion" protocol, which can be used to evaluate software against the various dimensions of learnability issues. I will then describe two of the new techniques we have developed to alleviate two of the specific issues. ToolClips aid in "Understanding", by providing contextual video assistance to help users understand how to use software tools. CommunityCommands aid in "Awareness", using recommender system technology to recommend new relevant commands to the user. In addition to describing the research behind these two projects, I will also discuss the implementations of the ToolClips and CommunityCommands components into Autodesk products.

5. Discussion Items

None so far...

6. Action Items

None so far...

7. Conferences and Special Journal Issues

Recent Additions

Upcoming Deadlines

Jul 10, 2010: AMDO10 Conference

8. Directors' Meeting

9. Seminars and Events

2010 Jul 07, 13:30 Scientific Computation Group Master's Essay Presentation
Bo Wang, graduate student, David R. Cheriton School of Comp. Sci., Univ. Waterloo
Mean Variance Asset Allocation under a Regime-Switching Process
2010 Jul 08, 13:30 Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP) Group PhD Seminar
Greg Zaverucha, PhD candidate, David R Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo
Constant-Size Commitments to Polynomials and Their Applications
2010 Jul 09, 15:00 Software Engineering Research Group Master's Thesis Presentation
Yu-Ling Chang, graduate student, David R. Cheriton School of Comp. Sci., Univ. Waterloo
A dynamic user-centric mobile context model
2010 Jul 13, 15:30 Computer Graphics Research Group Seminar
Morgan McGuire, NVIDIA Research and Williams College
Real-Time Stochastic Rasterization
2010 Jul 15, 11:00 Institute for Computer Research Seminar
Professor Don Batory, Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin
Stepwise Parallelization of Streaming Architectures
2010 Jul 22, 10:00 Artificial Intelligence Lab Master's Thesis Presentation
Daniel Rasmussen, graduate student, David R. Cheriton School of Comp. Sci., Univ. Waterloo
A neural modelling approach to investigating general intelligence
2010 Jul 23, 10:30 Artificial Intelligence Lab Master's Thesis Presentation
Hyunggu Jung, graduate student, David R. Cheriton School of Comp. Sci., Univ. Waterloo
Reasoning about Benefits and Costs of Interaction with Users in Real-Time Decision Making Environments with Application

Also see other Math and CS postings.