Out of Context: Preliminary Schedule and Readings

Week 1: Introduction to "the context problem"

• Why do computers need to take account of context?
• What is and isn't context?
• Context-sensitive vs. context-independent views of computing
• Combatting brittleness: adapting systems to changing context

Week 2: Context for software agents

• Determining relevance of context
• Implicit input and repurposing input
• Context overload: Dealing with too much context

Readings:

• P. J. Brown, J. D. Bovey, and X. Chen, "Context-aware applications: from the laboratory to the marketplace," IEEE Personal Communications, 4(5), October 1997.
• Henry Lieberman and David Maulsby, Software That Just Keeps Getting Better, IBM Systems Journal, Volume 35, Nos. 3 & 4, 1996.

Week 3: Designing User Interfaces for Just-In-Time Information

Designing for secondary task, or "How to give someone information they didn't ask for without driving them crazy."

Readings:

• Bradley Rhodes: Bulding a Contextually Aware Associative Memory (unpublished draft)
• Wickens, CD, Engineering Psychology and Human Performance, Engineering Psychology and Human Perfomance, Scott Foesman Little Brown, 1992, pp. 74-115 (only skim 74-88).
• Don Norman: "How might we interact with agents?". From Bradshaw, J (ed), "Software Agents", AAAI Press/MIT Press, 1997

Week 4: Context for learning by example

• Generalizing context
• The "data description problem" for learning agents

Readings:

• Henry Lieberman: Integrating user interface agents with conventional applications
• Richard Potter: Just-in-Time Programming (RTF format version)

Week 5: [TBD]

Readings:

• Doug Lenat, The Dimensions of Context-Space.

[TBD]: Information visualization

Readings:

• Edward Tufte: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
• Ben Shneiderman: Information Visualization
• Muriel Cooper: Computers and Design

[TBD]: The role of background knowledge as context

• Active Ontologies
• The "Size Matters" Approach: Cyc
• The Rule-Based Approach: Expert systems.
• The Mining Approach: Information extraction
• The Interactive Learning Approach: Incremental development
• The Reactive Approach: Just don't do representation

Readings:

• Guha and Doug Lenat: Cyc
• Wendy Lehnert: Computers and Car Bombs
• Rod Brooks: Intelligence without Representation

Week 6 (Project proposals due): Systems that adapt to context

• Cognitive Adaptive Computer Help
• User Modeling
• User-system communication through annotated examples

Readings:

• Ted Selker: COACH: A Teaching Agent That Learns
• Elaine Rich: Stereotypes and User Modeling

Week 7: Philosophical and mathematical positions on context

Readings:

• Jon Barwise and John Perry: Situations and Attitudes
• Lucy Suchman: Situated Systems
• Bonnie Nardi: Context and Consciousness

Week 8: Machine Learning and formal approaches

Readings:

• Tom Mitchell, Pat Langley: Machine Learning
• Craig Neville-Manning and David Maulsby: Sequitur
• John McCarthy: Circumscription

Week 9: Sensing context from the environment

• Pattern recognition for determining context
• Roz Picard: Affective Computing

Week 10: Psychological and social perspectives on context

Readings:

• Cliff Nass and Byron Reeves: The Media Equation
• Joseph Bates: The Role of Emotion in Believable Agents
• Brenda Laurel: Metaphors with Character

Week 11: Final Project Reports

Week 12: Final Project Reports