IS470/IS471 Research Experience for Undergraduates (RXU)

In IS470/471 and CS 470/471, you will work on a research project over one semester (15 weeks). You could propose your own research project. I can help brainstorm a research idea with you, too. Or if you are interested, you can work on some parts of the research projects that I am working on.

I can be your mentor if you are interested in working on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. I mainly work on topics related to accessibility and crowdsourcing. But sometimes I work on other topics in HCI too.

Course Information

See the course web page: https://sis.smu.edu.sg/programmes/undergraduate/beyond/rxu

What’s the time commitment?

Based on my prior experience, successful students spend at least 10 hours per week on average for this course. This includes weekly discussion with me (about one hour per week) and independent work outside of the meeting. This estimate roughly aligns with the IS470 description “the workload of this module is similar to other SIS courses.”

Deliverables

For this course, you will need to deliver:

  • Project Proposal
  • Midterm report and feedback
  • Final presentation
  • Term paper

Available Projects

Here are short descriptions of some of the projects that I work on:

  • Design, develop, and evaluate interaction methods to generate audio descriptions to make videos accessible for people with visual impairments. We combine techniques and technologies, including user interface design/development, computer vision, and natural language processing to enable such interaction methods.
  • Creating information visualization to persuade crowdsourcing requesters to pay fair wage to gig-workers. Skills in creating interactive visualization and knowledge in microeconomics would help.
  • Design, development, and evaluation of a conversational agent system to localize a user in the indoor environment. We use natural language processing and agent-based technology.
  • I have other ongoing accessibility related projects that I am working on with other professors. Contact me if you are interested.

Prerequisites

You should have:

  • Excellent programming skills for web application development in Python and/or TypeScript/React
  • Knowledge in experimental design
  • Qualitative and quantitative data analysis skills
  • Familiarity with some of the above-mentioned technologies for each project.