[dcchairs2016] Review of UbiComp/ISWC 2016 Doctoral School submission 103

[dcchairs2016 at ubicomp.org]

Paper  103 - Investigating User Interaction with Autonomous Systems for Non-specialist Applications
Reviewer 1 - Max Muhlhauser

Overall rating:  2  (scale is 1..6; 6 is best)

Pre-PC discussion (hidden from author)

    

Confidence

   Very confident - I am knowledgeable in the area 

Contribution to UbiComp

   The paper looks at HCI (user interaction) for autonomous systems (AS),
   mentioning UbiComp related ASs (smart thermostat: autonomous temp
   control, smart vacuum cleaner etc.) but not supporting any reason why and
   how the PhD would be specific for Ubicomp. Up to now (1 year of PhD),
   there was no real Ubicomp system involved, but the author claims to take
   one into consideration in the future: autonomous food purchase. 
 

Overall Rating

   2  (Probably reject: I would argue for rejecting this paper.)

R&R Suitability (hidden from author)

   Reject without offering revise/resubmit - 5 weeks is too short to improve submission sufficiently 

The Review

   In its outset, the paper provides a convincing rationale for focused
   research on UI (user interaction) for AS (autonomous systems): users need
   more trust in AS (trust can be greatly augmented if users understand why
   the system is doing what when, which in turn requires a pertinent UI) and
   due to the imperfection of AS, it can be very beneficial if users can
   influence the actions or get temporary control over them (which again
   requires a pertinent UI). 
   Apart from the nice general outset, the proposal appears to have very
   serious issues: (1) Year one of the PhD has passed and there is obviously
   just a literature review and a first user study (not based on a real
   system) – this seems “OKish but not overwhelming”; (2) The plans
   for the rest of the PhD are extremely shallow und blurry: (2a) it is
   claimed that a Ubicomp system shall be implemented that controls the food
   stock at home and autonomously orders replenishment: without providing
   more (and much more concrete) details, the author fails to convince the
   reader that he will be able to achieve this “heroic task” and build
   something that is even close to useful, but a useful system would be
   necessary for the proposed further user study to be of any meaning; (2b)
   based on this planned system, the author plans to “conduct a second
   user study” – it must be doubted that any university will bestow a
   highly valued PhD in an HCI field just for the outcome of two user
   studies; this being said, the proposal could be rescued if the author
   planned to draw genuine scientific results from the UI and from the stock
   replenishment AS; as of today, the planned system shall serve just as
   apparatus for HCI related hypothesis testing (given the great challenge
   that a decent food replenishment AS would represent, it would be a waste
   of energy to restrict its scientific value to this); (2c) Generally
   speaking, there is no evidence that the PhD will result in concrete
   interaction concepts for UIs-for-ASs: the paper just speaks of
   guidelines. 
   Summarizing, it is strongly recommended to follow one of the following
   paths:
   -	Either build the food replenishment system such that both the system
   and its interaction concepts lead to original scientific contributions or
   -	Forget about building such a challenging system, plan a broader variety
   of studies and plan early on which concrete UI-for-AS related questions
   each one should address
   Most disturbingly, the whole research seems to take UbiComp related ASs
   as the ASs-of-choice just by chance: no specific challenges of
   UbiComp-ASs are taken into account or even mentioned.
 

Confidential Comments (Optional) (hidden from author)

 


To see the review, go to https://precisionconference.com/~ubicomp?goto=ubicomp16c