[dcchairs2016] Review of UbiComp/ISWC 2016 Doctoral School submission 105

[dcchairs2016 at ubicomp.org]

Paper  105 - Visual cue that change how people perceive and interact with autonomous systems
Reviewer 1 - Max Muhlhauser

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

Pre-PC discussion (hidden from author)

   No potential to revise & resubmit (should not be discussed at PC meeting) 

Confidence

   Very confident - I am knowledgeable in the area 

Contribution to UbiComp

   The paper focusses on a CogSci/HCI related issue and has no existing or
   planned core Ubicomp contribution on its own.
 

Overall Rating

   1  (Definite reject: I would argue strongly 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

   "Management summary": (1) The status of the paper (in terms of quality of
   writing) is rather premature; (2) Both the past research and the planned
   research do not appear to be convincing in the sense of promising
   interesting scientific results or insights; (3) the relationship to
   UbiComp is extremely shallow.
   More details:
   The author (btw.: Why THREE blinded authors for ONE PhD?) seems to
   combine three incompatible things:
   1.	Quite far-fetching goals (“intelligibility of autonomous systems
   (AS)”, changing the way people perceive *and interact with* AS, etc.)
   2.	Extremely low-hanging-fruits as study setups/goals: visualization of
   the motion of (mobile) robots as a means for conveying their activities
   (ha! compare this to intentions/rationale etc. that are subject of
   intelligibility research! Remember the goal to “interact with” ASs in
   item 1)
   3.	Related work that is not properly related to the goal at hand –
   well, the related work is so different from the goal at hand that the
   relationship is very simple, repeatedly stated in the paper as “they do
   other things” (which is of course formulated more nicely)
   The bad writing quality makes it very difficult to imagine what
   “visualizing the motion of robots” actually means! Does the author
   compare a user’s understanding of the mobile-robot operation when she
   watches the robot move versus when she doesn’t (quite trivial!)? If
   not: where and how is the motion conveyed to the user? Similarly, the
   future work section – which is *very brief* talks about “different
   implementations of visual cues” – and remains totally unclear about
   what that means (does it rather mean “different visual cues”? If not,
   what is the role of IMPLEMENTATIONS in all this?). Since the paper fails
   to clearly articulate even such fundamental issues, there is no
   alternative to rejecting it.
 

Confidential Comments (Optional) (hidden from author)

 


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