[dcchairs2016] Review of UbiComp/ISWC 2016 Doctoral School submission 114

[dcchairs2016 at ubicomp.org]

Paper  114 - Automated Conversational Skills Training with Real-time Feedback
Reviewer 2 - Max Muhlhauser

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

Confidence

   Somewhat confident - I have passing knowledge 

Contribution to UbiComp

   DOubtful, see below....
 

Overall Rating

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

R&R Suitability (hidden from author)

   It would be possible to improve within 5 weeks, but difficult	 

The Review

   The author reports on work towards DETECTING (via ML methods) and
   CONVEYING conversational skills of users that interact through or with
   computers, with the aim to improve these skills during the interaction by
   means of appropriate feedback.
   One problem with the paper is that it is difficult to follow since it
   jumps back and forth a couple of times between past, present, and future
   work. The second problem concerns UbiComp pertinence: conversational
   skills improvement on conventional computer settings is hardly related to
   Ubicomp. A third set of problems concerns the content quality: in the
   “speed dating” (human-in-the-loop) experiment, members of the
   organization (“RAs”) had to determine whether the reported approach
   (developed at the organization) outperformed conventional instructions
   about conversational skills – and guess what: they had the impression
   that it does :-); in other words: this study appears to be very biased.
   As to the results reported from the first attempts towards automatic (HMM
   based) detection of conversational skills cues (smile, eye contact etc.),
   all but the “volume” detection (which can probably be directly
   measured with better results than those shown in table 1) yield false
   positives of 30% and more; this means that the system is currently hardly
   usable so that its application in a UbiComp related setting is not
   feasible yet.  
 

Confidential Comments (Optional) (hidden from author)

 


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