Software Engineering

• How could we pull affect and emotion into software design so software 'gets to know us' and improves communication effectiveness through continued use?
  • (Based on HCI / Affective Learning):  How can we improve software design so that it builds report with users through learning their behavior?  Affective learning- the software would elicit positive emotional responses from users.  Communication- it would learn / build context with the user, so it could use the shared context / built context over time to predict user communication and a ‘lingo’ from the context that allowed more efficient communication.
    (Affective Learning in Software Design): When we talk and interact with computers, we have to be just as explicit as we were the first time we talked to them.  What if we could build computer language processing systems that actually were able to build context levels with you?  So that, like with people, the level of context goes up over time, and more implicatures are understood by both parties based on a shared history / context.  This would involve the computer raising it’s level of context with you through history, and would be best suited to computer applications that were used frequently and often.

Review “Affective Learning” from Preece’s book Ch. 5- ways we can design software to elicit positive (emotional) responses from people- do a dissertation related to this (Dr. Nahl)

Introduction to General Area:

Specific Areas of Interest:

Questions I want to Investigate:

Research Methods to use when Investigating:

- naturalistic observation... etc.

Faculty at UH that could support this topic:

Who are the big players in this field, and what topics are they researching?