Proposal For PhD General Exam - MIT Media Laboratory

Proposal For PhD General Exam
Carson Reynolds
Affective Computing
MIT Media Laboratory
March 8th, 2002
Recent work has enabled us to detect emotional states such as frustration with
increased reliability and ease for the user. This innovation leaves a daunting question
before us. Namely, if we can reliably detect different emotional states, how can
computers best use information about those sates to alter and adapt interaction?
This general examination will confront this question by drawing from a common thread
visible in a broad array of disciples. Many disciples have sought an understanding of
adaptation, some in the abstract (control theory) and some in the most applied sense
(adaptive user interfaces). As a backdrop for this pursuit, the contextual area will
look at this history of mathematics, and more narrowly examine how early developments
in dynamical models might have influenced our current understanding of adaptation.
These topics will help address important aspects of the main thesis: How can adaptive
systems be systemically understood and realized? How do these systems alter usability
and interaction with computer users? How might this effort be understood in light of a
broad history of efforts to precisely communicate flux and change underlying the
physical phenomena around us? As these component questions are thoroughly scrutinized,
one expects to emerge a more complete understanding of how computers could adapt
interaction in response to emotional states.
Outline of Areas:
The Interplay between Usability and Adaptation in Interaction
Main Area
Hiroshi Ishii, Associate Professor, MIT Media Laboratory
Formal Models for Adaptation
Supporting Technical Area
Rosalind Picard, Associate Professor, MIT Media Laboratory
History of the Mathematical Understanding of Dynamics
Supporting Contextual Area
Daniel Goroff, Professor of Mathematics, Harvard University

Main Area: The Interplay between Usability and Adaptation in Interaction
Examiner: Hiroshi Ishii
Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Laboratory
Description:
This area seeks to cover literature on the topics of usability, its relationship to
adaptation, and interface design. Readings are drawn primarily from usability, humancomputer
interaction and design traditions with an emphasis on issues that directly
address problems with adaptive techniques.
Written Requirement:
The goal of this topic will be, at minimum, to write a paper that surveys and discusses
the conflicts between adaptive interfaces and usability. If that goal is accomplished,
further work on prototypes for new types of interaction, in light of this inquiry, will
be articulated and tested.
Signature:___________________________________________ Date:_____________
Reading List:
General Usability:
Adler, P.S. and Winograd, T.A. (Eds.) 1992. USABILITY: Turning
Technologies into Tools. Oxford University Press: New York.
Hayes, B. E. 1998. Measuring Customer Satisfaction: Survey Design, Use, and Statistical
Analysis Methods. (Second Edition). American Society for Quality: Milwaukee, WI.
Hix, D. and Hartson, H.R. 1993. Developing User Interfaces: ensuring
usability through product and process. J. Wiley and sons.
John, B. E., & Kieras, D. E. 1996. The GOMS family of user interface
analysis techniques: Comparison and contrast. ACM Transactions on
Computer-Human Interaction 3(4):320-351.
Landauer, T. K. 1995. The Trouble with Computers: Usefulness, Usability,
and Productivity, MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass.
Nielsen, J. 1993. Usability Engineering, San Diego, Academic Press.
Usability with Respect to Adaptive Interaction:
Benyon, D. R. 1993. Adaptive Systems; a solution to usability problems.

User Modeling and User Adapted Interaction.
Calvi, L. and de Bra, P. 1997. "Improving the Usability of Hypertext
Courseware Through Adaptive Linking" in Proceedings of ACM Hypertext '97, Southampton,
UK, 224-225.
Caulton, D. and Dye, K. 1997. Do Users Always Benefit When User
Interfaces Are Consistent? In Thimbleby, H., OConaill, B. and Thomas, P.
(Eds) People and Computers XII - Proceedings of HCI '97, Springer, New
York.
Grudin, J. 1989. The case against user interface consistency. Communications of the ACM
32, 10, 1164--1173.
Greenberg, S. and Witten, I. H. 1985. "Adaptive personalized interfaces
-- a question of viability." Behaviour and Information Technology, 4(1),
pp. 31-45, January.
Hook, K. 1997. Evaluating the Utility and Usability of an Adaptive
Hypermedia System, Proc. of Intelligent User Interfaces, 179-186.
Mitchel, J. and Schneiderman, B. 1989. Dynamic versus Static Menus: An
Exploratory Comparison, ACM SIGCHI Bulletin 1989 v.20 n.4 p.33-37.
Streeter, L., Nass, C., Keisler, S., and Shneiderman, B. 1995. Interface
styles: Direct manipulation versus social interaction. In Proceedings of the CHI'95
Conference on Human Factors and Computing. ACM Press, New York, N.Y. Denver, Colo.
Totterdell, P. Rautenbach, P. 1990. Adaptation as a Design Problem.
In: Adaptive User Interfaces, Dermot Browne, Peter Totterdell, Mike Norman (Eds), pp.
59-84, Academic Press.
Interface Architecture Approaches
Langley, P. Machine learning for adaptive user interfaces. In Proceedings of the 21st
German Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 53--62, Freiburg, Germany,
1997. Springer.
Linton, M. A. Vlissides, J. M. and Calder, P. R. "Composing User Interfaces with
InterViews," IEEE Computer, February 1989, pp. 8-24.
Myers, B. et. al. "The Amulet Environment: New Models for Effective User Interface
Software Development, " IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. 1997b. 23(6). pp.
347-365.

Myers, B. Giuse, D. Dannenberg, Zanden, R. B. Kosbie, D. Pervin, E. Mickish, A. and
Marchal, P. "Garnet: Comprehensive Support for Graphical Highly Interactive User
Interfaces," IEEE Computer, vol. 23, pp. 71-85, 1990.
Scheifler, R.W. and Gettys, J. The X Window System. ACM Transactions on Graphics,
5(2):79-109, 1986.
Static and Dynamic Graphic Design
Laurel, B., ed. 1990. The art of human-computer interface design. Reading, Mass.:
Addison-Wesley.
Meggs, P. 1992. A history of graphic design, 2nd ed. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
Mullet, K. and D. Sano. 1995. Designing visual interfaces: Communications oriented
techniques. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Sunsoft/Prentice Hall.
Norman, D. A. 1988. The design of everyday things. New York: Basic Books.
Shneiderman, B. 1992. Designing the user interface. 2nd Ed. Reading, Mass.: Addison—
Wesley.
Tufte, Edward, Visual explanations. Images and quantities, evidence and narrative,
Cheshire (CT): Graphics Press, 1997, pp.156.
Tufte, Edward, Envisioning information, Cheshire (CT): Graphics Press, 1990, pp.126.

Technical Area: Formal Models for Adaptation
Examiner: Rosalind Picard
Associate Professor of Media Technology
Affective Computing Group, MIT Media Laboratory
Description:
This supporting area surveys different formal systemic models from adaptation. Drawing
from a wide variety of different phenomena and algorithms that have been deemed
adaptive, this area encompasses readings from a wide variety of disciplines. However
each of these readings is of a primarily theoretical nature and relates directly to
models for adaptation.
Written Requirement:
The goal of this area will be to produce a publication-quality survey/synthesis paper
that provides a taxonomy and describes common mathematical models for adaptive
behavior.
Signature:___________________________________________ Date:_____________
Reading List:
Adaptive Control Systems
Bellman, R. E. 1961. Adaptive Control Processes. New Jersey: Princeton University
Press.
Oppenheim, A. V. and Willsky, A. S. 1983. Signals and Systems. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1983. [Chapters 9, 10, and 11]
Stefani, R. T., Shahian, B., Savant, C. J., Hostetter, G. 2001. Design of Feedback
Control Systems, Fourth Edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sutton R.S., Barto A.G., Williams R.J. 1992. Reinforcement learning is direct adaptive
optimal control.
Optimization Methods for Adaptation
Bishop, C. M. 1995. Neural networks for pattern recognition. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Goldberg, D. 1989. Genetic algorithms in search, optimization, and machine learning.
Holland, J. 1975. Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems, The University of
Michigan Press.

Jacobs, R. A., Jordan, M. I., Nowlan, S. J., & Hinton, G. E. 1991. Adaptive mixtures of
local experts. In Neural Computation 3, pp. 79-87, MIT press.
Kirpatrick S., Gelatt, C.D. Vecchi, M.P. 1983. Optimization by simulated annealing.
Science 220, 671-680.
Rumelhart, D. E., Hinton, G. E., & Williams, R. J. 1986. Learning internal
representations by error propagation. In Rumelhart, D. E., & McClelland, J. L. (Eds.),
Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition,
Volume 1: Foundations
Shewchuk, J.R., 1994. An Introduction to the Conjugate Gradient Method Without the
Agonising Pain, Internal Report, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon
University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, Aug. 1994 (available at
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jrs/jrspapers.html).
Equilibria in Biological Systems
Ashby, W.R. 1952. Design for a Brain. London: Chapman and Hall.
Bernard, C. 1957. An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. Dover.
Thompson. D. W. 1961. On Growth and Form, Abridged Edition. University Press,
Cambridge.

Contextual Area: History of the Mathematical Understanding of Dynamics
Examiner: Daniel Goroff
Professor of the Practice of Mathematics
Department of Mathematics, Harvard University
Description:
Using historical evidence, this supporting area will provide an understanding of how
models for dynamical systems developed. The area will consist of a brief review of the
complete history of mathematics and a more in depth look at how Dynamics evolved and
influenced later developments such as models for chaotic phenomena.
Written Requirement:
The goal of this area will be to produce a paper that seeks to connect up the
postulations made in the development of models for dynamics to those that underpin
models for adaptive behavior.
Signature:___________________________________________ Date:_____________
Reading List:
Abraham, R. and Marsden, J. 1978. The Foundations of Mechanics. Second Edition:
Addison-Wesley.
Abraham, R. and Shaw, C. 1992. Dynamics, the Geometry of Behavior. Third Edition:
Dakota Books.
Alexander, D. S. 1994. History of complex dynamics : from Schroder to Fatou and Julia
Braunschweig,
Ball, W. W. Rouse. 1960. A short account of the history of mathematics. Macmillan,
London, 1888. Reprint: Dover, New York.
Bourbaki, Nicolas. 1994. Elements of the history of mathematics. Springer-Verlag, New
York. Translated from the French edition: Eléments d'histoire des mathématiques.
[excerpts]
Birkhoff, G. (ed.) 1959. Orbit Theory. Proceedings of Symposia in Applied Mathematics
Volume IX.. American Mathematical Society, 1st. Edition.
Birkoff, G. 1978. Ordinary Differential Equations. New York: John Wiley, 3rd edition.
Cajori, Florian. 1894. A history of mathematical notations. Macmillan, New York,
Second edition: Macmillan, New York, 1919.

Cannon, J. T. and Dostrovsky, S. 1981. The evolution of dynamics : vibration theory
from 1687 to 1742 New York.
Ekeland, Ivar. 1988. Mathematics and the Unexpected. xiii, 146 p., 2 halftones.
University of Chicago Press.
Goroff, Daniel. 1993. “Henry Poincaré and the Birth of Chaos Theory: An Introduction
to the English Translation of Les Méthodes Nouvelles de la Mécanique Céleste, New
Methods of Celestial Mechanics.” in: Méthodes nouvelles de la mécanique céleste. Ed.
and Trans. By Goroff, Daniel (American Institute of Physics, Woodbury, NY, 1993), Vol
1.
Klein, Morris. 1972. Mathematical Thought From Ancient to Modern Times (Vols 1-3).
Wiles, New York, Oxford University Press. [excerpts]
Moser, J. 2001. Stable and Random Motions in Dynamical Systems: With Special Emphasis
on Celestial Mechanics. Princeton University Press.
Ruelle, D. 1991. Chance and Chaos. Princeton University Press.
Sarton, George. 1927. Introduction to the history of science, volume I. Williams &
Wilkins, Baltimore.
Smith, David Eugene. 1958. History of Mathematics. Two volumes. Boston, 1923-1925.
Reviewed: Isis 6, 440-444. Reprints: Ginn, Boston, 1951-1953 Dover, New York.
Smale, Stephen. 1986. The Mathematics of Time : Essays on Dynamical Systems, Economic
Processes, and Related Topics. Springer Verlag.
Struik, Dirk J. 1967. A concise history of mathematics. Revised edition: Dover, New
York,
Truesdell, C. 1921. Essays in the history of mechanics, Berlin.

Biography:
Daniel L. Goroff
Daniel Goroff is Professor of the Practice of Mathematics at Harvard University, where he also
serves as Associate Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, and as a
Resident Tutor at Leverett House. He earned his B.A.-M.A. degree in mathematics summa cum laude
at Harvard as a Borden Scholar, an M.Phil. in economics at Cambridge University as a Churchill
Scholar, and a Ph.D. in mathematics at Princeton University as a Danforth Fellow.
A 1988 Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize winner, Goroff has taught courses for the mathematics,
economics, physics, and history of science departments at Harvard since joining the faculty in
1983. In pursuing his work on nonlinear systems, chaos, and decision theory, he has held
visiting positions at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in Paris, the Mathematical
Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, and the Dibner
Institute at MIT.
In 1994, Goroff was elected to a three year term on the Board of Directors of the American
Association for Higher Education (AAHE). During 1996-97, Goroff was a Division Director at the
National Research Council (NRC) in Washington, and during 1997-98, he worked for the President's
Science Advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). That year he
was named a “Young Leader of the Decade in Academia” by Change: The Magazine of Higher
Education.
As Director of the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics (JPBM) beginning in 1998, Daniel Goroff
was called to testify about scientific education and research priorities both by the House and
again by the Senate during the 106th Congress. He currently serves as Chair of the U.S.
National Commission on Mathematics Instruction at the National Research Council and co-directs
the Scientific Workforce Project of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Home Telephone: 617-493-2777 Fax Line: 617-495-3739
Office Telephone: 617-495-2168 E-mail: goroff@math.harvard.edu