Research Plan for
Intel Scholars
Mentor: Julie Kientz (julie@cc.gatech.edu)
Scholar: Kelly Poulo (kelly.poulo@gatech.edu)
Scholar: Vanessa Larco (vanessa@gatech.edu)
Area of Research: Human-Computer Interaction
Project:
How do users broadcast their personalities with Instant
Messaging away messages, buddy icons, and profiles?
Overview:
Students will recruit about 25 participants for the
study from various sources (internet recruiting, word of mouth, etc). They
will begin by surveying them on their current habits and then run a 1-2 week
study using a logging tool to monitor changes to a person’s away messages,
buddy icons, or profiles on AOL instant messenger. The students will then
follow up the logging study with questionnaires on their subjects’ habits.
Research Objectives:
Learn about performing an explorative study to
characterize different types of users and their behaviors, which can help to
inform application designers what additional features users would find
useful for instant messaging applications.
Duties of Scholars:
 | Become familiar with related work in the area of
instant messaging applications by reading a few papers on similar projects |
| Become certified by the Georgia Tech Institutional
Review Board and familiarize themselves with its purpose |
| Get logging tool (already written) up and running on
a Linux server and start collecting data |
| Recruit subjects for a research study |
| Design and conduct a web-based survey |
| Write a tool to parse logs obtained by monitor |
| Do follow-up questionnaires with study participants |
| Analyze data for interesting results |
| Write up results in a research paper and submit for
publication |
| Prepare a poster and short talk about project |
Tentative Schedule:
October 2005: Read about related work and get
IRB certification
November 2005: Get logging tool up and
collecting sample data, write script to parse log files, finalize initial
web survey
December 2005: Finalize everything for beginning
study
January 2006: Conduct study
February 2006: Analyze data
March 2006: Write up results in paper and submit
to conference (CSCW? GROUP?)
April 2006: Prepare poster and short talk
