Spring 2016
Data science for data about you. Computing is expanding our ability to collect and process data about our everyday lives. This seminar covers personal informatics, the collection of data from daily activities for reflection and self-experimentation. We will cover methods for knowing more about yourself through using technology to track different types of data and how to interpret them, and run controlled experiments on yourself. We will learn about self-reflection and visualization, experimental design, time-series analysis and apply them to domains of location, sleep, activity, time spent, health and wellness. These topics will be pursued through independent reading, assignments, class discussion, and a semester-long self-tracking and experimentation project. Students should already be comfortable working programmatically with data, and preferably taken a course in: data science, machine learning, user interfaces, or probability/statistics. The seminar will have limited enrollment. Please fill out this form to apply.
Note: if you've taken CS 1300, then CS 2951R is more organic, smaller and intimate, less formal, and a bit more like an experiment in itself!
We will use Slack for sharing content and posting comments about readings, and the only written handin will be one assignment writeup (A0). Reading comments should be interesting things you noticed in the reading that you'd like us to talk about in class. The assignments will be opportunities for you to do something fun with your own data, and you will share the findings in short "show and tells" in class.
Location: 477 CIT (Lubrano)
Time: 1:00-2:20pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays
Jeff Huang, 407 CIT, jeff @cs.brown.edu
Office hours: Tuesdays 2:30-4:00pm
A0 "You vs You" - A hypothesis-driven self-experiment study you perform on yourself
A1 "The Road Taken" - Collecting and revisiting past places you have been and routes you have taken
A2 "My Life in Pictures" - Make visuals that allow you to compare your time spent with a larger population
A3 "From Motions to Actions" - An exercise of classifying raw motion sensor data into activities
A4 "Unrequited Mail" - Make an email assistant bot to let senders know when to expect a response
Collaboration policy: if you use something (code, an idea, text, etc.) that you didn't come up with yourself, cite it!
By popular vote, laptops/phones should not be used in class except to share something, or to show the reading.
The late policy is: extensions can be requested with a reasonable explanation.
Moderating: everyone should moderate 2 papers, which involves leading the discussion (short summary and open with questions) and asking academic authors the backstory for the paper.
Reading comments: you should make substantive comments for each reading on Slack (adding to the discussion).
Getting help: TA Nedi can help you with the technical parts of the assignments. She has weekly office hours at Wed 11am-1pm in 409 CIT.
Self-E: Smartphone-Supported Guidance for Customizable Self-Experimentation
Nediyana Daskalova, Eindra Kyi, Kevin Ouyang, Arthur Borem, Sally Chen, Sung Hyun Park, Nicole Nugent, Jeff Huang
CHI 2021
Lessons Learned from Two Cohorts of Personal Informatics Self-Experiments
Nediyana Daskalova, Karthik Desingh, Alexandra Papoutsaki, Diane Schulze, Han Sha, Jeff Huang
IMWUT 2017