Will-Billingsley.md

@@ -11,6 +11,11 @@ Some years ago, Prof John Billingsley (USQ) developed vision guidance algorithms
 
 I have a few more plans for what to do with this afterwards, but the start of this project would be to get a BlueTooth-controlled vehicle driven by a phone (that sits on the vehicle -- the phone is the onboard sensor and processing bundle).
 
+### Learning analytics on richer data
+
+There's a lot of buzz about learning analytics. But normally the data doesn't go much deeper than forum posts, site visits and activity, etc. In COSC220, we have huge great trails of data -- every issue, issue comment, code-change, run-of-the-tests, etc. We don't just see the students' submission, we see much of their development along the way. So, what can we find out when we can mine into the students' assignment work in progress?
+
+And what if we start extending that to other kinds of assignment? What does the world look like if we move from "assignment submission" to "assignment development in a versioned environment"?
 
 ### Multi-modal monitoring
 
@@ -18,13 +23,7 @@ Speaking of phones having many sensors...
 
 There have been quite a few in-home monitoring projects that are about video. I want to go multi-modal. I know the shower's on because I can hear it... (so I don't have to put a privacy-invading camera in the bathroom). We're proposing a PhD topic around this general problem, but we can bite of small parts as thesis and masters topics.
 
-
-### Learning analytics on richer data
-
-There's a lot of buzz about learning analytics. But normally the data doesn't go much deeper than forum posts, site visits and activity, etc. In COSC220, we have huge great trails of data -- every issue, issue comment, code-change, run-of-the-tests, etc. We don't just see the students' submission, we see much of their development along the way. So, what can we find out when we can mine into the students' assignment work in progress?
-
-
-### MathsTiles 2, and "Balance method vs Inversion method"
+### MathsTiles 2, and comparing different ways of learning algebra
 
 MathsTiles was a little something I cooked up back in the early 2000s. It's like Scratch-for-mathematics, only it can scale from algebra all the way up to complex number theory proofs. 
 
@@ -37,18 +36,20 @@ There's a few other tricks I'd like to use so that students learn something abou
 
 RamSelect lets users weight particular genetic characteristics of a ram they'd like to buy (wool fibre thickness, etc). But these characteristics have relationships between them.
 
-It strikes me there's two interesting HCI problems here --
+This project bites off a few contained problems
 - controls for setting weightings on a touch device (I have a different idea of how to do that)
 - how to express a complex relationship between variables to users
+- how to express "qualitative uncertainty" in a prediction
 
-This would be a typical CHI-by-the-numbers project. (Build a few different versions representing different interaction styles; run a controlled experiment with some measures and a survey; report chi^2 on the categorical stuff and T-test the quantitative measures).
+This can be a CHI-paper-by-the-numbers project, to get a publication quickly. (Build a few different versions representing different interaction styles; run a controlled experiment with some measures and a survey; report chi^2 on the categorical stuff and T-test the quantitative measures). 
 
-And if you get through that fast enough, there's another one on "qualitative uncertainty" in predictive models.
+## Less defined projects:
 
+The ones below are in an earlier stage of gestation
 
 ### Design-by-spidery-organisation
 
-We have a very large project with the Sheep CRC that is on a mission to change how graziers do sheep-raising (to get them hooked on the idea of using data and predictive algorithms to understand risk). This is a technology-led project, that spans multiple organisations, that is on a design mission (to change how people work). I would like to interview the members of the team to do a case study of multi-organisation technology-led design. 
+We have a very large project with the Sheep CRC that is on a mission to change how graziers do sheep-raising (to get them hooked on the idea of using data and predictive algorithms to understand risk). This is a technology-led project, that spans multiple organisations, that is on a design mission (to change how people work) but that is not in itself designerly. I would like to interview the members of the team to do a case study of multi-organisation technology-led design.
 
 This project requires very good communication skills -- it is all about rich, detailed interviewing and qualitative data analysis.
 
@@ -58,8 +59,6 @@ We've had a masters student working very successfully on trying out DeepMind's d
 
 But these take quite a while to run -- partly because it involves simulating an Atari. Can we do something smaller? Get a deep-learning based system for games so it can run in hours rather than days? (e.g., not simulate an Atari but run games in the system with a lower pixel count)? And if so, can we start to characterise "pedagogy for AI" -- how to optimise what to train it on?
 
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 ### The forkable, compilable course
 
 I have longstanding plans to make education work a lot more like open source projects. And it just so happens there's a UNE activity that we could do some of this around...