Meeting Minutes

Date:	December 1, 2011
Location:	DC 2303
Time:	11:30
Chair:	Stephen Mann

1. Attendance

Ben, Craig, Tiffany, Zainab, Grace, Edgar, Simon, Elodie, Matt, Bill, Alex, Phillipe, Dan

2. Coffee Hour

Coffee hour last week:: Phil- thanks!
Coffee hour this week:: Volunteers? (Craig's bday)
Coffee hour next week:: Volunteers?

3. Forthcoming

Date:	December 8, 2011	December 15, 2011	December 22, 2011	January 5, 2012
Location:	DC 2303 11:30	DC 1331 11:30	DC 1331 11:30	DC 1331 11:30
Chair:	Simon Parent	Matei Negulescu	Alex Pytel
Technical Presentation:	Philippe Lamoureux	Stephen Mann	Matei Negulescu	Simon Parent

4. Technical Presentation

Ben Lafreniere	Title : Understanding the Faces and Uses of Online Tutorials Abstract: Despite their prevalence, little is known about how users make use of web tutorials for feature-rich applications, and why authors take the time to create them. We analyzed comments posted to web tutorials to understand the purposes that tutorials serve for users, and examined the tutorials themselves to understand their structure and for insights into why authors create them. Our results indicate that users come to tutorials for help performing specific tasks, but also to check their existing skills, learn new techniques with applications, and for the experience of following an advanced workflow step-by-step to create a complex end result. As for tutorial authors, we found that most tutorials had clear extrinsic reasons for existing, including earning ad or referral revenue, promoting premium products or services, or acting as a portfolio for the author's skills and abilities. We suggest a number of improvements to current tutorial interfaces based on our findings.

Ben Lafreniere

Title : Understanding the Faces and Uses of Online Tutorials
Abstract:
Despite their prevalence, little is known about how users make use of web tutorials for feature-rich applications, and why authors take the time to create them. We analyzed comments posted to web tutorials to understand the purposes that tutorials serve for users, and examined the tutorials themselves to understand their structure and for insights into why authors create them. Our results indicate that users come to tutorials for help performing specific tasks, but also to check their existing skills, learn new techniques with applications, and for the experience of following an advanced workflow step-by-step to create a complex end result. As for tutorial authors, we found that most tutorials had clear extrinsic reasons for existing, including earning ad or referral revenue, promoting premium products or services, or acting as a portfolio for the author's skills and abilities. We suggest a number of improvements to current tutorial interfaces based on our findings.

5. Discussion Items

Lab meeting room, day, time for next term - we'll try to hold the meetings on the same day at the same time.
Agenda creation form modified.
Reminder to create minutes for the meeting.
Old books. We moved some outdated books from the library and put them on the coffee table where we hold coffee hour. If you think they should remain in the library, please return them there. Or feel free to take any of them if you want.
DC 1331 is not available next week for our meeting, so we'll hold it in DC 2303.

6. Action Items

?-mas party on December 10. Be there.

7. Conferences and Special Journal Issues

Recent Additions

Upcoming Deadlines

8. Directors' Meeting

9. Seminars and Events

Tuesday, 29 November 2011, 2:00PM - Computer Science (Symbolic Computation Group), DC 1304: Michael Monagan: -- Computing Tutte Polynomials
Friday, 2 December 2011, 11:00AM - Computer Science (Symbolic Computation Group), DC 1304: Reinhold Burger: -- Closed form solutions of linear odes with elliptic function coefficients: the higher order case
Friday, 2 December 2011, 11:30AM - Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence Lab), DC 2306C(AI Lab): Marek Grzes: -- Relational Approach to Knowledge Engineering for POMDP-based Assistance Systems as a Translation of a Psychological Model
Monday, 5 December 2011, 1:30PM - Computer Science (Symbolic Computation Group), DC 1304: Soumojit Sarkit: -- Computing Popov Forms of Polynomial Matrices
Tuesday, 6 December 2011, 12:00PM - Computer Science (Institute for Quantum Computing), RAC 2009: Sev Gharibian: -- Hardness of approximation for quantum problems
Tuesday, 6 December 2011, 2:00PM - Computer Science (Bioinformatics Group), DC 2310: Xi Han: -- Effective Strategies for Improving Peptide Identification with Tandem Mass Spectrometry.
Wednesday, 7 December 2011, 10:00AM - Computer Science (Software Engineering Research Group), DC 1304: Colin Werner: -- A Case Study of a Very Large Organization

Also see other Math and CS postings.