Group Ideation

This is a group assignment in which you will generate and describe at least 5 unique ideas in personal health informatics that your group would be interested to pursue for the term project. The primary goal of this assignment is to have your group start thinking about possible project ideas you’d like to pursue. A secondary goal is to give you and your group members practice with collaborative ideation.

Motivation

Consider the following simple observation: the "goodness" of your ideas is normally distributed. Most of your ideas are going to be average. A rare, few, however will be good, and fewer still will be very good. If you want to consistently have very good ideas, then, you should generate a lot of ideas. If you generate enough ideas, the Law of Large Numbers will kick in and you are likely to have a handful of very good ideas that have the potential to have strong impact.

As you gain more experience doing research and practice deliberately, you should be shifting the "goodness" distribution of your ideas to the right: i.e., the average "goodness" of your ideas should continue to improve. That's growth! However, the shape of that distribution will remain the same: your best ideas will be few and far between, and the only reliable way to extract them will be to generate many ideas. This is true for me, you and everyone else. You will only be able to pursue a handful of projects at any one time, so make sure you are pursuing the best ideas that you can generate.

Accordingly, this assignment is designed to help you generate many ideas. Along the way, you will see a lot of papers.

Details

For this assignment, work as a group to generate at least 5 proposed research projects that would fit within the scope of this course. Do not split up and each contribute a few ideas each — work together on this.

Here are some things to keep in mind when generating ideas for this assignment:

Use Google Scholar as well as the references section in papers listed in this course to start sifting through related work. You may look ahead to topics and readings later in the class for inspiration.
Using Google Scholar's "cited by" feature to discover related work.
Remember that your final deliverable should be ready by the end of the semester. Make sure you scope your project so it's accomplishable in that timeframe. This includes the population needed for your study is available.

Deliverable

A single PDF document consisting of at least 5 proposed personal health informatics research ideas, each generated together as a group.

For each project idea, give it a:

Title
Describe the core contribution in 2-3 sentences (i.e., what the personal health informatics community will learn);
Explain what exactly you're planning to build or what the method will be for the study you are planning;
Cite at least one published paper or article that is a central piece of published, academic related work, and describe its relevance to your idea.

Here's a good example of ideation. Note that this example assignment was done in Sauvik Das's CS4/8803 Usable Privacy & Secruity class.

Grading

You can earn up to 10 points for the assignment along the following two dimensions: research contribution and feasibility.
Instead of grading all ideas, I will select the top 3 and grade based on those.
This will produce the highest scores and will also allow me to nudge you towards projects that I think have the greatest potential.
If you want to pursue an idea outside of the 3 you were given feedback on, please meet with me to discuss that idea prior to submitting your project abstract.

You can earn up to 10 points for the assignment along the following two dimensions: research contribution and feasibility.

	Insufficient	Adequate	Proficient	Mastery
Research contribution (7 pts)	1: Ideas are present, but they do not clearly articulate why they represent significant new knowledge to personal health informatics or why they have wide applicability.	3: The ideas demonstrate incremental new knowledge in personal health informatics and have only minor generalizability.	5: The ideas introduce moderate new knowledge to personal health informatics and are typically generalizable.	7: The ideas introduce creative new knowledge to personal health informatics and are strongly generalizable.
Feasibility (3 pts)	1: The ideas have not been scoped to be completable within a semester.		3: The ideas have been appropriately scoped to be completable within a semester.