Posted on by tianhony@andrew.cmu.edu

Exercise 4

Yang Zhang, Junhan Zhou, Gierad Laput, and Chris Harrison. 2016. SkinTrack: Using the Body as an Electrical Waveguide for Continuous Finger Tracking on the Skin. Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1491–1503. DOI:https://doi-org.proxy.library.cmu.edu/10.1145/2858036.2858082

  1. Do you have any conflict of interest in reviewing this paper? A “conflict of interest” is defined as follows:
    1. Ph.D. thesis advisor or advisee
    2. Postdoctoral advisor or advisee
    3. Collaborators or co-authors for the past 48 months
    4. Any other individual or institution with which the investigator has financial tiesYes/no. If yes, please disqualify yourself instead of proceeding. 

No.

  1. Expertise. Provide your expertise in the topic area of this paper.
    • 4 – Expert
    • 3 – Knowledgeable
    • 2 – Passing Knowledge
    • 1 – No Knowledge Single choice. 
  1. Summary. Please summarize what you believe are the paper’s main contributions to the field of soft robotics.Please write a short paragraph. 

The paper describes SkinTrack, a novel sensing technique that enables continuous finger tracking on the skins’ surface from a sensor-instrumented smartwatch. User studies and supplemental experiments are conducted to demonstrate the accuracy of the sensing technique. Furthermore, example applications are also shown in the paper.

  1. Strengths and Weaknesses. What are the main strengths and weaknesses of this work? Does the paper have strengths in originality and novelty?Please write a short paragraph. 

The paper has strengths in originality and novelty and it is very well argued by clearly categorizing previous works and comparing itself with them. A strength of this work is the extensive experiments run and effective data analysis. A weakness of the paper would be missing a chart that documents and organizes experiment datas altogether.

  1. Soundness. Are the ideas, algorithms, results or studies technologically/methodologically sound?Please write a short paragraph arguing for the strengths and weaknesses of the work. 

Everything present in the paper is sound in my opinion. Although the number of the participants in the user study is low, the way experiments are conducted and the results strongly support the claims. Results entails statistical analysis and thus effective.

  1. Related Work. Does the paper adequately describe related and prior work?Please write a sentence or short paragraph. 

Prior works are very educational for novices like me while including the important technical backgrounds. They are also sorted very carefully and concisely.

  1. Presentation. Is the paper well organized, well written and clearly presented?Please write a sentence or short paragraph. 

The paper is very well organized. Terms are properly introduced before they are introduced and while I was reading it, I was never confused by anything.

  1. Suggestions. Do you have suggestions for improving this paper?Please write several paragraphs detailing specific points of the paper which merit reconsideration. Be sure to address the text, figures and tables, mathematics, and grammar and spelling. 

A minor suggestion would be adding a chart that has some of the data from experiments to see where the analysis numbers come from.

  1. Comments to Committee (Hidden from authors). Does the paper have enough originality and importance to merit publication? Is the paper relevant to the field? These comments will NOT be sent to the authors:Please write one or more paragraphs as needed to justify your review judgement. 

I believe the paper has enough originality and importance and it clearly identifies a research gap and describes a novel sensing technique that fills the gap.

  1. Overall Rating. Provide your overall rating of the paper (5 is best)
    • 5 – Definite accept: I would argue strongly for accepting this paper.
    • 4 – Probably accept: I would argue for accepting this paper.
    • 3 – Borderline: Overall I would not argue for accepting this paper.
    • 2 – Probably reject: I would argue for rejecting this paper.
    • 1 – Definite reject: I would argue strongly for rejecting this paper.

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