Department of Informatics – Information Management Research Group

CSCW 2024: Exercise

Homework 2: Small Group Experience

Experiencing Creativity in Distributed Small Group Assignment

During the exercise session on March 14th, you formed teams of 4 to complete the tasks described below.
If you have missed this session, please contact your fellow students (i.e., Channel “Exercises” in MS
Teams) to check if any team has four people that can still accommodate one more person (note: each
group can only have maximum 4 members). If you still do not have a team by Saturday, March 16th, 23:59,
please contact Rafael Wu (wenyuan@ifi.uzh.ch).

Task 1 – Collaborative Creative Challenge (8 points)

Find a time that would work for all members of your group to solve the creative challenge collaboratively.
Reserve around 120 minutes for a distributed (i.e., not co-located) collaboration meeting with your
team. Agree in advance on the tool(s) you will use during the collaboration. In addition, agree on a
persuasion system developed in your previous homework that you will discuss during the collaboration
session.

At the agreed-upon time, connect with your team via the chosen tools (and video conferencing if video
conferencing is not embedded in the chosen tool) and solve the creative challenge.

Take care of the documentation:

Record your collaboration session on audio and video (e.g., screencast). Please, check your recording
tools before the sessions and ensure that they work properly. Consider having more than one person
from your group recording the collaboration session in case of unexpected failure.

Creative Challenge: Designing an LLM-based chatbot with persuasive abilities.

In this task, we invite you to unleash your creativity and to design an LLM-based chatbot with persuasive
abilities for the interactions from the last homework. The aim of this chatbot is to replace the advisor and
to persuade users to change their attitude or behavior with pre-defined goals.

Content: LLM-based Chatbots are the mainstream for organizations and business to provide human-like
conversations to users for a variety of services. Powerful LLMs such as GPT-4 have proven a lot of
potential for chatbot development. However, the characteristics of the LLM also bring challenges for the
chatbot design: First, the LLMs are non-deterministic, which means the outputs of the LLM are always
random generated and there is no way to control it precisely. Second, LLMs are stateless, which means
the context of the output generated by LLM is always limited by the context of input and its training data.
One promising approach is prompt engineering, which tries to control the output of LLM by carefully
designed prompts for the input. There are also several frameworks to empower the LLM with additional
components for more complicated tasks, such as LangChain, but a widely accepted paradigm for
development of LLM applications is still missing, not to mention the incorporation of persuasion. Your task
is to design an LLM-based chatbot which has persuasion abilities in certain scenarios developed in the
previous homework.
The design of chatbot can be realized but not limited to prompt engineering. We encourage you to realize
a prototype based on an LLM, such as easily accessible ChatGPT (for demonstrating purpose, the paid
version of GPT-4 is not required).

The document “Homework_2.1_Appendix” provides you with some basis about prompt engineering.

Deliverable:
1. A prototype or a video presentation showcasing the LLM-based chatbot with persuasive abilities
(see format for additional details).
2. Video recording of the online session where your team collaboratively develops the creative
solution deliverable.

Format:
There’s no required format. Suggested formats include video, animation, visualization, interactive module
etc. For example, if you were to create a video as a creative solution deliverable, keep the video to
approximately 1-2 minutes long.

Target Audience:
Consider the viewers of your content to be the public who have little to no knowledge in the research of
CSCW.

Expected Work Hours: 5 hours.

Submit
1) Creative Solution Deliverable – video/animation/storyboard/interactive module etc.
2) Video recording of the online session where your team collaboratively develop the creative solution
deliverable to OLAT until Sunday, March 24th, 23:59 Zurich time.

• Please use a ZIP File and one submission per team.

• Name the ZIP File with the homework title, the correct group number (see Excel sheet) and the
members’ last names, e.g., “Homework_2-1_group33_martin-meyer-brown-xiu.zip”
• Please use the following link to upload your ZIP File until March 24th, 23:59 (the submission folder
will close afterward):
• https://seafile.ifi.uzh.ch/u/d/078eeb8940a14c1dafc2/
• Provide names and matriculation numbers of all team members.

Task 2 for Homework 2 will be published on March 25th.