hci-lambdaprototyping-tutorial

Serverless Prototyping for computational HCI

Ilya Musabirov

Summary

This is a tutorial and a software prototype for kickstarting serverless (AWS Lambda + Chalice + Python) prototyping with chatbots (Telegram/Slack).

Started as a Final Project for CSC2558 at UofT, it expands on the principles described in EduCHi2020 discussion paper.

It is intended mostly for HCI/UX students who work with computational interaction (multiarmed bandits, optimization) or program prototypes and want to decrease time-to-prototype or time-to-user. Some more reasoning behind this approach to prototypes in Motivation.

Maybe some users find motivation more valuable and inspiring than a particular implementation idea I came up with.

The tutorial contains:

• docs, explaining critical parts of the approach, and containing some ideas for technical and design exercises
• Jupyter notebooks for some activities (think about each notebook as a prototype of other parts of the system: creating a database and working with gathered data, analytics)
• code skeleton of a Chalice bot backend with stubs of main functions

Table of Contents

1. Motivation for the approach
2. Short intro to serverless architecture
3. Starting up!
4. ChatBot
5. Bot Goes Bandit
6. Exercises, Ideas, Resources, Next Steps

Before we start

For practicing with prototyping, you will need:

• an AWS account (all of the key services are in AWS FreeTier limits)
• notebook service like Deepnote (has some useful features and integrations, free Edu tier) or Colab to expand stubs for working with data and analytics
• Python environment, VSCode or another editor, git

Feedback

Please, leave issues and questions here.

The documents and figures are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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