Harmen Kroon

In this section I will reflect on my activity related to the course Socio-Cognitive Engineering.
Each week we had two lectures of which one was a proper full lecture and the other partially so and partially a work session.
As a group we also had a set time Wednesday morning when we were working in the Insight lab (robot lab).
I will also reflect a bit on titbits that I found interesting during the course.

Week 1

Getting to know the group and reading up on the field.
We decided as a group to work with MiRo and my task was to look into playing music/sound; which could be limited using MicroCloud.
After the first classes I read the two papers (Neerincx et al., 2019) and (Han et al., 2016)

Week 2

Due to not having a Mirocloud account I was unable to explore the codebase. I did try to look up videos and information at https://www.miro-e.com/mirocloud.
Before the lecture I read the two papers (Peeters et al., 2016) and (Neerincx et al., to appear) in order to prepare for the guest lecture.
My task for this week included writing problem scenarios.

Week 3

Before the lecture I read the paper on team design patterns for moral decisions in hybrid intelligent systems  (Neerincx et al., 2021)
I was tasked with making an ontology and decided to explore Typedb, relational software mentioned in the lecture.
For my first session in the robot lab I made a script that would move MiRo around in a circle and play some basic sounds.

Week 4

After the lecture I read the paper (Peer et al., 2017).
I finally finished the ontology with draw.io and not Typedb as it proofed to difficult to install for the timeframe and utility in this project. I also programmed a lot of functionality for our demo. We wanted to show off our design for grabbing attention when someone deviates from the path, for whenever MiRo acts excited and for how MiRo follows a path along a hallway with turns.
I recorded this behaviour and shared it with the team as we demo this in week 5.

Week 5

This week there were presentation and my group presented on Monday. During both days I tried to be as attentive as possible in order to be able to ask relevant questions and seek inspiration from the other groups. I also took notes whenever tips, advise or remarks were given that are relevant to our project.
I felt that we could improve on our ontology by adding an additional interaction ontology which I took as a task upon myself. Other tasks that I got included research on uses of robot dogs and other robot animals in care facilities, and preparing for our next robot lab session.
In the lab session I tried to make MiRo recognise coloured garments, but the simulator was quite a bit buggy which delayed and eventually make us dismiss this idea.

Week 6

Unfortunately I was not feeling well in the weekend and the beginning of the week and my attendance and performance was therefore lacking as well.
Luckily I could ask my team members about what I missed during the lecture and then supplement my notes with the lecture slides and the reading.
During our Wednesday morning lab session I was feeling better and we were able to set up a pilot experiment. Since I missed some of our group discussion I was a bit confused with the organisation around the experiment as it seemed to me that a lot of parts were well prepared but as a whole there lacked some cohesion. So I tried to fill in the gaps and help set up the pilot and also make extensive notes on what we should improve on before the real experiment.

Week 7

Before the lecture I read through the paper on value sensitive design (Harbers, M., & Neerincx, M. A. 2017)
We focused on our experiment and evaluation this week. Since I helped with the pilot I was tasked Experiment lead.
I asked the other groups for participants in our experiment and coordinated the planning of the experiment on Wednesday morning.
I designed the layout of the experiment as well as the division of tasks, formalisation of instructions, creating a checklist, printing out documents and bringing appropriate attire to the experiment. This showed to me how many variables are at play during an experiment and how we maybe could have performed another pilot earlier on so that we could perfect our set up more.
Throughout the week I also participated in experiments of three other groups which was an interesting experience.
Friday we started evaluation of our test results and I made some nice looking graphs that illustrated our findings.
Sunday I came together with Tim and Ricardo to lay out the presentation and divide the slides over ourselves and Doreen.

Week 8

On Monday I finished my part of the presentation and we had two presentations from group 1 and 2.
We got some good tips for the next day when were supposed to present.
On Tuesday morning the four of us got together early in order to practice and finetune the presentation which helped us a lot in my opinion. After that we were up first and I felt we did great; my part went well and we could properly answer every question thrown at us. The other groups were interesting to learn about as well.
Thursday morning Ricardo, Laura and I got in a call to discuss all that needed to be finished up in the xwiki for our final deadline. We were able to go through every page and determine what needed to be added and/or proofread. Afterwards we divided some of the tasks and presented them to the group.

Week 9

On Monday I finished up all my tasks like adding to the ontology, proofreading, writing introductions to various pages, expanding on our claims section (as we did for the presentation) and finishing up this reflection.
Overall I would say I really liked this project. Although it was quite compact and we came across some hurdles it provided me with new insights in design, problem spaces, experimental setups, teamwork and especially the Socio-Cognitive Engineering method.
I feel that apart from my week of illness I contributed well to the team. Certainly so nearing the later weeks when some more direction was needed and we definitely had to make some strides to come to a satisfying result for all. Which I think we conclusively accomplished.