Péter Angeli

Week 1

In the first week, we were presented the idea of Socio-Cognitive Engineering. We learned about the foundations of robot-human interaction, what are the possibilities and hardships.

We formed groups together and discussed what kind of prototype are we going to build for the final project, and learned about how to use the XWiki platform. We picked the NAO robot as our tool, but as I have never programmed any robot, I'm really interested in how hard this process going to be.

It was really interesting to see the videos of the kids with diabetes, and how much these robots mean to them. I think it was the perfect "introduction" of why this subject and the whole socio cognitive field of study is so interesting and rewarding.

Week 2

The lecture about brain functionality was really interesting. I have always admired biology, discovering our body, and the fascinating beauty of the human brain. The video about the care facilities' "special rooms" was really interesting. Also it's nice to see that people with dementia have something or do something they really enjoy.

On Tuesday we started with the Foundation part of the XWiki. Lang and I started working on the Operational Demands part. It's really interesting to see that our project starts to have a well-defined specification, and a solid foundation.

Week 3

This week the lectures were about user stories, design patterns, and ontologies. I was kind of familiar with ontologies, as I had a course in my home university where we had to use SPARQL to work with semantic web queries where ontologies were a big part of the course.

It was a good idea last week to split the group into smaller parts and work with a smaller group of people, but this week I got the Objectives and Functions part myself, so I worked on that alone.

We also booked a group session with the robot for next week, which I was very excited about.

Week 4

The lecture this week about experiments and measurements was really helpful, as we started to experiment with the robot in real life.
First, it was a really strange experience to work with NAO, sometimes it was frustrating that it did not do what we told him but we managed to do some funny and interesting things with him

Sadly after much experimenting, we found out that the speech recognition part was not working so we wasted a bunch of time trying to fix it without any success. But at least we had a lot of fun with the group laughing together.

For this week my job was to prepare the Evaluation's Participants & Material part.

We had to do the presentation next week on Monday, so we started to prepare that as well. It was a good opportunity to unify our thinking process and finalize any "loose ends" on the project.
Sadly Rembrandt tested positive, meaning he had to skip the presentation.

To have everything ready by Monday, everybody had a part of the presentation prepared by the weekend, but we also had a final meeting on Sunday evening to finalize everything.

Week 5

On Monday, we had the presentation where we received a bunch of helpful feedback on how we should continue on the project.

For Friday we also booked an appointment for NAO to work on (considering the feedback we got on Monday as well). On this occasion, we also tried to work on speech recognition which didn't want to work, but we figured out a way to have a semi-final prototype for the evaluation. We also filmed a short film.

Week 6

The lecture this week was about inclusive design. It was interesting to think about how people with reduced abilities can use our (or others) products. It is a hard, time-consuming but really important and rewarding job to think about these people during the design process.

This week I worked with Lang again to create a spreadsheet with overview comments on XWiki on what to improve.

Week 7

This week was the busiest week of all. We had to finish our prototype and also test it with other participants. It turned out that having a consistent testing flow is not as easy as we imagined at first.

Thankfully we got the Tuesday slot for next week to hold the final presentation which gave us a little bit more time to work on the project

On Friday we started working early in the morning to finish up the robot and set it up for the evaluation. I also created a short description of the instructions on how to interact with the robot. This sped up the process.
Later that day, around 1 pm we started having our first participants. We originally thought we could only get around 10 people to show up, but in the end, everybody asked their friends to come in and take the test. A test usually took around 10-15 mins for each person.
In the end, we had around 19 participants which was enough for some simple graphs and to have some results
We finished around 5:30 pm. It was a very long, but very rewarding day and week.

On the weekend we also finished the final presentation and processed the data we got from the evaluation.

Week 8

On Monday we worked a bit more on the presentation and also listened to what other teams managed to do with the robots.
I was surprised by how many great ideas they had and how well everybody worked together. I thought I was lucky with the team I got but it seems like this course brought together every team and got the best out of them

On Tuesday we presented our final presentation. We got really helpful feedback. This week we also finalized the XWiki and worked with the feedback we got. Finished up and polished everything.

Final Thoughts

I really enjoyed this course. This was completely different from any course I could have taken part in my home university, and it was really enjoyable.
I love working with robots, but it was surprising how hard it was for us to figure out basic functionalities, and it was sad that we couldn't achieve everything we thought about at the beginning of the course.

I'm also really happy I was part of this group, everybody was really active and helpful, everyone seemed like they are interested in the course and do the work because they enjoy it, not because it was mandatory.

The only feedback is that I think we could have achieved more during the course (robot functionality-wise) if it was a bit longer, I think 8 weeks is not enough for this, and I would have liked to work more on this project.

I learned a bunch of really important things and I'm really happy I took this course. Thank you.