Péter Angeli

Version 14.1 by Péter Angeli on 2022/04/03 16:27

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 the 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.

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

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 were 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 emoticon_smile

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

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

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".
Sadly Rembrandt tested positive, meaning we had to skip him for the presentation.

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

Week 5

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

For Friday we also booked an appointment for NAO to work something out (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 abilites can use our (or others) product. 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 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 that easy as we imagined 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 emoticon_grin

On Friday we started working early in the Morning to finish the robot and set it up for the evaulation. 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 1pm we started having our first participant. We oroginally thought we could only get around 10 people to show up, but at the end everybody asked their friends to come in and take the test. A test usually took around 10-15 mins for each person.
At the end we had around 19 participants which were enough for some simply graphs emoticon_smile

We finsihed around 5:30pm. It was a very long, but very rewarding day.

Week 8