Pierre Bongrand

Last modified by Pierre Bongrand on 2022/04/05 19:37

Motivation

 
I am a master student that follows the artificial intelligence track. I took this course for three reasons:
Firstly, as I believe in a future in which both artificial intelligence - both as software and in robotics - and humans will have to work together, it seemed like the perfect course to take to understand the cooperation of both.
Secondly, I already took a lot of theoretical courses and it was important for me to do a course that has an important social impact.
Lastly, as my grandmother just got diagnosed with a brain tumor this summer and as I saw her cognitive abilities decrease week by week, it was very special for me to work on a project that targeted people with dementia.

Weekly Breakdown

 

Week 1

 
Since the goal of this project is to develop a prototype that meets a real-life need. The field of knowledge is very wide-ranging from the types of dementia, and the needs of these people, to the type of activities they want to engage in, to the technologies available to help them.
We decided to divide each of these tasks among the six group members. The idea is that each person will do in-depth research in one of the areas and can present it to the group for the weekend. This way the whole group will be proficient on the topic as a whole.

Research

I chose to work on two aspects:
Location of PwD:
I have listed the advantages, disadvantages, and specificities of two settings: health care center, and the patient's home.

Interaction Goals:
I researched the needs of people with dementia. I identified three types of goals the chosen robot could fulfill: functional, emotional, and safety.
I listed 5 to 10 potential use cases per goal that I found to be either the most important or very original and not already fulfilled.

Finally, I presented this work to the team and we all made choices about: the type of dementia the patient would have, the potential goals and use cases we will focus on, and the type of robot to choose.

Report

Based on my work, we wrote with Sneha and Haoran a first draft version of: 

  • Environment, 
  • Stakeholders, 
  • Problem scenario, 
  • Objectives. 
  • Defined a first use case. 

Week 2

We split the team into two subteams. Sneha and I would work on the report while the rest of the group would work on the code.
The point of this was that we could both get an idea of how to code our technical solution and define our problem scenario and personas.
Sneha and I decided based on a series of arguments and the willingness of the group to implement a solution based on communication that the project will be oriented toward a patient with early-stage and mild dementia. 

Sneha and I defined based on this worked on the report.

Report & Design

  • Defining the personas
    We improved the report by writing a first version of the following sections:
  • Objectives
  • Claims
  • Environment
  • Stakeholders

Week 3

Even though we wanted to switch roles week by week so that everyone would be proficient both with the code and the report we didn't as we accumulated a bit of work from the previous week in both subteams. As a result, I worked with Sneha this week on the report and explored the general potential goals of the robot.

Report & Design

  • We defined the use cases and described the steps sequence of each one of them.
  • We redefined our goals according to the limitations of Pepper.
  • We defined the first series of requirements.

Week 4

Report with Sneha

  • Designed the team design patterns and drew them.
  • Ontology. Designed the ontology. Sneha drew it. 
  • Requirements
  • Analysed other group's work report and made minor edits to a few sections.

Week 5

Report

  • Defined the claims.
  • Redefined most of the requirements and described all the features.
  • Redefined the Use cases according to the new claims and requirements.
  • Reorganised the objectives and made minor edits.
  • Wrote a first version of the Music Management page.
  • Provided some feedback about the evaluation and gave some input about the evaluation process.

Presentation

This week as Pietro was in contact case one day before the presentation, I had to replace him for the presentation. 

  • Make every slide that I presented (as nothing was ready before).
  • Write the text of my presentation (as nothing was ready before).
  • Give feedback about the slides of other speakers
  • Presented

Week 6

As many deadlines are approaching at the end of the block and the deliverables for this project need to be finished soon, I took a bit of a managerial position. Moreover, some people didn't participate much in the project until now. I kindly asked in the group chat and person, that it would be nice if everyone could contribute as much as everyone else. As some people had very little idea about the specifications of our project a part of my work this week was to guide them and help them get on track so that they could contribute later on.

Managing

  • Made a list of tasks accessible and editable online. The list was organized by both priority (not done, needs to be improved, fine but could be improved, done) and type (report, code, presentation). The idea of the list would be that everyone could access anytime the list of remaining things to work on, and could be updated by anyone.
  • Asked tasks preferences of each team member.
  • Provided description of each task.
  • Helped individually three people to get on track with the project.
  • Gave regular feedback about the report on XWiki.

Report

  • Wrote the first version of the inclusive design page.
  • Implemented the feedback from the presentation about the team design patterns 

Week 7

Managing

  • Read every section of the report and provide constructive feedback.
  • Updated the list of tasks.
  • Reminded people to complete their part. Otherwise, we would not meet the deliverable deadline.

Report

  • Wrote the first version of the Human-Agent Teamwork page.
  • Implemented feedback that we received from the professors on roughly every tab of the wiki: Foundation, Specification, Evaluation, Design Pattern.
  • Contacted Bart to add some new pages and features to the Xwiki.

With Sneha:

  • Use cases: We corrected some mapping errors between UC step, Requirement, and Claims.
  • Team Design Pattern: Modified the visuals to make it work with the IDP.
  • Claims: We updated the claims according to the feedback provided by the professors and made the appropriate changes to the use cases so that it matches well
  • Requirements: We updated the claims according to the feedback provided by the professors

 
Experiments

  • Gave extensive repeated feedback about the questionnaire, its style, and the experiment process.
  • Mathieu and I corrected the evaluation forms as there were some mistakes.
  • Did 15 evaluation sessions on Monday, Thursday, and Friday.
  • Participated in 3 experiments from other groups.

Week 8

Managing

  • Providing constructive feedback to team members about every component.
  • Updated the list of tasks.
  • Reminded people to complete their part. Otherwise, we would not meet the deliverable deadline.

Report

  • Created, designed, and wrote the Graphical User Interface section and visuals. As it was some feedback from the professors from our presentation, I thought it would be a nice addition to describe the work we have done concerning the GUI.
  • Humanoid Robot: As some feedback given on this page by group members has not been implemented in more than 2 weeks, I took the liberty to completely rework this section. 
  • Implemented the feedback of the professors about the Ontology-based on some literature.
  • Adjusted the Introduction.
  • Added citations to the pages that needed sourcing (Including research).
  • Made some analysis about the data we collected for our results.
  • Explored different visuals for displaying the results 
  • Proofread the entire report iteratively as we improved sections repeatedly.
  • Gave some constructive feedback about 90% of the sections on the Xwiki or by group messages.
  • Analysed other group's work report and made minor edits to a few sections about aesthetics and structure.
  • Contacted Bart to add some new pages and features to the Xwiki.
  • Improved and adapted the general aesthetic of the pages to the export features of XWiki (because export feature changes the nature of the webpages).

Personal Reflections

In general, I enjoyed working on this project. I found the lectures to be really interesting. The guest lecturers were a nice addition and gave some very valuable insights. The iterative process of the project was a great pedagogical experience. Moreover, contributing in a practical way to a societal problem felt very nice and gave me some perspective about how I will use my knowledge after this degree.

On another note, a significant downside of this project was the severe lack of motivation of a few team members. Even though help and reminders were provided to unmotivated individuals, they had very little effect on them. This resulted in a very unfair repartition of work as half of the team was overworking as we were passionate about the project and wanted to deliver a nice and finished product and report.