Profile of Arber Demi
Personal Information
- Arber
- Demi
Originally I thought this course would be a follow up of something like Human-Computer Interaction from the CSE BSc programme, however it mostly resembled a follow-up to another course I took this year, specifically the Conversational Agents course (although less focused on the actual implementation aspect).
I enjoyed the idea of creating a proper use case for a robot in the lives of PwD, and it was quite nice to learn about all of the different issues that they face while considering the different features/functionalities that our and the other team robots would have.
Throughout the course we did have some issues, but I really enjoyed the discussion section with the other students during the lab times. They were very useful in seeing other perspectives and getting some work done that was under better supervision.
One thing I personally struggled with quite a bit was some sense of direction (especially during the earlier weeks), as the project was quite open ended in what we were doing. That is fine for the most part, however it did seem like everything was going a bit fast, and in the end not being able to do our evaluation in a more proper environment ended up making the entire process feel like it didn't get a proper ending. This of course wasn't only due to the course, but our specific robot as well, as this specific use case is quite personal and not really easy to deal with. On top of that, with the end time of the project being around week 8 or so, it really added to this feeling of having to do everything quickly. I would really prefer for the deadlines to be pushed up a bit to allow for more back and forth with the robot designs and getting more feedback.
As a general thing with the course I would really want a bit more direction when it comes to the starting phase. As someone who hasn't really been exposed to most of the technology or ideology that goes into this course, it was quite difficult to make decisions and choices about what would be the best cases, and even though this process of going through all the pros and cons helps with getting a better understanding of the reasons for these ideas/tools existing, I would prefer it being more constrained just for the case of the starting part of the course. Maybe a more specific project topic that has less free-movement between all of the groups so there is more communication that works better as feedback between groups, or perhaps just a better/more flexible technical place to start working with the robot. (The Interactive Robotics site wasn't really that great, as a lot of the things we though we could do were not possible. Would much more prefer dealing with some code and documentation).
Otherwise, I enjoyed the course, it grounded a lot of the ideas I had before about how a robot assistant could work.