Deepali - Self Reflection

Week 1

In the first week, I worked on understanding the project requirements and my team mates better.  During the lab session we understood our problem statement better and brainstormed for ideas for an interactive agent. We started with building personas and stakeholders that may be involved with our agent and then came up with various ideas such as conversation partner, sing along buddy, painting buddy, walking assistant among many more. We met up on Friday morning to retrospect on our ideas and we decided to fixate on the idea of a painting companion. We discussed and noted down major initial decisions needed for our project and divided up the tasks for completing the Quick start Section. I worked with Marijn to work on the "effects" section of  the Quick start section. I found it quite challenging to extend upon the negative consequences our agent can have, especially the socio ethical effects.

Week 2

During the Lab session, we discussed and settled on the final scope of our agents and its use cases. We eliminated more generic use cases for our agent such as health monitoring and decided to scope down the use cases of our agent to just assisting the PwD with painting and using information from the session to enhance interaction between and PwD and his daughter.

Week 3

• Understood the various Human Factors to consider as the foundation to design.
• Read papers to come up with relevant socio cognitive principles to make the robot applicable. 
  • Saw that self determination theory is a good foundation to assist the PwD given our goals.
  • Researched on various robots built for art and the design principles they use. Not many robots assist users in paining. There are generic assistive technology but nothing that helps disabled personnel.
  • Synchronization of tasks and thoughts between PwD and robot is important hence added two principles for it.
• Worked on building a foundation for evaluation.
  • The DECIDE framework was great help to systematically come up with the evaluation framework. It allowed us to systematically look for and select effective metrics and evaluation approaches.
  • After research realized that generic attitude towards robots is also an important aspect to consider.
  • Since we have personalization involved, will need to see how to handle.

Worked with my team mates to summarize and present the first iteration of our group presentation

Week 4

Started looking into further evaluation frameworks and metrics. Several papers exhibit scales and methods to evaluate a social robot, however since we will be using proxy participants to evaluate our robot further research is necessary to come up with the specifics.