Personal Reflection

Main take-away: enrichment of HRI knowledge and experience 🤖💙🧑🏻‍🦳

Starting my Computer Science Master's last September, I passionately explored my interests in interaction between people and tech, namely HCI and HRI, starting with the courses Social Signal Processing and Conversational Agents. In pursuit of that direction, I took on the challenge of this project with great eagerness. On a personal meta-level, I think courses in this area matter a lot: most of TU Delft's teaching tends to depend on the notion that it is preferable to learn the how rather than the why of technology. Socio-cognitive engineering shifts the focus to the latter, while still maintaining that technical expertise in the loop. This course therefore proved to be an enrichment and broadening of the things that interest me.

I look back at this project with a great satisfaction. The result is a collaborative effort in which I applied my skills and enriched my knowledge within this great team. Kickstarting the project, there was an initial discussion on expectations: a meeting in which each their personal forte's and pitfalls were clarified to the team. I knew my strengths lie in critical reading and writing since I practised that a lot of times during my Bachelor's in Chinese Studies. It was immensely beneficial to the project process and outcome to see such a diverse skillset in this group! I can proudly say that the result reflects that collaboration.

My contributions were focused on my experience in previous courses, focusing on ethical HRI, validated evaluation of HRI systems and statistics. That started early in the process with the conceptual phase and human factors, extending to the user study procedure and statistical analysis of results in the later part of the project. From the point of my skills, I held the written documentation in check at times when potential inconsistencies were present, always referring to the relevant literature on the topics being discussed. Additionally, I found that my conceptualisation skills were helpful in the kick-off phase of our project. I follow extracurricular electives at the Design faculty where we infuse AI with meaningful interactive prototypes.

All in all, this course proved to be an irreplaceable addition to my curriculum, in which I encountered plenty of concepts and read interesting related work on the topics that keep me thinking at times. The project left a few aspects for future avenues to be taken. Those aspects can be found in the direction of a more representative user study sample, or a more valid study process. My wish is to revisit the themes and concepts that were introduced and discussed during this course in the future, so who knows until soon! 😉