Week 16 (April 24 - April 28):

Work: We got the IRB review back very quickly. I spent my time working on that and revising what needed to be revised. I also started working on the final report for CREU.

Goal: My small goal right now is to write a good enough IRB proposal that they don't keep sending it back for edits. And once that's done, turning around and implementing it in Amazon Turk. In the next couple days, I'll look into how to upload a survey there and pay participants.

Outcome: This is only the third time I've done an IRB submission and I have been getting better. The edits that were made were concerning small details and requests for clarification. I fixed them and hopefully the next submission I do will go more smoothly.

Week 15 (April 17 - April 21):

Work: This past week I spent a lot of time writing the IRB submission for this survey. I also finalized the pilot survey in Qualtrics and sent it around the lab to get people's opinions. The lab members got back to me quickly and I also spent some time implementing these changes in Qualtrics.

Goal: At the moment, we are at the mercy of the IRB. Once they get back to us and either ask for revisions or accept the submission, we can begin. Once we have IRB approval, it will be quick to implement the survey in Amazon Mechanical Turk. Perhaps I can expect to have data to analyze before June!

Outcome: This week was mainly writing for the IRB. This is normally a good thing because I often reuse the language from the IRB to write the eventual paper, it is good to practice this kind of writing. I also learned a little bit more about how people read and understand my survey language based on the pilot survey feedback I received.

Week 14 (April 10 - April 14):

Work: This week's work was mainly writing the survey language and sending it out for edits and revisions.

Goal: I want to send out a complete pilot survey to the lab for edits sometime this week. I want to make pictures to make it clearer to the survey-takers. Implement the full survey in two weeks.

Outcome: Most of this week was just technical work. Writing and re-writing... but I feel like I'm getting better at writing precise survey language.

Week 13 (April 3 - April 7):

Work: We spent the week doing more literature review, trying to understand exactly what the field needed. I also started drafting a bit of the language for the pilot survey.

Goal: The pilot survey should be finished by Monday next week (April 17) so that we can show it and talk about it at the lab meeting.

Outcome: I learned a little more about how context affects people's moral decision-making. It's interesting, so we decided to turn it into two surveys. I've also gotten into the details of some of the papers we're imitating to look at how they write their language and structure their survey.

Week 12 (March 27 - March 31):

Work: At the meeting, I presented the revisions we'd made and felt like we were nearing a final draft. However, we collectively experienced a Goldie Locks moment... there had to be a better way to describe the scenario to include group decision-making, but we just hadn't arrived at "just right". I spent this week, after the meeting, doing a lot of reading and preparing a more organized meeting for Week 13 so that we can cement our goals and set off in the right direction.

Goal: Find the ideal way of expressing what we want to the survey-takers. After this week, we should have a clarified goal and a more concrete direction so that we can write a survey that's "just right".

Outcome: I've done a few lit reviews for class and for other research work. It is incredibly daunting every time. However, I think I'm getting a little better at it. Like all things, I suppose I just need practice determining when I've learned enough and what makes a good article to cite.

Week 11 (March 20 - March 24):

Work: At the beginning of this week we talked about the feedback we had gotten from the fellow lab members. I spent this week trying to implement it to improve the survey.

Goal: Our goal is to implement the pilot survey after we make a few revisions. The final implementation should happen in a few weeks, at the latest.

Outcome: Reading all the feedback that I got from fellow members of the lab, I learned a little more about what taking a survey feels like. Sure, I've taken online surveys, but things that I assumed wouldn't controversial (like the fact that the passages are repetitive) really got on people's nerves.

Week 10 (March 13 - March 17): Spring Break

Week 9 (March 6 - March 10): HRI 2017

Work: This entire week was spent in Vienna interacting with the Human-Robot Interaction community. I spent my days listening to talks and networking with individuals.

Goal: I am looking into places to go to grad school, beginning in fall 2018. My goal at the conference was to meet people and learn about programs that would be interested in me as a PhD student. I also want to learn what new work is being done in the field and discuss this work with the authors.
I am still giving my lab members more time to look through the survey so that I can revise it and implement it when I get back to Indiana.

Outcome: I have learned a lot about presenting at a scientific conference from my own poster session, from the workshop that I attended, and paper talks that I attended. I also got to practice my networking skills. This will make me successful as a researcher, beyond just doing research..

Week 8 (February 27 - March 3):

Work: As discussed last week, most of my time was spent preparing for the Human-Robot Interaction Conference. I also spent most of my time writing a draft to submit to another HRI conference (RO-MAN).
I am waiting for more feedback on my pilot survey and giving reviewers a few weeks to take it and get back to me with detailed comments.

Goal: I am preparing to present some of my previous work at next week's conference. I have spent some time practicing my presentation and my goal is to get some real-world experience interacting with the scientific community.

Outcome: I have developed my scientific writing skills as I am making the final push for the RO-MAN paper draft. It is almost done and will be ready to submit by Monday, March 6th.

Week 7 (February 20 - February 24):

Work: This week, we finished compiling and launched our pilot survey. We sent it to other lab members here in Indiana. In fact, we have already received feedback based on our pilot.

Goal: This week is the last week before I attend a conference in Vienna about Human-Robot Interaction. Much of my time this week will be spent preparing for a short presentation and a number of posters I am presenting. This is perfect because it gives me time to wait for people to send in more feedback. I should be able to take a good look at the feedback by the week of March 13.

Outcome: This week was mainly just crunch work. I think that the biggest learning moments will come out of the pilot survey. Once we get some more feedback and begin compiling it into a new and better survey, then we will have lots of opportunities to learn about what is clear and unclear and how to better express what we want our of our survey participants.

Week 6 (February 13 - February 17):

Work: There is an element of our experimental manipulation, group dynamics, that we have considered cutting It's really difficult to implement. I reached out to one of our lab members this week who is more of an expert in group dynamics to get some advice about why we should keep this manipulation and how we should implement it. We are trying it for the pilot and I spent most of this week working on revising that language.

Goal: We are nearing the end of the pilot design process. However, in two weeks many from our lab, including myself, are attending the Human-Robot Interaction Conference in Vienna. After that is spring break, so our (more realistic) goal is to have the pilot composed and ready to implement after spring break.

Outcome: Again, the difficulty of composing the survey language has taken me by surprise. It's very detailed. Also, I've done work in group dynamics before and this week I had the opportunity to revisit those questions when I was deciding how ot compose the group dynamic language. I think that the pilot survey is better for it.

Week 5 (February 6 - February 10):

Work: This week was, again, focused on designing the factorial study. Anne and I have been working on the content more in detail.

Goal: We are nearing the end of the pilot design process. Next week, we hope to have finalized and tested the pilot survey. We plan to do this mostly among friends and colleges in the lab. Once that is done, we can begin working on the IRB submission.

Outcome: There are a lot of things that we are unsure about and since every word matters in a survey, we're spending some time making the best pilot survey possible. I spent a lot of time looking at past examples of factorial surveys and questions they ask. It's also a challenge to design the survey vignettes in a way that makes sense. It's like a word puzzle. You need to write the sentence in a way that it makes sense no matter what level is inserted. It's a challenge. Anne and I are learning by practicing.

Week 4 (January 30 - February 3):

Work: This week was, again, focused on designing the factorial study. Anne and I sketched out the preliminary design last week, and this week was spent revising it and implementing it in a pilot test. We decided that the best was to learn how to make a factorial survey was just to make one and test it.

Goal: In the next couple of weeks, we hope to have finalized and tested the pilot survey. We plan to do this mostly among friends and colleges in the lab. Once that is done, we can begin working on the IRB submission.

Outcome: The biggest learning curve was implementing the factorial survey into Qualtrics. (Qualtrics is the online platform that we have made surveys with in the past.) This is hard because we need to randomize the situations presented to the participants, but some are impossible situations or simply don't make sense. Needless to say, it takes some coding knowledge. Over the next few weeks, Anne and I will pool our resources and learn the best, most efficient way to accomplish this challenge.

Week 3 (January 23 - January 27):

Work: This week, I focused on designing the Factorial Study. I did some more reading about the best way to accomplish that task. Then, Anne and I collaborated on a rough outline of dimensions and levels in the factorial study which we hope to present at the CREU meeting on Monday.

Goal: At the CREU meeting on Monday, we will get feedback and improve our preliminary survey design. It's really important that we get as much input as possible, so in the next couple od weeks, we'll work on drafting the survey vignettes and showing it to some departments around campus who can give us more feedback. In the next couple of weeks, I hope to have a survey more-or-less composed and ready to implement / submit to the IRB.

Outcome: In the past couple of weeks, I've learned a lot about how to design a factorial survey. The trickiest part, it seems, is composing each condition in a way that it will still make sense even when the conditions are mixed and matched. Anne and I have both read a lot about this, so working together to create a factorial survey that (almost) makes sense was quite a learning experience.

Week 2 (January 16 - January 20):

Primarily, I did some reading about how to design a Factorial survey. I found a couple of books helpful at the library on campus and well as some example journal articles online to base our design on. I've been learning the scientific jargon: ("dimensions", "vignettes", "levels", etc.) and have been gathering information about the best possible way to divide and present the survey to respondents. The trick is to present as many combinations as you can to get opinions, but not so many that the participants get fatigued and reading repetitive scenarios.

I also continued working on the full conference paper for Oregon State, writing the results and discussion sections. I almost have a first draft ready for other people to review.

Week 1 (January 9 - January 13):

This was the first week of classes after Winter break. Over the break, I got word that my Late-Breaking Report paper was accepted and will be published in the HRI 2017 conference proceedings. I was also able to start working on an expansion of the late-breaking report paper with my collaborators at Oregon State. Since the paper is mostly drafted, I am going to spend some time editing it before February 19, which is the deadline.

We met for the CREU project and began discussing data analysis for last semester's Authority study. We also began discussing how to begin next study. We went away from the meeting agreeing that we would all be reading up on how to conduct / design a Factorial survey over the next couple of weeks.

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Semester 1

Week 15 (November 28 - December 2):

Because the deadline for the Late-Breaking Report is Monday, December 5th, my priority this week was editing my draft. I spent some time learning how to operate in LaTeX, which is an industry standard for publication. With the help of online forums, I was able to work within the template provided and complete a final draft ready for submission.

Week 14 (November 21 - November 25):

I went home this week for Thanksgiving Break, so I did not get as much work done as I normally do. However, I did accomplish a few things. I spent some time editing my draft of the Late Breaking report. I also began a list of literature to read in preparation for next semester. Lastly, I ran a final analysis of the interrater reliability for the videos coded from my last experiment. The results showed Moderate agreement, which is good, and there is every indication that this will be useful for coding the current CREU-sponsored project!

Week 13 (November 14 - November 18):

This week was mainly spent drafting my Late-Breaking Report. This is welcome practice for my scientific writing. The biggest challenge was delivering my point in ass few words as possible. The LBR format requires that submissions be under 2 pages in length and in the ACM format that's about 1500 words. I look forward to getting edits and learning what my colleagues in Oregon think is important and worth focusing on.

This week I also spent some time in meetings and running participants. We are beginning to think about next semester's project.

Week 12 (November 7 - November 11):

After Kansas City, I was exhausted and I had a great deal of work to make up after missing class. I focused this week on running participants for the Authority Study so that I could catch up on my coursework.

I also have done a little bit of data analysis. I am checking in on the Interrater Reliability numbers bi-weekly until they are finished. I am also continuing to analyze data for the Entitativity + Morality Study.

Lastly, I plan to do some work writing a Late-Breaking Report for HRI, the Human-Robot Interaction conference held this year in Vienna. This will be an opportunity for my to practice writing for publication. In my previous publication, I didn't take a strong role in writing the paper. While an LBR is not officially a publication, it will be presented with a poster at the conference and be an opportunity for me to get feedback from my advisors on my writing.

Week 11 (October 31 - November 4):

This week was slightly out of the ordinary. I went to Kansas City to attend the International Conference on Social Robotics. They published a paper that I co-authored in the conference proceedings and so I had the opportunity to present my work for the first time! it was a great experience where I learned a lot about what work is being done around the world in Social Robotics and I also learned about presenting and communicating science.

I also had the opportunity to run some Interrater reliability tests on some of the facial expression videos that have been coding. I'm pleased to report that the agreement between my coders is going up and in a couple weeks I'll have some very good data to look at!

Week 10 (October 24 - 28):

The CREU project is just swimming along. Running participants is going well so there isn't much to report there!

A lot of my week was spent preparing for next week when I'll be attending the International Conference on Social Robotics to present a project that I co-authored last year. I spent some time practicing my presentation and trying to learn what to expect when attending my first conference.

Lastly, I ran some statistics on last semester's survey data. Nothing looks terriably significant yet, but I haven't given up hope! I also got some video codings for that project as well so I will check them for interrater reliability in the next few days.

Week 9 (October 17 - 21):

This week was very busy for my side projects. I finally decided on how best to code the facial expression videos from the Entitativity + Morality study, which the Authority CREU project is based on. The coders are setting to work on those and they will be done in the next month or so! Basically, I've decided to just focus on Valence, rather than valence and arousal.

Now that I have one bit of the data collected accounted for, I will be able to look at the survey data. I had a very productive meeting with Marlena who is currently in Japan. We decided how best to look at the survey data and I got a lesson in using SPSS to analyze data.

The CREU project is going very well. Participants are signing up and progress is being made slowly but surely! We're still working out a few kinks in the presentation, but nothing serious. Overall, progress is positive!

Week 8 (October 10 - 14):

This week was fairly normal in regards to the actual work done. We met as usual with our CREU collaborators and agreed that things were going so well that we could cut our meetings down to only half an hour. There was a troubleshooting issue with the robot (it stopped speaking) that was eventually corrected. We also set a goal to start discussing next semester's project by November. This is so that we can get materials submitted to the IRB and sorted out and loose as little time as possible next semester to begin running participants.

Other than CREU work, I've spent the week continuing to work towards Interrater reliability. Progress is slow, but also not a top priority. I've also begun preparing to attend and present at ICSR (The International Conference on Social Robotics) in November. My colleague and I are working on putting together a presentation for a little rehearsal on Monday.

Week 7 (October 3 - 7):

As usual, all the CREU collaborators met. This week we discussed some details for starting the experiment. We scheduled when we would be running these participants and put up a few time slots. I ended up running only one participant, but it went very well! I think that next week will go even better now that I've had more practice.

I also had a meeting with people who are coding videos from a study that I did last semester (the Entitativity + Morality study). We have been trying to create a scheme that will promote enough interrater reliability to be useful. With any luck, the Authority study for CREU will use the same scheme since the studies are similar and both use video data.

Week 6 (September 26 - 30):

At the beginning of the week, I meet with my other CREU collaborators. We discussed how to run the study and organized future meetings for a pilot test. Since the Authority Study requires some acting from the researcher, we practiced this to make sure that everyone was reading the script more or less the same. In one condition, the researcher is supposed to have High Authority and be very competent and in the Low Authority condition they are more scattered. We ran through the script a few times each and came up with different ways that we would all project Low and High Authority.

I also did some work for a research project that I began over the summer at Oregon State University (OSU). Basically, I am coding and analyzing some qualitative data using MAXQDA. This week was spent installing it, troubleshooting, and finishing a first pass of the data. Specifically, I am coding focus group transcripts which I have never done before. So I am learning how to analyze that type of data!

Week 5 (September 19 - 23):

Made a lot of progress with Interrater Reliability for the Entitativity + Morality experient. We will be testing a new approach to coding which may work for the Authority Study that we are doing through CREU!
Met with CREU Collaborators to make sure everything was on track.
Met again with the CREU Collaborators to pilot the experiment.
Ran participants for the Entitativity Studies.

Week 4 (September 12 - 16):

Continued Running participants for the entitativity studies.
Met with CREU Collaborators
Additional Entitativity + Morality videos were coded for another Interrater Reliability check
Met with my advisor from Oregon State University to discuss deadlines for working on the study that was begun over the summer.
Met with CREU collaborators to pilot this semester's study / learn how to run participants.

Week 3 (September 5 - 9):

Met with CREU collaborators
Ran Interrater Reliability stats for the Entitativity + Morality study video coding
Began running remaining participants for the Entitativity Studies.

Week 1 & 2 (August 22 - September 2):

Met with collaborators and discussed the studies that we have planned.
Set up lab space (including a beautiful new carpet!)
Met with new research assistants and began setting up some other experiments:

Entitativity Study: We attempt to measure the impact of different robot group dynamics on participant's anxiety and comfort levels.
Entitativity + Morality Study: One that I designed and started last semester. We measure how people behave in morally questionable situations with different robot group dynamics.