Progress is moving more rapidly for the user study. A team of 4 of us (3 undergraduates, 1 PhD student) are working on this project. We’ve been holding meetings all week to discuss the experimental design and to accomplish our main goal of creating a script for the Wizard of Oz experiment. So, for our first meeting, we discussed which variables we wanted to study. We had a wide selection from last week’s MovieLens group meeting. But we were able to narrow it down to assertiveness of the bot and information available to the bot. After deciding on the variables, we then discussed how we wanted to conduct our experiment.
We decided to conduct an offline study with a sample of multiple small groups of friends (3-5 people). We felt that this would most accurately represent the way that the MovieLens bot will be used. Our alternative options were to conduct the experiment through Amazon Turk and to vary the group sizes of small versus large. However, using Amazon Turk for multiple samples being tested at the same time is quite complicated. As for the variance of group size, we decided that this could potentially be a confounding variable. In addition, it would require us to recruit a larger sample, which is difficult under our limited time. Later, we started to work on the script for the chatbot. We first brainstormed types of interactions that would occur between the bot and the user. Here is an example of what we brainstormed below.
I’m quite proud of what we have accomplished for this week. We met our goal and are heading in the right direction. In addition to the experimental design, I’ve been reading more research literature and continuing the Data Science Bootcamp. For the weekend we had lots of activities! We went to the Science Museum on Friday, celebrated a birthday on Saturday, celebrated another birthday on Sunday and went to the Food Truck Festival in Uptown.
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The Weekend Outside of bootcamp and lab, I’ve enjoyed making some new friends and exploring my surroundings. I even had my birthday this week! A group of us went to the Mall of America to celebrate. I also got a free cupcake from a place that won “Cupcake Wars”! And today (Sunday) a group of us are going to see Wonder Woman at a nearby theater. I’m really thankful that the other students here are so nice and welcoming. They’ve made my experience here so far very enjoyable!
I landed in the Twin Cities at around 10 am. It's my first time in Minnesota, so I'm excited to experience a new environment! It was very hot today which made for a very tiring exploration of the city/campus. However, I thoroughly enjoyed the environment of the UMN campus. It's a more urban environment than at BGSU which I really like. There's a lot of beautiful buildings and cool places here. I checked into my campus housing at 17th avenue dormitory. It's on the edge of campus, so there are amazing views of the stadium, campus, and the city throughout the building. The room is nice and spacious and there are a multitude of lounges to work and hang out in. I have a roommate named Kate who is very nice. I look forward to getting to know her! Being here feels a bit surreal. Just a few weeks ago I didn't have any plans for the summer, but now I'm in Minnesota doing research! Crazy stuff. But I really look forward to my first day tomorrow and meeting everyone. Week 1
My first day started with orientation. This consisted of meeting everyone in the program and an overview of the summer research experience. We learned about UMN’s mission for the Big Data REU which is to help us better our research schools and to consider graduate school. Then we started our first Big Data lesson. We are utilizing a course from UC Berkeley called Data8. It’s a bit daunting to take on a full semester class in 3 weeks, but I’ll try my best! On Wednesday we had a nice luncheon with our mentors. I got to meet my mentor, Haiyi Zhu. She specializes in HCI(Human Computing Interaction) and does numerous studies on social network platforms like Facebook, Wikipedia etc. I’m really glad I have been paired with her because I find this field of study and her research very interesting. After the luncheon we were introduced to our labs. So I met the other undergraduate students (there are 4 of us) and the other professor whom Haiyi is collaborating with for the summer.They explained the big picture of what the projects they want to work on for the summer. We will be working to develop and improve a site called Movielens. This site is a movie recommendation service for those times you can’t make a decision. In addition, we will be exploring how to best develop a way to do recommendations for groups of people, in order to implement to Movielens. The projects aren’t determined yet, but there will most likely be 3 components. Technical, User study, and Analytics. We each picked 2 of the 3 that we would be interested to work for. I chose the User Study and Analytics project, as those seemed the most interesting to me. Much of the details are unknown this week, but I’m excited for the meeting on Monday to further discuss the project! Later, there was more to do! We had another orientation. And then, it was time for pizza and bowling for all the REU programs. In all honesty, I mostly went for the the pizza, but bowling was really fun! I got to bond with the other students in my program and have lots of fun with them. The last 2 days of the week simply involved data bootcamp in the morning and lab in the afternoon. Since neither the user study or analytic project has been planned, I just read up on related studies and on AI services like the Amazon Alexa for the Echo. |
AuthorHi! My name is Mary Solomon and I'm from Northwest Ohio. I'm a rising Junior studying Data Science with a music minor at Bowling Green State University. I plan to graduate in May 2019.. Archives
August 2017
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