During our meeting, Dr. Short asked me to narrow down what in HRI interests me and to make a list of all the tools in my toolkit and rate my comfort around using them. Hence, this week I was focussed on thinking about what interests me within the field of HRI and on assessing my strengths and weaknesses.
I read through Computational Human-Robot Interaction by Thomaz, Hoffman, and Cakmak which provides an overview of the field. I also got an introduction to social robotics by reading Social Robots that Interact with People by Breazeal, Takanishi, and Kobayashi. I also went through papers in the ACM Digital Library for HRI to see what the state of the field right now is and what is catching my eye. These helped me get a sense of what piques my interest within the field.
I asked the PhD students what technical, mathematical, and robotics tools they use in their research to get a scope for what “tools” entail. Based on this information I made a list of my own tools and rated my current proficiency in them and also rated my comfort level surrounding them. I found this 2-part rating to be helpful because there were quite a few newly acquired tools that I did not feel proficient in but felt comfortable putting them to use while learning more about them.
Aside from this exploration, Isaac and I spoke about shared autonomy and about what a research baseline is. I also got to hear about the RSS conference experience from PhD students: what their favourite moments were and what research presentations stood out to them. I also got to attended a colloquim coordinted by DIAMONDS program at Tufts on Reproducibility and Explainability for AI Applications in Scientific Research by Line Pouchard and this was a great ooportunity to meet other undergrads who are doing summer research at Tufts!