Author: Monica Cano

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Programming in Unity at the DEN Summer School

Post by Joe Strickland (2017 Cohort)

Back in the summer of 2018 I attended the DEN summer school in Bournemouth. One of the big draws of the summer school for me was the programming in Unity course that was being offered. Having come from a psychology background, I had no programming knowledge but it was becoming clearer and clearer that this was going to be something that held me back during my PhD, especially when it came to prototyping ideas for experiences. The course itself was pretty good, we ran through several different elements of using Unity including the basics of building scenes, game object physics, and exporting our scene onto a smartphone and viewing it with a cardboard header as a VR experience. We also started using Vuforia and making basic AR content. This workshop gave me a good basic understanding of Unity, but more importantly, it showed that what I wanted to learn and eventually make was well within my grasp. This was very important for motivating me to carry on learning how to build Unity experiences, as well as code in general.

Once the summer was over, my supervisors and I sat down and started discussing short-term goals to get me learning everything I’d need to learn in order to build interactive AR experiences myself. The first of these goals was to learn Python and C# in order to understand the logic of coding and be able to write my own Unity scripts to control different elements of the software. My supervisor ran me through all the basics in Unity that I might need for the specific things I was going to make, a welcome refresher after the summer school course, and I was sent off to learn my languages. Personally, I found Python quite easy to learn. The logic of the language made sense to me and the online resource I had been recommended taught it in a very hands on a practical way, with many small assignments to try out new coding knowledge and to keep old knowledge fresh and reinforced in your memory. Also, the course was broken up into bite size chunks and I found doing a lesson a day over the course of a month a very productive way of learning this language.

C# scripting was a little harder for me to grasp. I don’t know whether it was the difference between it and Python throwing me off or knowing that having to learn this was going to be more important for my PhD, but it took a lot more to try and figure out what I was doing with it. Learning this was done through some of the Unity provided tutorials, as well as other user generated tutorials on YouTube. I was also learning how to use Unity to specifically make the first short term goal project I had been assigned; making videos plays in Unity. The Unity video player isn’t completely user friendly and it took a lot of trial and error and searching Unity message boards and community sites to find out how to get it to work in the way I wanted it to. Having got it to work I moved on to controlling it a bit more and building an experience where the audience can press keys to trigger the playing of different video clips. I crafted a game object for each video clip we had and had them generated and destroyed whenever we needed that video playing, depending on the input of the audience. What I ended up with was a functional interactive film about a man trying to find his heart medication, where the audience could decide whether he moved left, right, or had a heart attack at various points in the film. When I showed my supervisors they liked it but found how I had made the film incredibly inefficient, so they tasked me with remaking it so that different videos played on the same game object and not on different ones. This next step proved challenging but eventually I managed to write a functioning Unity script which changed the state of the game object and, once a game object was of a certain state, it would play different videos with different audience responses. It would then change its stage again to allow the experience to progress. This experience pleased my supervisors, but they didn’t like how making decisions at the wrong times messed the game up, so I had to add delays into the script that stopped audiences making decisions at the wrong points in the experience. Fortunately, this wasn’t to difficult to do, although trying to use time as a function while coding with the video player in mind did prove confusing.

I was also asked to build a restaurant scene and fill it with moving virtual characters, but this was very similar to the summer school exercises and the Unity developer tutorials so this didn’t prove too tricky. Characters were downloaded from Adobe Maximo, so came with animation cycles attached and a few YouTube tutorials later I had people looking around and being furious at virtual restaurant tables.

Finally, I was asked to build an AR tester experience. I had to place a virtual character, like those from the restaurant scene, into a real world environment and have them occluded by a real world object, specifically sitting behind and hidden by a real world table. This is something that is surprisingly hard to find official Unity information for. There is lots of help for tracking markers and placing AR content in the real world but not so much for having that content blocked by real objects. I eventually found a YouTube tutorial which addressed a similar problem in a way which allowed me to figure out how to solve my own. They showed how there was a depth occluder material that you could use to create invisible game objects that would block the audience’s vision of the virtual content. Creating a cube the size of a table top and placing it over the lap of my sitting virtual character, then using a placemat as a tracking marker in the real world to position the avatar behind a real table allowed the virtual character to appear as if they were sitting in the real world. The illusion was particularly impressive when the character moved and there arms would disappear and reappear below and above the line of the back of the table. See attached photo for a snapshot of the experience.

If I had any advice to any other researchers looking to get into creating XR experiences, or even just learning to code, it is there’s no time like the present to start learning. There are plenty of great resources online for free that go through everything you’ll need to know step by step, while also allowing you to navigate through lessons to learn the specific things that you need for whatever project you might be working on. Though getting an understanding of the basics is fundamental you can pick or choose what of the more specific stuff to learn to suit your needs fairly easily. Also, just like any skill, you’ll need to keep practising. Find some little challenges to work towards, like I had set out for me. There were a few times I’d not focus on coding for a few weeks and then notice that I had forgotten something I definitely knew before and had to go back over previous lessons or code that I had written to find it. Don’t fall for this like I did, keep it up at a steady pace and you’ll be writing code in no time.

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STEM activity at Loughborough Grammar School

Post by Melanie Wilson (2018 Cohort)

We visited the Loughborough Schools STEM activity which was taking place at Loughborough Grammar School which included pupils from several Loughborough schools. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths and the workshops encourage pupils to design and explore a project based on these criteria. We gave a presentation on the pathway we took when designing, prototyping and manufacturing the Endeavour LED sabre.  We then addressed the need to consider what activities the final product would be used for including any limitations or challenges which might need to be addressed. Finally we talked with the pupils individually and invited them to tell us about their projects and explored options that might be worth thinking about in their design stages and beyond.

More about Mel’s work and activities can be found here.

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Lightsabre Mindfulness Fighting

Post by Melanie Wilson (2018 Cohort)

BBC East Midlands visited one of our LED sabre sessions in Sileby. Below is the report they produced. We were very pleased with this article as it gave a good account of the classes and of our manufacture of the ISM Endeavour LED sabre. Despite a few Star Wars references added by the BBC it was accurate and highlighted a number of our values!
Following the visit we were contacted by many interested people including an international media company. As a result the story appeared in a number of  publications. The articles tended to relate more to the Star Wars films and their associated lightsabers. Both StarWars and lightsabres are trademarks of Disney and Lucas films and Intergalactic Sabre Masters Ltd has no affiliation with these trademarks nor their owning organisations. We did not mention these trademarks during any of the interviews and were surprised to see some of the so-called “quotes”! However, there has been a lot of interest as the result of this exposure which has pleased us and there have been several new starters at classes as a result, particularly from the BBC piece. In addition, there have been enquiries from many organisations wishing to book team-building events, lessons and displays. These are coming from people with a wide range of  physical and mental ability and their representative organisations. We are keen to ensure that the activity is open to a diverse range of participants.
—originally posted here

I was also on BBC Radio Leicester to talk about LED sabre manufacture and classes. The LED sabre classes with adults and children are designed to incorporate mindfulness, confidence building and self awareness towards increasing resilience in a fun way. We teach traditional western sword arts, particularly those of the medieval hand and half. We train and spar with LED sabres, designed and manufactured locally, specifically made to be safe, ergonomic and easy to use by children and those with differing physical abilities.

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5 tips for being more inclusive!

Post by Neeshé Khan (2018 Cohort)

I’m writing this blog post while travelling on a highspeed train that’s currently running from Glasgow (Scotland) back to where I need to be. Whizzing past towns is a blur of colour – to me these blotches of blurred colour represent so much life,  emotions, tears, love, loss, endless stories and experiences. Some of these stories we might get to hear about and many more never get heard.

Much like this blotch of colour, my mind is also a blur with so many thoughts, ideas and experiences that I soaked up at CHInclusionworkshop. CHI is a prestigious conference which has seriously started thinking about inclusion at their events – to open up to new audiences and making those attending feel included in this computer science community.

Having attended this workshop was particularly timely for me. I recently had the privilege of being interviewed about diversity and inclusion of females in the cybersecurity and AI fields and share my own experiences in regards to this for Women’s History Month. I don’t believe that it was something in specific that I had done but rather just that I ended up being at the right place at the right time.

I’ve also noticed how a lot of my conversations with my close support network have been focused on diversity, inclusion, social justice and equal opportunities. I thoroughly enjoy these conversations because (selfishly) they offer me great mental stimulation. I believe that these phenomena are interlinked and must be seen in a circular rather than a lateral way and think this is one of the greatest challenges we face for a better future.

These are some of my learnings from the interview, personal discussions and the CHInclusive workshop, which I hope will be inspirational to you but also in time serve as a reminder to myself – enjoy!

Everything is a two-way mirror. I came across a sentence at the workshop which deeply resonated with me. It was something along the lines of ‘see yourself in others and see others in you’. I feel this is the core of being inclusive to others. It’s important to strive to find commonalities with anyone rather than differences. It’s a two-way mirror where we must constantly try to see others’ stories and challenges in our own experiences while also seeing ourselves in their actions and choices.

2. Inclusion and diversity are separate but the same in many ways. We must think about these carefully as one is insufficient without the other. Inclusion speaks about including everyone along the way, just bring everyone along for the ride! To me, diversity essentially means taking a range of skillsets along for your ride. Even if that means that someone might offer the same skillset as you. They can still do things very differently to how you do them. One is not better or worse than the other, just different. I firmly believe diversity goes beyond gender and must start to seriously encompass ethnic minorities and truly represent diverse audiences, each participant bringing their own skillset.

3. Empower ourselves and those around you. Be more inclusive to everyone. Be more diverse in your engagements. Be mindful of your conscious and unconscious biases. We’re all people who are saying the same things in different ways. Some things we’ll inevitably love to hear and others we’ll dread but listen to them anyway. This might empower you, as well as others, to create spaces that are tolerant and encouraging of new thoughts, people and things.

4. It’s not personal. I feel it’s important to remember that any comment that might exhilarate or aggravate you, it’s not personal. No one other than you has travelled your journey, faced your challenges, overcome your adversities or experienced what you’ve experienced and how you’ve experienced it.

5. Create space for others even if you feel that space isn’t created for you. This can be especially hard to experience. Ultimately, it still allows you to offer a space that’s safe for anyone who needs it. You can foster micro-universes of interaction that will lead to others being empowered and eventually you’ll find yourself surrounded by people who offer this same space to you in a much deeper and richer way than you can imagine.

—originally posted at https://neeshekhan.wordpress.com/

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Teaching Python Programming at Nottingham Girls High School

Post by Jimiama Mafeni Mase (2018 Cohort)

I participated in the outreach activity of teaching python programming language to students of Nottingham Girls High School organised by a social enterprise called Codex. Codex is a social enterprise run by students from the University of Nottingham. Selected candidates had interviews with Codex management team who were interested in the candidates’ python coding skills and their passion in teaching children. Fortunately, Codex selected a small team of computer scientist including myself to teach introduction to python for 5 weeks (i.e. 1 hour every week) from the 1st of March to the 29th of March 2019.

The syllabus for the course consisted of the fundamentals of python programming i.e. inputs, outputs, data types, maths operators, conditional statements, while loops and for loops. Each class was made up of about 15 to 20 students and lectures took place in the school’s computer lab. We taught using power point lecture notes and hands-on programming exercises. These required us to be extremely audible and patient with the students as most of them didn’t have any programming experience or knowledge. We were also required to speak fluently and make sure all the students understand the concepts and complete the exercises.

We successfully completed the course on the 29th of March and provided a link for the students to fill out surveys about their experiences and rate the teachers. I learnt some teaching skills from this outreach activity, as it was my first experience as a teacher. In addition, it enhanced my problem solving skills as we received a lot of challenging questions about certain concepts in the lecture notes and exercises. It was a great experience and opportunity to transfer some of my knowledge as a computer scientist to the younger generation, which we consider “Future leaders”. Lastly, I will love to thank Codex and the University of Nottingham for this opportunity and wish that they create many more outreach activities for children to learn computer science.

 

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Andrew returns from AAAL conference in Atlanta

Post by Andrew Moffat (2015 Cohort)

American Association of Applied Linguistics

For people learning a second language, today’s hyper-connectivity has the potential to present new domains of engagement with and exposure to their target language. Exposure to the target language is accepted as a necessary condition for language learning, and it is often a key variable in classifications of learning environments. However, Internet-based communication technologies have the potential to connect learners with expert and non-expert speakers of the target language, regardless of geographical location, providing opportunities for informal learning.

Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) has historically been approached within Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition as a tool for enhancing language learning. More recently however, there has been an increased focus in investigating language learners’ pre-existing, “extramural” English-language online communicative activities, exploring their potential as a site of exposure to language and negotiation of meaning in authentic interaction, with a view to integrating this aspect of learners’ lives more deeply with their formal learning. Most of this work is small scale and qualitative in nature, and there has been relatively little large-scale fact-finding carried out to survey current practices in this area.

My talk presented the findings of a large-scale survey undertaken in partnership between the University of Nottingham and Cambridge University Press. A questionnaire asking respondents about their English-language online communication activities was promoted on CUP’s online dictionary website, receiving over 10,000 responses in a four-week period from second language English speakers all over the world. The analysis of this data set identified contexts of CMC in which English learners most frequently use their L2 as well as commonly occurring difficulties encountered therein. The talk concluded with a brief overview of an approach to incorporating and supporting English-language online activities in the classroom, thereby integrating formal and informal learning.

 

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Lunchtime Lecture at the ODI: Using data to support citizen-centric sustainable urban development in Tanzania

Post by Roza Vasileva (2016 Cohort)

On January 26, 2019 I had an excellent opportunity to present my PhD research project. More specifically, I spoke about the findings emerging from my research interviews in Dar es Salaam with various stakeholders of the Tanzanian data ecosystem: government, donor institutions, local community organisers, start-ups, international experts and academia. This study aimed to understand what processes take place on the ground when people try to take advantage of data and technology to transform Dar es Salaam into a ‘smarter city’, and what the challenges are.

This was a public event as part of the ODI Fridays – free lunchtime lectures for everyone. Below is the video recording of the presentation.

–originally posted on Roza’s blog

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National Open Data Symposium in Oma

Post by Roza Vasileva (2016 Cohort)

On October 1-3, 2018, I had the pleasure to participate in the first National Open Data Symposium in Omanas a speaker on principles and benefits of Open Data. The presentation covered various definitions of open data, including examples in some key sectors such as health, education, transport, etc.

I was pleased to see representatives from five different sectors across government and private sector together, having a discussion, raising challenging questions. There are many agencies within the government, which have started publishing open data, and these efforts are a bit uneven. I think the most important thing about the symposium was that these agencies came together to start moving towards a collaborative approach to open data. This event sent a powerful message to the public, government and even international open data community that Oman strives to advance their open data agenda and has desire to bring best international practices in this process.

Being one of the international speakers in the event and having worked with the World Bank on open data in many countries, it means to me that Oman is really keen to learn from other international experiences and adopt best global practices in their approach to do open data and moving towards smarter future. We need to remember that we’re increasingly living in cities, and Open Data is key to creating a platform for smart cities. Citizen-focused smart cities increasingly use data analytics to improve service delivery to its citizens making them more accessible, engage with the communities, find joint solutions to most pressing urban issues, making our cities more livable and sustainable. As my own area of academic research lies in looking how open data can support smart cities, I want to see Oman open data use it for open urban innovations and delivering better services to its people.

Conversations evolved around how to make data more usable for the data users. Engagement with the consumers of the data was one of the key points that was raised throughout the symposium. I echo one of the participants comments that value of releasing open data comes from data use. One of the key elements to open data is adopting open license that explicitly gives permission to use and re-use data for any purpose, including commercial purposes. If the license does not exist on the portal and does not articulate those rights for data re-use, the users cannot be sure that they can use the data. This is one of the challenges Oman will need to address to enable the open data benefits, especially for economic growth that were extensively discussed at the Symposium.



-originally posted on Roza’s blog

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How to make a strong password

Post by Neeshé Khan (2018 Cohort)


Making strong passwords which are memorable are easier than you think if you ignore everything that you’ve been told and start to think of the reasoning behind the combination.

Yesterday morning I heard an advert by the UK’s National Cyber Security Center about setting better passwords. I went to the resources and ended up going down the rabbit hole to discover a range of resources on a variety of topics on ‘Get Safe Online’.

It’s a good starting point but very basic. If you know not to keep your dog’s name as a password, you won’t come out any better than when you went in. Personally, I’ve always found it a waste of effort with imposed slap-dash restrictions by IT teams or platforms to make me ‘secure’ (must be 8 characters long, include a special character etc). You can follow these rules but still be relatively vulnerable to hacks like the dictionary attack.

So, here’s some things I’ve learnt from various readings, discussions and from Dr Pound’s lectures at University of Nottingham that will help you understand how to make strong passwords rather than being told what passwords should contain.

1. Ignore what you’ve heard: Most common password is, believe it or not, ‘Pa55w0rd’. It meets the base requirements of being 8 characters long and contains a capital and a numeral. But, this would literally take no time to crack with a dictionary hack. But, if you ignore these requirements and change the way the same word is written to ‘pAssw*rd9’: first letter is not capital, ‘0’ turned to an asterisk and adding a ‘9’ because it’s conveniently next to the asterisk key. The strength of this simple memorable word changes to drastically more secure than what you started off with.

I’ve explained this in the parts below but just making a case here that keeping the word password as a password, isn’t all that weak, but it’s actually the combination that’s weak. In a similar way, you can keep words that are easy to recall by simply changing the combination of how those words are set. Always try to use three words as your password.

2. Don’t replace alphabets with numbers: You’re not any more secure by replacing the ‘e’ with a ‘3’, an ‘O’ with a ‘0’ or an ‘a’ with a ‘4’. When hackers attack, this is one of the first parameters they set as it allows an easy break when they’re racing against time. Instead, add it randomly into the word instead, ‘baseball’ to ‘ba9eb8ll’ where cracking time goes from something around the 10-minute mark to 3 months. Similarly, ‘p12345R6’ is much stronger than ‘Pa55w0rd’, although it’s the same word with ‘1,2,3,4,5, 6’ introduced and ‘R’ made into a capital letter than the ‘D’.

3. Capitals: Yes, they’re good but try not separating or ending words with them. This is because these parameters are set by the hackers when they attack i.e. words beginning/ending with a capital letter. See example 2 above for password where we made R capital instead of ‘P’ or ‘D’.

4. Special Characters: If you’re using a character like “_” or a “*”, use it in the middle of the word rather than to separate the words. Imagine the censoring of a r*de word. This means avoiding adding it at the start or end as the word won’t be well censored if you would see it anyway. Again, this helps to not get fished out at the start of a hack. Now, imagine updating the password to ‘pA*sw0Rd’ on the principles above.

5. Complexity: The complexity doesn’t have to be “letsthinkofacrazylongword” to keep us safe. You could use simple word combinations that are memorable without being vulnerable by using the tricks above. This also saved you the time taken to have to reset your password because it was so hard you forgot yourself an hour/day after setting it. I think we’ve all been there, right?

6. Prioritise Passwords: “Don’t keep the same password for everything” is obvious. What’s new is that you can actually prioritize the passwords you choose. This can be relatively easy by simply deciding how much information a platform holds about you and how valuable this information is to you. If there are pictures of you on a platform that can be used against you (snapchat/insta), that goes higher up on the priority list than an email account you don’t use very often. For low priority platforms use passwords that you wouldn’t mind resetting if you forgot them (which can take time). Equally, you won’t be at a great risk if your information was stolen or acquired by someone who isn’t supposed to have it.

7. ‘Call a friend’ option: Just that in this case the friend is still you, but through a different screen that you own. This is known as two factor authentication and great way to put in another loop to make sure others are kept out. Not every platform offers it and it could potentially mean that you might end up locking yourself out. For instance, if my online bank uses a text message with a code that I need to enter on to the platform, I could have changed/lost my phone number and not updated it for the bank. This means I have to go into the branch to prove my identity and provide new details. Another case could be Hotmail using Gmail to verify that’s it’s actually me IRL, but I might have forgotten my Gmail password too because it wasn’t my primary email. This will be quite difficult to correct because I can’t show up to Google HQ to prove it’s still my account.

8. Install that update: Yes, update your application or software. New patches/updates sometimes happen because they’ve found a weakness in the software, like the recent Whatsapp and Facetime bugs. Updates are rolled out to implement new software that gets rid of any backdoors that hackers can use to get in.

9. IRL: Yes, keep a note in the real world with your password(s). It’s like writing a diary so similar rules apply. Ideally, don’t give it the heading of ‘these are my passwords, keep out’, don’t stick them next to the device and don’t indicate which platform those passwords are for. It could be as simple as what appears to be a shopping list under your spice jars.

Resetting passwords is annoying but you’re better off doing it now than later.

—originally posted at https://neeshekhan.wordpress.com/

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My Journey to a PhD

Post by Abigail Fowler (2016 Cohort)


STEM “My Journey to a PhD” Talk, February 2019

I joined a Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) event at Loughborough Grammar School. I was happy to join in when I heard they were running STEM events for secondary school boys and girls. On a rather wet and windy day, I headed to the event hoping the pupils would enjoy my talk and have some interesting questions.

My talk covered My Journey to a PhD, my research, and a memory game to demonstrate working memory. The game involved seeing an image of items from around the home and kitchen for 10 seconds. Then having 10 seconds to write down as many items as they could remember. I took the items with me as a tactile version in case any blind or partially sighted pupils attended. Somewhat ironically I forgot to boil an egg to take with me to match the image, but improvised with an egg cup for the tactile version.

The talk went really well and the pupils loved the memory test. No one got all 14 items, and they all sighed when I put the image back up so they could see what they’d missed. The second test involved spotting what was missing from an image, and they all answered the moment the slide appeared. It was a simple but effective demonstration of how our ability to remember varies between tasks and this should be considered in design. I am glad I included a practical element as it is always great to get more interaction. The group had been hesitant to ask questions, so it was good to give them permission to get involved at the end of the talk.

My PhD is sponsored by the rail industry. It turned out that Network Rail provide funding for a STEM challenge. Pupils were eager to hear how they could work on projects of interest to Network Rail. I suggested they consider level crossings, and how to influence the behaviour of level crossing users, as this is an area of great interest to the rail industry.

During the day I got to hear some of the current ideas students had for their own STEM projects. These included how to detect when someone is having an allergic reaction to food and designing a water filtration system to provide drinking water. I was really impressed with the range of projects and their innovation.

I talked to the teacher afterwards, and they will be coordinating STEM events in the future across the region to raise awareness with pupils of opportunities and future careers in STEM. I welcome this programme, and the links that can be built between schools and universities to support pupils in their further education of STEM subjects.

—Originally posted at