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Three Actually Isn’t a Crowd: Reflections on my Internship with the UKRI TAS Hub

post by Cecily Pepper (2019 cohort)

About the Internship

In December 2021, I began an internship with the UKRI TAS (Trustworthy Autonomous Systems) Hub on two projects: TAS for Health and TAS Test and Trace. I applied to this internship as I have an interest in technology and autonomous systems, how people develop and measure trust towards technology, and, perhaps most of all, the effect of technology on health and wellbeing. My own PhD project is about exploring the impact of social media platforms on the mental health and wellbeing of care-experienced young people, so hopefully the connection and interest between technology, health, and wellbeing is clear. Another key motivator in applying for the TAS internship was that the role involved completing an in-depth thematic analysis for each project. As I am doing multiple thematic analyses for my own research, I thought this would be a great opportunity to enhance and develop my skills in this area. Moreover, the internship was a role that included working with two other interns to complete the analyses. This especially interested me as I enjoy working with others and was curious as to how the group analyses would work compared to the analyses I have done by myself.

The TAS for Health project explored the attitudes towards using a smart mirror for health from two participant groups: those who were recovering from a stroke and those who have the medical condition multiple sclerosis (MS). My role involved taking part in the participant workshops, preparing the transcripts from the workshops, and completing the thematic analysis with the other interns. It was a truly enjoyable experience listening to the experiences of the individuals who participated in the research. As well as this, assisting in the workshops offered another layer of insight to the analysis. The other project, TAS Test and Trace, followed on from previous studies around the general public’s attitudes and trust in the NHS Test and Trace application for Covid-19. For this project, my role was to again prepare the transcripts and complete a thematic analysis with the other interns. I will also contribute to the paper writing for both projects, which are currently underway. This is another aspect of the internship that applies to my own PhD activities, as it is a great opportunity to develop my paper writing skills ready for when I aim to publish my own studies.

Reflections on the Internship Experience

I have thoroughly enjoyed the internship and learned so much. I have developed my thematic analysis skills, my collaborative skills, and learned more about how to present and display research findings (to name a few). For this blog, I will now share some reflections on the experiences I have had now the two projects have ended. Perhaps the biggest and most salient reflection I have from working with two TAS research groups was the value of working with others and being part of a research team. I currently don’t belong in a research group and, as PhD students may know, the doctorate journey can be a lonely one. I find many times in my own work that I wish I could bounce my ideas off someone, especially during analysis work. Don’t get me wrong, I have wonderful supervisors who I meet with regularly and they offer brilliant and insightful advice; but doing an analysis collaboratively with two other people was a fantastic experience. We were able to continuously bounce our ideas off one another, question our reasoning together, and have regular chats about anything we queried. This made me appreciate teamwork in a completely new light and it’s safe to say three was definitely not a crowd! We also all learnt a new way of completing a thematic analysis, explained by a member of the research group, which was a valued addition to our current skillset.

In addition to this, having weekly meetings with a research group was a great experience and made me really feel like I was part of a team. As I mentioned, I don’t belong to any research groups so I haven’t had this experience yet; apart from perhaps my CDT cohort, who I love spending time with, but our research is all so different so it can be hard to find commonalities to discuss, and get-togethers are rare now we’re in the later stages of our PhD and due to the pandemic. On a personal note, I’m a shy introvert and tend to anxiously avoid social events, but being required to work with others so regularly and closely was valuable in pushing me outside of my comfort zone. So, one of the biggest take-aways from my internship is the value of working closely with others and having a team of researchers to meet with regularly. I’ve met some lovely people who I hope to work with again in the future and I have learned so many things about the importance of working with a research team.

The second reflection I had from my internship experience was the realisation and surprise at how welcome a distraction from my own PhD work was. I was in a bit of a rut with my PhD work, struggling with recruiting a hard-to-reach participant group whilst also struggling with the final stages of a separate thematic analysis for another of my studies. With the internship, I soon realised that I welcomed the work with open arms and found my research spark again, that had obviously been dimmed by my own research struggles. While I knew subconsciously that I was struggling with my own work, the internship reignited my love for research and made me realise I needed to remove my head from the imaginary sand and address the issues I had in my own work. This was therefore helpful to me personally as it was a reminder that I had a passion for research, and it was encouragement to resolve the issues I had with my own work rather than burying and avoiding them.

Overall, I had a great time and learnt a lot from both the academic side but also from the personal side. Working on two thematic analyses was fantastic practice and I believe my skills have developed significantly. Additionally, being part of a research team with regular meetings and deadlines was useful for the future, both in an industry and academic sense. Despite the value of both the professional and research skills I have developed, the most enjoyable part of the internship was working closely with other researchers and having a welcomed break from the lonely world of doing a PhD during a global pandemic.

 

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The joy of building things. My reflection on the internship at BlueSkeye AI

post by Keerthy Kusumam ( 2017 cohort)

September 2020 – January 2021

I interned at BlueSkeye AI, a company that delivers ethical AI for supporting mental health for the vulnerable population using facial and voice behaviour
analysis. The long term vision of BlueSkeye AI is to ’Create AI you can trust for
a better future, together.’ The goals of my PhD aligns perfectly well with that
of BlueSkeye, where comprehending various facial behaviours to recognise markers of mood disorders forms a core part of the work. The company BlueSkeye AI is cofounded by my PhD supervisor Prof Michel Valstar and the teammates include several of my past PhD colleagues. The following pointers are my reflections on my four-month-long internship at BlueSkeye AI.

The joy of building things that work. The internship at BlueSkeye
rekindled my enthusiasm to build systems that work in the real world, face real
challenges, and create real impact. When I joined, BlueSkeye AI had a product
that was going to be released to the market and what I had to build would
then be integrated into this product. That made it extremely well-defined as a
problem, where we were not trying to define a problem itself but rather engineer a solution that needs working on real-world data, leveraging the cutting-edge computer vision/machine learning research.

Real World Vs Research World. My emphasis on real-world data stems
from my divided self where I am both a computer vision researcher as well as a
roboticist. Before doing my PhD I spent nearly 4 years in a robotics research lab with an active collaboration culture – where everyone in an open-plan workspace contributes to projects irrespective of their original funding sources. This cultivated the exchange of ideas across disciplines – computer vision, cybernetics, robotics, reasoning, machine learning etc leading to very creative and interesting bodies of work. In robotics, computer vision is often a tool that it relies upon to make decisions, which means robustness and consistency precedes accuracy. In computer vision research, however, beating the state-of-the-art on benchmark datasets seems to be the key marker of success. I enjoy both these aspects and the internship opportunity at BlueSkeye AI gave me just that – a place to bring those together. I got to build a computer vision-based social gaze estimation system that works on a smartphone. The challenge was about finding the right balance between exploration and exploitation. Here I had to optimize for efficiency, usability, practicality, simplicity and data efficiency along with the standard performance metrics that I use in research.

The Team and Teamwork. My onboarding was seamless, owing to the
hands-on approach adopted by the BlueSkeye AI’s leadership. I was also familiar with the team, so I was lucky to enjoy an incredibly friendly and supportive environment. The weekly meetings where everyone discussed progress or the issues they faced, posed as learning sessions for me. I understood the value of communication and brainstorming from the team as a whole, to keep up the momentum. I worked in sync with the lead machine learning engineer who set up several documents and code specifically for me, that removed my roadblocks to integrate the module into a mobile device. I also learned how managing tasks in a time-critical manner helps save time and resources for the company as well as yourself.

Importance of values. One should never compromise on their values
while working for a company and it is important to work in a place where value
systems align. BlueSkeye AI’s five-year mission is: ’To create the most-used
technology for ethical machine understanding of face and voice behaviour that enables citizens to be seen, heard, and understood.’ I was astonished by their sensitivity towards mental health research, strict adherence to ethical guidelines while handling data, being transparent to the data volunteers about their data and having numerous clinicians with great expertise on board. Being part of the company albeit during a short internship provided me with a sense of purpose and I felt attuned to my values.

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One Giant Leap for My Future: Summer Internship Experience with NASA GeneLab

post by Henry Cope (2019 cohort)

Over the summer I had the honour of taking part in the NASA GeneLab summer internship programme. Despite previous plans to complete this in sunny California, the pandemic made it necessary to adapt the internship format, which I must admit was bittersweet. Nevertheless, I was incredibly excited to step into my role as a space biology bioinformatics intern.

Now, I appreciate right off the bat that this might raise a few questions, so I will endeavour to briefly break down the relevant terms as follows:

      • Space biology – This is the study of the adaptation of terrestrial organisms (e.g., you and I) to the extreme environment of space. Two of the main spaceflight stressors are increased radiation exposure and microgravity (0G). The knowledge generated from space biology is important for developing improved countermeasures, such as to reduce microgravity-driven muscle loss experienced by astronauts, which also occurs on Earth due to factors including muscle wasting diseases, or bed rest following surgery. If you are interested in learning about space biology in more detail, I can recommend this open-access review; it’s a very exciting time right now for spaceflight!
      • Omics – These are types of biological “big data” (usually ending in “-omics”, go figure) that tell us about the underlying functioning of different systems within the body. Of course, a classic example is genomics, in which your unique DNA sequence imparts traits such as eye colour. However, there is also transcriptomics, which capture snapshots of how activated/expressed your genes are at given points in time.
      • Bioinformatics – This is essentially analysing biological data, including omics, via software. When a sample of biological material is taken, it can be processed in the lab for different kinds of omics analyses and then computational methods are used to identify meaningful patterns in the data. Lots of programming! 🙂
      • NASA GeneLab – NASA GeneLab is an organisation that consists of two primary components. One is the data side, which is delivered via a carefully curated public biobank of omics collected from spaceflight missions (usually involving model organisms like mice), or from studies on Earth that simulate aspects of spaceflight. The second side of GeneLab is the people side, which is mainly delivered via international analysis working groups (AWGs) that work together to analyse the data within the repository. Spaceflight experiments are costly, so GeneLab’s open-science approach of increasing access to data and collaboration during analysis is important for maximising the scientific potential of these experiments.

With the definitions out of the way, I will briefly describe my primary project for the internship. Essentially, I was presented with several transcriptomics datasets that had been generated from RNA extracted from the skin of mice. These datasets were derived from mice that had been flown on different missions, with lots of other variables such as differences in diet and duration spent on the International Space Station (ISS). Skin is particularly interesting in the context of space biology for several reasons as follows:

      • In spaceflight, dermatological issues such as rashes are very common
      • Skin is the first line of defence against cosmic radiation and an important barrier against pathogens
      • Skin can be monitored using non-invasive methods like swabs, which avoids risks associated with invasive biopsies
      • Skin can act as a “mirror”, telling us about the underlying health of the body in terms of things like immune function and diet
      • Despite the aforementioned importance of skin, skin is incredibly understudied in space!

I had carried out some initial analysis of the datasets prior to the start of the internship, under the guidance of Craig Willis, who was at the time a PhD student at the University of Exeter and is now a researcher at Ohio University! Whilst I had prior experience with programming, bioinformatics was new to me. Craig very kindly showed me the ropes so that I would have the necessary skills to jump straight into the internship project. That said, GeneLab runs programmes for teaching bioinformatics to students at different levels, so having prior bioinformatics skills was not at all a requirement.

Just before I started the internship, I met Afshin Beheshti, who is a bioinformatician and principal investigator at KBR/NASA Ames Research Center, amongst other roles! Afshin was incredibly friendly so we got on right away. Throughout the internship we met weekly via video call, but we also communicated via Slack throughout the week. I strongly believe that a line of communication which is more direct than email is essential for virtual internships. During the internship, GeneLab also organised online networking events, which gave me the opportunity to talk to the other interns about their projects.

Following my internship, I have continued to work on the skin analysis project, and we are now striving towards a publication, which will include astronaut data (a rarity!) alongside the rodent data. I also had the honour of presenting some of our findings online at the public NASA GeneLab AWG workshop in November, and in-person at the Royal Aeronautical Society Aerospace Medicine Group Annual Symposium in London in December. As part of the continued work on the project, I have also been able to engage with the GeneLab for High School (GL4HS) programme. Several students who have previously completed a high school level internship with GeneLab are now working on tasks such as literature review and figure generation for the publication. An additional output is that some of the semi-automatic figures that I have developed for this project have been adapted to different datasets for use in publications for the Covid-19 International Research Team (COV-IRT), of which Afshin is president.

Ultimately, I am very happy to have completed an internship with GeneLab. I’ve developed some great relationships along the way, which have continued past the scope of the internship. In particular, I’d like to thank Sam Gebre for organising the internship, Afshin Beheshti for being an excellent supervisor, and Sigrid Reinsch, Jennifer Claudio, Liz Blaber and the students involved in the GL4HS programme. If you wish to know more about my project or have questions about space biology in general, please feel free to reach me at: henry.cope@nottingham.ac.uk

-Henry

 

 

 

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Call for Participants – Impact of the Kooth Platform on Subjective Well-being

post by Gregor Milligan (2021 cohort)

The “Impact of the Kooth Platform on Subjective Well-being” pilot study is exploring the changes in subjective well-being of participants before and after the use of a digital mental health support platform. We are particularly interested in exploring if the Kooth app impacts the subjective well-being of its users.

We are currently recruiting participants to use the app 3 times a week for 6 weeks. Participants will answer weekly surveys that will enable the understanding of their subjective well-being and experience on the platform.

We are looking for participants that fall within these demographics:

  1. Participants will be between the ages of 16 and 25
  2. Participants have not used the Kooth app before

If you fit into this demographic, we’d like to invite you to take part in this study, in which we will evaluate the effect of Kooth on subjective well-being. It will not be necessary for you to discuss your medical or mental health history or that of others, and you are under no obligation to disclose any information you do not want to. The surveys are designed to take around 5 minutes and will take place online. You will receive a £25 shopping voucher for contributing to the study.

This study will take place between March and May 2022, with dates to be confirmed once we have an idea of the number of participants.

For more information, or to sign up, contact Gregor Milligan at gregor.milligan@nottingham.ac.uk.

Many thanks,

Gregor Milligan and Liz Dowthwaite

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Broadening Horizons in the Horizon Scanning Team

post by Charlotte Lenton (2020 cohort)

The Possibilities Were Endless

The industry partner for my PhD is the Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB) which is a member-based organisation working with organisations throughout the rail industry to improve railways in the UK. RSSB has vast connections with industry organisations throughout the sector which meant I could have pretty much undertaken any rail-related role in a whole host of companies to get first-hand experience of what it’s like to work in rail. So why did I decide to stick to an office-based position within RSSB?

In December 2020, the small but excellent, Horizon Scanning team of two at RSSB kindly came along to an online event that I organised with other members of the CDT to talk about their work and techniques used in horizon scanning. This presentation was well received by my colleagues and left me wanting to know more about how this technique works in practice, as well as how the outcomes benefit organisations within the rail sector. It was quite opportune that the team would be starting to do some horizon scanning work as part of the Rail Technical Strategy (RTS) refresh in the summer of 2021 which was around the time that I would be starting my placement. The RTS was the main industry document which helped to shape my PhD proposal throughout Year One of my studies. Following the initial training I was allocated as the lead student analysis for the RTS ‘Easy-to-Use’ horizon scanning work.

Horizon Scanning: Thinking the Unthinkable

Very few people are excited by the prospect of change, especially when the potential changes and their impact are largely unknown. As a horizon scanning analysis my job was to think about changes and the various implications that these could have on the rail sector. I was to explore the horizon for early signs of potential changes, collate information about these emergent changes, and think about how these changes could make a difference to the industry. In this sense, I was to think about the unthinkable and process this information in a way that would be helpful for managers to begin to anticipate the future.

Taking the RTS roadmap for the Easy-to-Use priority as a starting point, I began to search the internet for key terms relating to the different topics. Anything I found that I thought was an indication of something new, a change, a confirmation or just background information on one of the topics, I logged in an online spreadsheet. Each data point collected was then reviewed on a weekly basis at a sensemaking meeting where I discussed the recorded items with the horizon scanning principal. This was a useful exercise for us both as it helped him to get an idea of the types of things that I was finding during the scanning process, but it also helped me to justify my reasoning for logging the data points depending on their categorisation.

(Image: The current roadmap for the Easy-to-Use priority of the Rail Technical Strategy)

The Rules: There Are No Rules

Unlike academic research, the validity of the information source was not subject to much, if any, scrutiny providing it was an indication of a novel idea or potential change. The example that was used during training, which will always stick in my mind, was that an idea expressed in a blog post by a man sitting in his living room at 2am in Lagos should not be discounted just because of the source if the idea is an indication of a potential change on the horizon. Other sources with similar ideas may be found further down the line which validate or reject the ideas posted by this late-night blogger. So, for the purposes of information gathering even this type of blog post should be logged in the database alongside sources such as academic journals, newspaper articles, books, and television programmes.

Adapting to this unrestrictive method for capturing information and knowledge was a particular challenge for me as it went against everything I have been taught to do as part of my academic training. I was so accustomed to only using and trusting sources that are deemed valid by the academic community that I found it hard to log sources that felt ‘invalid’ as they were merely the opinion of one person in a blog that only a few people have read. This led me back to thinking about a module I had previously completed as part of my Masters in Gender Studies. In this module we discussed the inequalities that exist within the production and sharing of knowledge because of how the academic world is geared towards only listening to voices that have been validated and verified by our peers. Why do the comments of a professor from a top UK university matter more to the academic community than the words of a Black Feminist activist talking about her first-hand experiences of racial and gender discrimination? Whilst I am not suggesting that the academic community should start referencing every other person that posts their thoughts and opinions online, perhaps we, as academics, should begin to take a more flexible approach like the techniques of horizon scanning in our search for knowledge to gain a better understanding of the world outside of the four walls of academia.

Writing For a Different Audience

Towards the end of the placement, I was asked to start writing a report to be disseminated throughout the rail sector which highlights some key areas for potential change in the future. Unlike writing for a university assessment or an academic paper, this type of reporting needed to short and snappy whilst consolidating the evidence from many data points found during the scanning phases. In one sense it was quite like writing for social media where you must get your point across in as few characters as possible whilst still making an impact on your audience with a statement about how these potential changes could impact their work or service.

I think this type of writing is just as important as writing for journals and books for academics as social media can be used as a vehicle for disseminating research beyond the fourth wall and into the public domain in a more familiar and understandable way. I am not suggesting that we should all start doing Tik Tok dance videos to disseminate our research, but it does seem that social media remains an underutilised platform for communication with wider audiences. It is also only recently that I have started seeing webinars and training sessions being offered through the university to train PGR on how to communicate their research through social media. Needless to say, I will be booking myself on to one of the sessions imminently!

Broadening My Horizons

Overall, I feel that the placement with RSSB has given me excellent first-hand experience of what it is like to work within a busy team of researchers in an industry setting. I have been encouraged to think outside of the box and change my perspective in terms of what is considered ‘valid’ knowledge. The practical experience of using Horizon Scanning techniques and writing for different audiences has also improved my transferable skills available to me throughout and at the completion of my PhD.

I cannot thank Guy, Sharon, Mel, and the team enough for welcoming me into the world of R&D at RSSB with open arms and treating me to such a valuable set of experiences throughout my placement.

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Drivers and Barriers to Digital Inclusion

post by Oliver Miles (2018 cohort)

Interning as an Embedded Research Associate with CityMaaS

 Finding the right internship – introducing CityMaaS

From July-September 2021, I had the privilege of working as an embedded research associate with CityMaaS, a London based start-up in the digital inclusion space. This opportunity arose after pitching my PhD at a Digital Catapult networking event for students and start-ups. I prioritised attending this event as I was especially keen to experience work in a start-up environment. In the weeks following, I was introduced to Rene Perkins – CityMaaS CEO and co-founder. We agreed that at the intersection of her work on digital inclusion, and my work on values-driven personalisation, there was scope and mutual interest for a research project uncovering the drivers and barriers to digital inclusion adoption. Over a series of conversations, we discussed aims and objectives, ultimately formulating some questions and a target population. As I continue to write up research findings, I’ll talk only very briefly about research method and content. The focus here is more on the process of co-creating the ‘right’ internship, doing research work as an intern, and working as an embedded researcher within an external company. After introducing key concepts and CityMaaS products and services, I’ll talk about research participants, rationale and outcomes, reflections on navigating a specifically ‘research orientated’ internship and plans for future work.

Concepts, products, and services

Digital inclusion is a far-reaching domain, but the focus of CityMaaS is specifically on applications of accessibility and mobility. CityMaaS software solutions include ‘Assist Me’ – a web tool for personalising the audio-visual and interactive content on websites; ‘Mobility Map’ – a mapping tool inclusive of machine-learning driven predictions of location accessibility and personalised route planning features; and ‘AWARE’ – an automated compliance checker, scoring and reporting a websites’ alignment with globally recognised web standards[1]. Improving accessibility online and offline is therefore, in a nutshell, the unifying objective for these solutions.

Who are digital inclusion solutions for?

People with additional accessibility and mobility needs – specifically those affected by conditions of visual, audio, physical and cognitive impairment – are ultimately the critical target end-users in terms of product interaction. Crucially though, they are not the clients: As a business to business (B2B) company, CityMaaS market and sell their solutions to public, private, and third-sector organisations with a view to improving their in-house digital inclusion offer; the general incentive being adding socio-economic value.

Why do corporate opinions and practices matter?

While the appeal of improving accessibility and mobility could/should be thought of as self-evident, if companies are to invest in bespoke solutions such as Assist Me, they need to not only be sure of its technical functionality, but confident it thematically aligns with their own conceptions of digital inclusion. Corporate clients therefore, were our population of interest for this work.

Research Activity:

My work combined designing, conducting, and analysing interviews with senior heads of digital from 3rd party organisations known to CityMaaS, with the aim of answering an overarching question, ‘what are the drivers and barriers to digital inclusion?’. Results – from thematic analysis of semi-structured interview transcripts, expressed as 10 value themes driving or hindering accessibility and mobility – would go onto inform the design of an ideation workshop (Fig 1).

Figure 1 – Digital inclusion themes

Interviewees and selected colleagues would then engage in specially designed accessibility and mobility solution ideation workshops, aligning features and functions of CityMaaS products with the 10 emergent themes (Fig 2).

Figure 2 – Software demo, product attributes & values-driven ideation exercise

Research Outcomes:

For CityMaaS, outcomes are aimed here at better defining the qualitative touchpoints for digital inclusion and discovering desirable uses for software, grounded in real-world values. For myself as a researcher of values-driven personalisation in the digital economy, this was a chance to explore emergent drivers and barriers as a values-orientated resource to digital solutions ideation in diverse corporate settings.

Reflections on navigating ‘researching’ and ‘interning’

There were several practical questions which required collaborative discussion with the CDT, most notably the nature of the partnership, data collection and storage, and my potentially conflicting status as both a doctoral research student and CityMaaS intern. We agreed the best framing of my status was that of an ‘embedded research associate’, as while I would be working alongside the CityMaaS team, my research would require university ethical clearance if results were to be useful to me in the wider PhD. As such, data collection and storage were conducted through university systems and protocol. I received no renumeration for my work with CityMaaS, with the prior agreement that research was explorative and not directly connected to business development activity on my part.

In terms of the nature of the work, the biggest challenges were those of project management, resourcing (providing interviewees, access to data) and ultimately ‘scope creep’. In terms of project management, mapping activities to a Gantt chart was personally beneficial, and I ensured that at numerous stages, there were deliverables which kept me accountable. For example, conducting initial requirements gathering sessions with CityMaaS business development and technical colleagues allowed me to hit an early goal of enumerating product features and functions, helping me to learn the product portfolio before interviewing participants later.

Delegation of activities also aided productivity where appropriate. As an example, my colleague in business development had much better access to interested and already connected corporate organisations than I did, meaning the substantive element of the internship wasn’t mostly generating participants.

The biggest danger though remained scope creep. Again, I found that effective project management and having short-term deliverables helped: I was able to complete internal requirements gathering, interview design, participant interviewing, analysis, and workshop design in the allotted 3 months’ time. Completion of ideation workshops though proved to be an ambitious final component; consequently, scheduled to take place in early 2022. While this remains realistic for me due to relatedness of the work to my PhD, if the project had to complete at any of the prior stages, outcomes were designed to be useful as standalone findings.

Conclusion & Future work

On reflection, I found the internship one of the most useful CDT activities for me in terms of both continued professional development and alignment with my own research interests. Moreover, I had never considered working in the digital inclusion sector before or had the opportunity to contribute to research in a start-up environment. As I complete workshops in February 2022 and write-up, I hope my findings are insightful to CityMaaS and useful to furthering my own understanding of values-driven consumption in the digital economy. I would also recommend the Horizon CDT network and partners at Digital Catapult, in terms of networking and finding bespoke internship opportunities.

[1] Based on the w3 (2018) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Based on the w3 (2018) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/

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Digital manufacturing, say what?

Reflection on developing a digital manufacturing toolkit for children

post by Natalie Leesakul (2018 cohort)

What is the first thought that comes to your mind when you think of manufacturing? Assembly lines? Boring and repetitive tasks? Loud noises?

Over the years, the manufacturing sector has evolved and moved more towards the age of digitalization. However, as the sector entered the era of Industry 4.0, skilled-labour shortages started to become a problem. The sector is experiencing the phenomenon where current employees are retiring while failing to attract new skilled employees. The manufacturing sector was not on my radar until I started my PhD at Horizon CDT (Grant No. EP/L015463/1) working in partnership with DigiTOP (Grant No. EP/R032718/1), and that has completely changed my perspective. This sector is filled with innovation. It is about forward thinking. At the core, there is a major element of maximizing productivity and efficiency by utilizing advanced technologies but also a shift towards ensuring seamless human-machine collaboration and contributions to sustainability and the Net Zero movement. After getting more involved in this sector in the past three years, the question that always comes up is how do we make manufacturing sexy? How do we inspire future generations to be interested in manufacturing?

As part of DigiTOP’s work, we are developing a toolkit to help organizations implement and integrate digital technologies. We provide research on the role of human factors and the impact of technology on the workforce along with use cases and recommendations on the technology adoption and design. One of the on-going toolkit developments is an educational set of resources focusing on the introduction to digital manufacturing aimed at a younger audience (primary and secondary children). I had an opportunity to be a part of the team in charge of developing the content from the start of the video production to running our very first workshop with students in collaboration with Speakers for Schools.

At the start, the first question to answer was how to transform a complex topic into something that is easy to comprehend by the children. We see digital manufacturing as “the use of smart, digital, autonomous and intelligent technologies within the manufacturing sector. These technologies include robotics, virtual and augmented reality, sensors and distributed data networks.” Certainly, there was quite a bit to unpack from this definition. Putting ourselves in the shoes of a 7-year-old, a short animated film was chosen as a communicational medium. Acknowledging that there was not any other existing child-focussed videos on manufacturing at the time, we decided to go forward with the plan and the video was produced in collaboration with Cloudifacturing and Digitbrain projects. The video production kicked off with choosing the right supplier. We searched for a video producer who really understood the brief and the video style of our preference and that required reading through multiple proposals as well as extensive discussion on animation style, colour schemes, voiceover artists, etc. Once we decided on the proposal, we provided the producers with an initial script that covered the objectives and key messages of the video including:

        • Introduction to general changes in industry 4.0/digital manufacturing
        • Cloud-based technologies and human factors considerations
        • Digital twin
        • Human physiological sensing
        • Human robot collaboration
        • Virtual reality in manufacturing and design
        • Responsible technology development and adoption

The challenge we had was explaining all of the above topics in a 3-4 minute video. We consulted with experts in child education to translate (boring) academic language into child-friendly and exciting dialogue. After many editions and revisions of the script, here is the final cut of the video:

The project did not stop at the video production. We are continuing to develop further content to support the use of the video as part of a school curriculum. For our first trial, we were invited to run a workshop through Speakers for Schools program under the weekly theme of digitalization. The workshop dove into the topics mentioned in the video in an interactive manner. We wanted to hear from the students while still making it fun and educational. The workshop was divided into three sections: 1. Subject and skills for digital manufacturing; 2. Sensors; 3. Humans & Robots. I was responsible for the third section. Creating workshop content for younger audience required a completely different approach to a preparation for a conference presentation. How do we gain their engagement especially in a virtual environment? What kind of activities needed to ensure positive engagement? How do we keep them entertained instead of dozing off? How do we make it simple but still interesting? We had various brainstorming sessions to find different ways to run this workshop. We found that to keep the same narrative in all three sessions, creating a fictional character called ‘Amy’ who is a digital factory manager was the way to go. Throughout the workshop, Amy faces different scenarios where she needs helps from the students to make decisions. We used tools such as running polls, storytelling, yes/no questions, and lots and lots of pictures!

In my session of human-robot collaboration, I asked the students to help Amy assign tasks to either human operators or robots.

I was very surprised by some of their answers. The answers were mostly robots even for making coffee! To me, this demonstrates the pro-technology nature of the younger generation. They seemed to be quite comfortable with the topic and it was quite refreshing to see positive engagement from the students. Although we are now living in the world of digitalization, the final note that we left the students with was data and ethics. It is important that we are aware of potential issues and impacts that may arise from technology in order to balance the interests of all stakeholders. Special thanks to the team: Dr. Glyn Lawson, Debra Fearnshaw, Dr Adrian Marinescu, Dr Setia Hermawati, and Siobhan Urquhart.

Thank you for taking the time to read my blogpost. I hope this sparks your interests in digital manufacturing and public engagement. My name is Natalie, Horizon 2018 cohort, and my PhD focuses on the adoption of collaborative embodied autonomous systems in the case of digital manufacturing from legal perspective. 😊

 

 

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Call for Participants: Testing for Transparency

PhD researcher Ephraim Luwemba (2019 Cohort) is currently recruiting participants to take part in Testing for Transparency Interviews.

About the Interviews

The interviews form an important part of the Testing for Transparency project. By interviewing the people who design digital services, we hope to ensure it is relevant and that we have a realistic impression of the technical and institutional challenges faced when attempting to create transparent privacy policies.

Who can take part

If you currently work on digital services that are likely to be accessed by children or have worked on them in the past, we would appreciate your input. We are looking for professionals involved in all aspects of creating a digital service including but not limited to QA and user testing specialists, UI and UX designers, copywriters, content creators, project managers, project architects, and contract lawyers who have been involved in the drafting of website policies and terms of service.

Amazon voucher

We are offering a £15 Amazon voucher to interviewees as a token of thanks. If you prefer, we can also donate the same amount to a charity of your choice. To do so, please let us know which charity you would like us to send a donation to by e-mailing Ephraim.Luwemba@nottingham.ac.uk prior to your interview.

You can read more information about the project at Testing for Transparency Interviews 

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Panel Discussion at the Interrogating Audiences event

post by Kadja Manninen (2018 cohort)

Coming from an arts management background with over a decade’s worth of work experience, for me, one of the main reasons for applying to the Horizon programme, was the course’s strong industry focus. This means that already in the application phase, students are matched with industry partners, with whom they collaborate actively throughout the PhD. My industry partner is The Space, a digital agency funded by the BBC and Arts Council England, whose mission is to help arts and cultural organisations to reach new audiences online. Particularly during the third year of my PhD, I have worked closely with my industry partner on various projects they are partners in. Through these projects and my own PhD research, I have had the opportunity and privilege to talk to around 40-50 arts organisations and independent arts professionals. The conversations have mostly centred around digital transformation, new digital business models, the needs of digital  arts audiences, and more recently, the impact of Covid-19 on the arts and cultural sector.

Therefore, I was thrilled, when the wonderful Helen Kennedy, Professor of Creative and Cultural Industries at University of Nottingham, invited me to take part in a panel discussion at the Interrogating Audiences online event the Institute for Screen Industries Research (ISIR) was organising on July, 9th, 2021.

The event brought together around 60 participants, both academics from different fields as well as representatives of various cultural organisations. The programme was composed of three panel discussions around the following questions:

      1. What questions do we have about audiences?
      2. How do we gather evidence to answer these questions?
      3. How would the answers be used to help design content production and distribution/ marketing strategies?

Below, I highlight some key takeaways from the three panels and my own experience as a panel member.

I was part of the first panel alongside Steward Terry from Broadway Cinema and Jennifer Hessler from University of Huddersfield. Our discussion focused on the many questions we have about audiences. Drawing on the interviews I have recently had with arts and cultural organisations, I decided to approach the topic from arts producers’ perspective.

It is increasingly clear that the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated digital transformation and organisational decision-making within arts organisations. While the strict social distancing restrictions imposed by the UK government closed cultural venues repeatedly over the pandemic peak year, they also created room for change by allowing arts producers to stop and take time for rethinking their ways of operating and exploring new forms of digital engagement with their audiences.

During my interviews with arts organisations, many described the diverse and often experimental ways of audience engagement they were undertaking under the new circumstances, where in-person encounters were not allowed. The organisations that were already digitally mature at the start of the pandemic, were in the best position to tackle the challenge of reaching digital audiences. They were, for example, able to rapidly repurpose their existing digital content and broadcast it, which enabled them to remain relevant and not to be forgotten by their core audiences. These organisations also tended to be the ones that saw the pandemic as an opportunity to reach new, more geographically dispersed audiences, and thus began creating new types of content specifically designed for digital delivery. There are many examples in the sector, but I think one that is definitely worth mentioning is Opera North’s From Couch to Chorus project, which gathered over 6000 people from all over the world on Zoom to sing opera.

(https://www.operanorth.co.uk/whats-on/from-couch-to-chorus/)

Some arts organisations engaged in unprecedentedly bold experimentation with digital content, and launched new digital products such as online escape rooms or at-home XR experiences. Organisations also upskilled internally, i.e. staff members rapidly learned, for example, the art of online teaching or performing to the camera. More recently, there has been an emergence of digital platforms introduced by arts and cultural organisations, a phenomenon that I think no one could have anticipated pre-pandemic. Another successful example from the sector is Rambert Dance, who have done particularly well with their Home Studio platform, creating an inclusive, global online community around their work, and Darkfield, who through an app-based approach have reached large international audiences for their at-home immersive audio experiences.

Steward Terry from Broadway Cinema agreed that also in the film industry, the engagement with new and existing digital audiences has been something that they have been actively developing, and they as well, launched their own on-demand platform, where selected films can be rented. He underlined that is has been key for Broadway Cinema to determine what makes them unique to motivate audiences to engage with them particularly during the pandemic. Interestingly, he also observed that after the re-opening, their audiences have returned, however, many seem to be somewhat younger than the audiences they had pre-pandemic.

The second panel centred on the different techniques of collecting data from audiences. It was great to see how mixed methods research is now becoming much more frequent in the arts. For example, Bridgette Wessers described the AHRC-funded “Beyond the Multiplex” project, which through a mixed-methods approach aimed to understand how audiences engage with main stream film and how can the cultural value of not-so-known films can be optimised. She emphasised that one dataset does not give you the whole picture, but its importance to approach the phenomenon from different viewpoints.

Richard Broughton from Ampere Analytics shared his knowledge on commercial data collection methods, which they use to evidence audience behaviour. These included financial information on how much audiences are spending, large-scale quantitative surveys and interviews as well as collection of title-level tracking. Listening to Richard’s presentation I couldn’t help wondering that it would be great if there was more collaboration between academics and commercial analytic agencies so that these efficient methods could be also accessible to academic researchers. Erin Sullivan from The Shakespeare Institute described interesting social media research data collection methods such as sentiment analysis and particularly the Netlytic software for collecting and analysing tweets and YouTube posts. This is something that I plan to explore more in detail in the near future.

The final panel focused on the data-driven approaches that inform content production and distribution strategies. Ayesha Taylor-Camara, PhD candidate from University of Nottingham gave a wonderful introduction to her research that explores the value of the BBC. Her presentation helped to understand the role media plays in people’s lives and how a cultural organisation’s value is formed based on the interactions and experiences with their audiences. Matt Locke from Storythings introduced a new (at least to me) concept of “anectdata” that is not necessarily captured by traditional data collection methods, but bears an increasing importance to broadcasters. He also underlined the significance of understanding the churn caused by digital technologies in audience behaviour. Rachel Shaw from the BBC agreed that the pandemic has accelerated change in the TV industry. For instance, the way BBC assesses value of content has changed from vertical to horizontal, since the distribution method has changed from a singular moment to a continuous event.

As the three-hour event approached its end, the closing discussion concluded around the overarching theme of change. Liz Evans from University of Nottingham drew attention to how change and trends impact audience research, and whereas in the industry audience research can be fast-paced, change and trends are often difficult to capture through academic research. Liz also made an important point about cultural audiences not being siloed in one sector, as people who watch television also commonly go to cinema and theatre. Therefore, she called for more inter-sectoral collaboration and understanding that changes in the film and TV sector can also impact other sectors, such as the performing arts.

Indeed, I think there are important lessons we can learn from understanding different audiences from different sectors. There are universal challenges and common issues that Covid has made more apparent, as Liz stated, pushed certain sectors, such as performing arts to a direction they wouldn’t have gone naturally.

To finish, Helen Kennedy pointed out another important question that is pertinent to all cultural sectors and has repeatedly come up in my own research: How can we reach audiences we know nothing about, and how can we create content for them? During the course of the pandemic, it has been easier for audiences to try something new and suddenly become, for example, dance audiences or opera audiences. If new audience demographics keep turning up at online events – whereas they wouldn’t attend this event in a live setting – what does that tell us about the barriers of access to these art forms or cultural institutions?