Tag: PhD

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Call for Participants – Sustainable Food Study

post by Milly Clover (2021 cohort)

Interested in shaping the future of sustainable food systems in the UK?

The Sensory Science Centre is seeking participants for an online survey as part of the Sustainable Food Study and we would love for you to get involved!

To participate in the survey, you will need to meet the following criteria:

      • Be aged 18 years or older
      • Be a UK resident

If you meet the criteria and would like to take part in the survey, please click on the link below. The survey will begin with the participant information sheet and consent form. Please read them for full details of the study. Providing you meet the eligibility criteria and consent to partaking, you will be asked a series of questions relating to the sustainability of our food in the UK. The survey should take approximately 20 minutes to complete. As a thank you for your time and participation, you have the option to be entered into a prize draw at the end of the survey by submitting your email address. This is to be in with a chance of winning 1 of 5 £20 Amazon vouchers.

Study Link: 
https://nottingham.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/food-sustainability-in-the-uk-survey-2

If the link to the survey is not working, please copy and paste the link into the browser.

Please feel free to forward this onto others who are interested in participating in this survey. Alternatively, you can pass on the research team details if they would like to contact us directly:
(Milly Clover, Survey Coordinator: sb-sustfood@nottingham.ac.uk)

Many thanks in advance,
Milly

Milly Clover
PhD Student in Sustainable Food Systems
Horizon CDT 2021 Cohort

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Robot dancer interacting with children – Feng’s internship

post by Feng Zhou (2017 cohort)

The robot dancer was one of four exhibits of “Thingamabobas,” a playful, sensory experience where participants meet and interact with a circus troupe of performative hybrid mechanized sculptures crafted from sustainable and recycled materials. The installation space is a place of wonder. It draws on the absurdities of British artists Heath Robinson and Rowland Emett’s contraptions, Calder’s Circus (1930’s), automata, object theatre, puppetry, and circus acts.

The robot dancer was shown in Lakeside Arts at the University of Nottingham. It attracted many families with children to attend.

We chose the low-cost robot arm – Ned as our dancer. It is also safe working with humans. The Intel RealSense Depth Camera was used as “dancer”‘s eyes to conduct facial recognization.

The fan-shaped zone is the range of the camera. It is also the zone in which children interact with the “robot dancer.” When the camera “sees” the face of the nearest child in the green area, it will dance following the child’s face. Since the “robot dancer” has a bad eye condition, it will be hard to tell whether there is anyone around when the nearest child shows in the purple zone. Thus the “robot dancer” will try to look around and search for children. And then, when children stand farther than the purple area, the distance will be over the range of the camera’s detection. So the “robot dancer” will fall asleep. During the same time when children go through “interacting,” ” searching,” and “sleeping” areas, there will be corresponding music being played.

There are still many points that could be improved such as increasing the interacting zone by increasing amount of cameras, switching professional robotic arms to achieve more sufficient movements, and decreasing the delay of interaction.

It was an amazing experience to work with artists and children.

My job was primarily on developing the robotic interacting system base on ROS, including developing the robotic interacting mode based on distance from the users, music playing etc. From this internship, I extended my skill set by learning the ROS system, which enables high flexibility in combining multiple devices into an integrated system. This enabled me to extend my six-axis 3D printing system, which is significant for my PhD research. During the process of developing the interaction mode of the robotic arm, I had a chance to work with dancers, who interacted with the system with dancing motion, through which, I got valuable experience working with dancers who are also aimed users for my PhD research.

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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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Just write it!

Reflection on my first paper writing experience
post by Natalie Leesakul (2018 cohort)

Citation: Urquhart, L., Reedman-Flint, D. and Leesakul, N. (2019), “Responsible domestic robotics: exploring ethical implications of robots in the home”, Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, Vol. 17 No. 2, pp. 246-272. https://doi.org/10.1108/JICES-12-2018-0096

As I was wrapping up my first study and starting to draft the paper, I thought this might be a good time to write a reflection piece on my first paper writing experience. Writing a paper can feel a bit daunting. There are always so many ideas to cover and it is so easy to get consumed by the findings and the need to make the paper perfect – and that is where I’m usually stuck at. So, I have to often remind myself that writing a paper is a journey on its own and it is going to take several drafts and many revisions before arriving at the final document, but even that is not the end!

When I was in my first year, my supervisor, Dr Lachlan Urquhart, invited me to join in on a paper that he was working with another Horizon student, Dominic Reedman-Flint, for ETHICOMP 2018 conference in Sopot, Poland. The motivation of the paper was to introduce empirical observation and conceptual analysis to present how responsible robotics should be built and what people think of life with robots. As the paper focused on exploring challenges and requirements for designing responsible domestic robots, it was very much aligned with my interest in robotics and the law, so I got on board.  Following the submission to the conference, we were invited to submit the paper to Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, and the paper was accepted and published in May 2019. Although it has been over a year since the conference, I still remember the feeling when I gave a presentation at a conference for the first time and the excitement when we found out that the paper was finally in the pipeline for publishing.

For paper preparation, we were working remotely prior to the conference – Lachlan was the lead on this paper while Dom looked at the exploratory study and my responsibility was to support and fill the gaps in some parts of literature review, data analysis and copy editing. We collaborated via email and used Dropbox to keep track of different paper versions and editing (the raw survey data was not stored on here). Through collaboration, the paper started to develop from a rough outline of the paper format to the final draft ready for submission.  Unfortunately, neither Lachlan nor Dom was able to attend the conference. Although it was quite nerve-racking when I found out I would be going to the conference and presenting the paper, this experience really set a good start for my PhD (I’ll save the details for another storytelling!).

After returning from the conference, we took into consideration the questions that were asked during the presentation and addressed this further in our paper. Some of the questions we received were around the main themes of the survey, how the questions were formed, and the general question on how robots can be used for other purposes such as helping those who are socially isolated. In this case, Dom and I were able to work together in person to revise the paper before submitting to the journal. It was definitely easier to collaborate in person as we needed to make some substantial changes to comply with the journal formatting requirements and criteria, decisions could be made faster this way. It took a few days of in-person meetings but intensive email exchanging between all three of us until we had the final draft.

After the paper was accepted and went through peer review process, we received feedback with a minor revision (adding an appendix that includes the statistical analysis). This part of the process allowed us one last chance to edit the paper before publication. It was a very crucial stage to ensure that the paper was airtight which only meant more revision and more back and forth emailing. As I mentioned from the beginning, having a final draft is still not the end of the journey. The paper can always be made better, but it is important to know when to stop. After reading over the paper several times and everyone double, triple, quadruple checked the paper, we then agreed on the final editing.

What I have learned from this experience is very valuable to my PhD journey. For practical skills, I personally think it is a good practice to maintain a record of each revision. I found the recommendation from Lachlan very useful for collaborative writing – so instead of everyone editing the master document, we created a copy of it to add our content to with track changes on. All the revisions must be uploaded onto a shared folder but then only one person compiles all the content onto the master document as this will prevent confusion and corrupted files. For personal development, although I was new to this process, I found that the key for successful collaboration consisted of being flexible and open to new suggestions, respecting each other’s opinions, being supportive, and having good communication, which both Lachlan and Dom have shown me 😊.  It was certainly a good first paper writing experience and a nice reminder to be patient with the process.

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The GIFT project

Post by Harriet Cameron (2018 Cohort)

The GIFT Project is an international project funded by Horizon 2020, which explores new ways of engaging with cultural heritage through gifting . The scope of the project is huge, and draws together researchers, artists, designers and museum professionals from across Europe, including the University of Nottingham’s Mixed Reality Lab . GIFT has developed and deployed various experiences with museums in Denmark, Italy, Norway, Spain, Serbia, the UK and the USA since it began in 2017. It has several different ‘tracks’ within it, each of which explores different elements of gifting, interactivity and cultural experiences. For example The Gift Experience allows the user to choose objects or places within the museum; photograph them; personalise elements of it, for example with a written note or audio comment; and then gift it to someone to experience for themselves. Another example is The One Minute Experience, which uses templates and guidelines to enable visitors to write short texts about objects viewed in the museums, which they can then leave as gifts for other visitors. I was lucky enough to meet the wonderful Dr Jocelyn Spence, the lead Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham for the GIFT project and originator of VRtefacts (developed alongside the equally wonderful Dr Dimitrios Darzentas), early on in my PhD. Through her, I learned about the GIFT project and the amazing work they were doing.

My PhD project is working with the Nottingham Contemporary art gallery  to explore relationships between audience, art and venue, and how those relationships can be better understood and developed into something more long term, personal and meaningful, through the use of novel technologies. Naturally, the GIFT project offered a fantastic insight into some of the ways work like mine is already being undertaken, and a chance to see how this work is received by the public users. When I was given the opportunity to help with a two day deployment of the VRtefacts experience as part of the GIFT project, I was delighted to get on board.

In late May 2019, at the Derby Museum and Art Gallery  we showed VRtefacts to the public for the first time. The project, without spoiling anything for any reader who may yet get a chance to experience it themselves, used virtual reality (VR) to encourage visitors to donate personal stories to the Derby Museum. Enabled by a combination of tactile and digital technologies, and a beautiful VR environment created by Dr Dimitrios Darzentas, visitors were able to interact with artefacts in a thoroughly immersive and novel way. My role for the course of the deployment was to get the visitor settled into the VR environment, set the scene for their donation experience, and then to guide them through their storytelling. We heard from a broad array of people, who donated an even broader range of stories. From hypothesising what the artefact may have been used for, to memories of related objects and places, to tangential personal anecdotes and fictional hyperbole, we were gifted with some fantastic tales that added a resonant, human layer to the objects displayed. The value of this to the museum, the visitor, and the research project are multiple. For example, for the museum, it gave a new avenue to understanding their audiences, and the meanings they take from the exhibits shown. For the visitor, it allowed them a deeper way to engage with the exhibits, a space to reflect on their own experience or expertise, and a platform to share those reflections with others. Finally, in terms of research, it demonstrated a novel, exciting way of accessing audiences, as well as the importance of inter-disciplinary projects in contemporary research.

The future for museums and galleries comes, in part, in a technologically driven, interactive format, which enables visitors to experience not just the exhibits, but the museum experience as a whole in novel and exciting ways. VRtefacts is a timely and exhilarating glimpse at what future museum visiting may entail, and the feedback from the public who engaged with the project was overwhelmingly positive. By providing a way for visitors to interact with artefacts and exhibits in a tactile, personal way, it became apparent that each visitor had their own interpretations, reflections, and indeed stories for each piece, brought to the fore by the enoblement of the technologies involved, that they were excited to share with the museum as well as each other. Enabling the visitor to share their stories was not only well received by them, but also by the museum who were pleased to learn about the histories of each piece, or the personal relevance of the artefacts to the individual. VRtefacts represents one face of the future for museums and galleries, in which personalised interactivity forms an important part of the visitor experience.

On a more personal note, the project demonstrated just one way that technologies can be utilised to enable and encourage connections between visitors, cultural venues, and exhibits. Despite my involvement beginning late in the process, just a few weeks before the date of the intervention, I was delighted that my feedback on the human engagement element was integrated into the final experience, and it provided a valuable insight into how these kind of projects are developed and deployed in a museum setting. Running the experience also allowed me to revisit storytelling skills I had established during my time working at an escape room, and develop those skills in a new context. Most importantly I think, it gave me an insight into the practicalities of running an intervention; potential pitfalls and opportunities, the value of a strong team, and the importance of foresight (like bringing spares for your spares!). I’m looking forward to being involved in more projects like this in the future, learning more and offering more back, even at some point using these skills I have been developing to stage my own interactive experience within a cultural institution as part of my PhD.

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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

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Summer Scientist

Each year children and parents are invited to visit the University and play lots of free and fun games that help us with research. This past summer, Wendy Olphert (2015 cohort) enjoyed assisting in one of the activities at Summer Scientist 2018:

A bit of brainwave! –Wendy Olphert

I’m researching the role that digital technologies (such as mobile phones and the internet) play in the lives of people with a brain tumour – whether their symptoms create challenges for technology use, and whether using technologies can contribute to improving their quality of life.

At one level, this is quite an easy idea to communicate to people outside of an academic context – we readily understand that if we have a problem with our brain it could affect our ability to think or act – but to appreciate the range of impacts that a brain tumour could have on an individual’s life requires an awareness of what our brains do and how they work.  The brain is such a complex organ that scientists are still researching these questions.  But we already know a lot, and as I recently found out, even for young children it can be fun as well as instructive to learn about how brains work!

Over the summer I had a chance to assist in an event called Summer Scientist 2018.

This is a week-long programme run by the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham in the school vacation that has now run for several years.  Families are invited to bring their children (aged 4-11) to spend half a day at the University to play lots of free fun games and optionally to take part in some research activities – that were also designed to be fun and engaging. By taking part, children (and parents) get to learn about how the mind and brain work by experiencing real science first-hand.

University of Nottingham Psychology Science week. Photos by Alex WIlkinson of Alex Wilkinson Photography.

I was given responsibility for an activity on the theme of electroencephalography – how dull does that sound for young kids?!  But the organisers had found a clever and entertaining way to demonstrate the fact that the brain generates electrical impulses, using a special headset with a pair of furry (fake!) cat’s ears attached (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurowear). The headset picks up electrical activity from the brain which in turn moves the ears depending on your state of mind. When you are relaxed, the ears droop; when you are interested, the ears are alert – and when you are ‘in the zone’ the ears wiggle.  The kids had free choice over the activities they chose to take part in, and most were fascinated by the wiggly ‘cats ears’ and keen to try them out for themselves.

The children attending had a free choice over the activities they opted to do, and during the course of the two sessions in the day around 40 children of different ages came to the stand to try out the ears and, by doing so, learned about electrical impulses in the brain.  There was a mirror to look in; once I’d attached their headset, some found out that the more they giggled at their reflection the more the ears wiggled (and the more the ears wiggled, the more they laughed!) Others, especially one little boy of about 6, spent many minutes silently trying out different ‘brain activities’ such as thinking about exciting times such as parties, being calm, or trying to count backwards from 20, and clearly being intrigued to see the effects of his ‘brainwaves’ on the ears’ movement.

For the older children, and in some cases their parents, I explained how scientists can use the electrical impulses in the brain to find out more about how it works and what is happening when the brain is not working as it should – and that in turn gave me a chance to tell some of them about the research that I am doing.

I really enjoyed the day and it was clear that the kids had a great time too, as well as picking up lots of science along the way.  I felt that the whole concept of ‘Summer Scientist’ week really was a bit of a brainwave!