public engagement – Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training Blog

7 October 2020

Presenting MRL creations to the public

post by Gustavo Berumen Salazar (2017 cohort)

Hello everyone. I hope you are doing well and are well-supported during these trying times. This period has allowed me to reflect on two public engagement activities that I took part in last year. The activities involved two exhibitions where I had the opportunity to engage with the public presenting three Mixed Reality Lab (MRL) creations in two venues (MRL at CHI, 2019 and Halfway to the Future, 2019). The MRL creations that I presented were:

Touchomatic

A touch-based two-player cooperative video game, in which each player holds a sensor stick with one hand and touches the hand of the other participant to control how low and high an airship can fly. Participants have to find the sweet spot to fly the airship to collect coins and not run out of gas.

Get Screwed

A virtual reality (VR) experience that plays with notions of control, sensory misalignment, and vertigo. Participants are placed on top of a swivel chair which is rendered as a bolt by the VR interface and attempt to unscrew it by turning.

VR Playground

A VR exploration of sensory misalignment, in which people use the motion of a swing to control their navigation through the virtual world. The VR interface couples the motion with movements in the game.

In the two venues, people from different backgrounds came to try the above experiences: researchers from the field of human-computer interaction (HCI), employees of technology companies, people who don’t work in technology-related fields, and people who accompanied attendees of the conference, from adults to children, all participated in the experiences.

People were interested not only in having the experience, but also in knowing more about the technological, creative, psychological, and other components of the creations. People wanted to know what technology was used and what happened in our minds that made it possible for the creation to integrate the virtual and physical. Given that people had different levels of expertise in the area, it was necessary to give explanations according to people’s needs. In a nutshell, the response of a professor will differ from that of a child.

Overall, I found the exhibitions a challenging task. There were difficult moments when people were not satisfied with my answers, and I had to find other ways of explaining the mechanics of these VR experiences. I found it very useful to relate my explanation to common knowledge through metaphor and analogy that people could easily make a connection with them.

It was a very enriching experience given that I had the opportunity to talk about interactive experiences, VR, and motion sensing with people from different backgrounds. Those topics are very different from the area of research on which my PhD is focused, which is on design ethnography and smart products.

In general, the experience was very fulfilling. I had the opportunity to share my time exchanging ideas with people and engage in thought-provoking conversations. It has taught me valuable skills related to speaking about and explaining my research with a diverse audience. I consider some positive outcomes of my participation in these public engagement activities to be:

The opportunity to practice critical thinking and think about the relevance of our research for the real world
Improvement of communication skills, as we are accustomed to talking to an academic audience, and this kind of experience gives the opportunity to practice with a non-academics
Building confidence as we have to be prepared to answer all kinds of questions on the spot and without prior preparation
Personal satisfaction from sharing with society part of the research that we conduct in the confined spaces of the lab

I hope that shortly we are able to take part in such open and diverse environments again.

29 September 2020

The public engagement in CVPM workshop, Seoul, South Korea

post by Siyang Song (2016 cohort)

At the end of 2019, as a Horizon CDT student at Nottingham University, I was attending a workshop (called Computer Vision for Physiological Measurement) in Seoul, South Korea. This workshop mainly focused on the research of applying recent advances in computer vision to measure the human physiological status.

This year, there were more than 50 people from company or academic institutions attending this workshop and 19 of us were giving talks to share the research we did and discussing the potential future research directions.

During this workshop, I gave a talk about how to apply state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to automatically detect emotions from people’s faces. In particular, it utilised people’s facial muscle movements to infer emotional status. This technique can be further applied to other purposes, as facial dynamics can reflect many different human statuses.

More importantly, how to apply such techniques to benefit our daily life was also discussed. For example, it can be further extended to make a quick and objective judgment about someone’s mental health, such as depression, or predict someone’s personality. Specifically, fast and automatically understanding human personality is important in employment. It can help employers to better recognise which candidates are more suitable for the job, and more willing to work in a group. Mental healthcare is another potential application. For example, while it is expensive and time-consuming to find mental health experts to diagnose mental health, such a technique can provide a cheap, quick, and objective assessment to most patients as well as provide more useful information for related doctors.

In short, such techniques have great potential to improve the business and quality of our life. For investors, it could be a good direction to invest money and time.

Since this workshop was with ICCV conference, at the end of this event, I had a great time in the banquet and had nice chats with other attendees.

16 September 201929 January 2020

The Brilliant Club

Post by Stanislaw Piasecki (2018 cohort)

Working as a Tutor for the Brilliant Club

The Brilliant Club is an award-winning charity that collaborates with universities and schools in the UK. Its mission is to increase the number of pupils from under-represented backgrounds progressing to highly selective universities. The Brilliant Club does this by searching for PhD students and asking them to share their academic expertise with state schools. Statistics from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service prove that pupils who participate in Brilliant Club’s Scholars Programme are significantly more likely to apply to, receive an offer from and study at a highly-selective university.

My journey at the Brilliant Club started with a workshop organised at the University of Nottingham by members of this charity. Initially, I thought that this workshop would simply give me with information about teaching methods. However, their engagement and passion for what they did convinced me to apply for the position of a tutor. I wanted to gain teaching experience and I thought that this would be a great way of achieving this objective while doing something positive for society.

After a successful interview, I participated in a two days training weekend organised for all tutors at the Brilliant Club. This was an opportunity to meet more experienced tutors and ask them questions about their experiences. I also developed my teaching skills by participating in a wide variety of training sessions. For example, we were given information on various teaching techniques and how to engage our audience. We were also given specific advice concerning working with children.

Following the training weekend, the Brilliant Club organised an event at the University of Manchester where we met our pupils and their teachers for the first time. During this day, I delivered my first tutorial. My pupils were divided into 2 groups of six children each. I was teaching pupils at the Key Stage 2 level.

The topic of my tutorials was “What are Rights?”. I delivered the tutorial with the help of a handbook prepared by the University of Oxford. The topics of the tutorials were decided based on the tutors’ educational and professional background. I remember that when I was in school, no one really taught us about law and I thought that this could be an interesting and important topic for children, if presented in an engaging way.

After the initial tutorial, I delivered six other tutorials at the pupils’ state school. This was a challenging and rewarding experience. My objective was to increase their skills and make them believe in themselves. We had a lot of interesting discussions on topics such as human or criminal rights. What I enjoyed the most was hearing children’s opinions on those issues and exchanging ideas with them. At the end, they had to write an essay which I marked according to University criteria. They all worked hard and received great marks!

Overall, preparing for the tutorials was a lot of work but it was worth it. Of course, my pupils were very young and they do not have to apply to study at a university in the future. There are a lot of other choices they could make. However, I wanted to explain to them what studying at a university means, to teach them about a new topic and show them that they have the capacity to succeed.