Tag: Summer school

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Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute 2023 Reflective Report

post by Favour Borokini (2022 cohort)

From June 25th – July 15th, 2023, I attended the 6th annual Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) Summer School at the University of St Andrews. The institute aims to foster interdisciplinary collaborations about how intelligence is expressed in humans, non-human animals, and artificial intelligence (AI), among others.

I was excited to attend the Summer Institute due to my interest in AI ethics from an African and feminist perspective. My current PhD research focuses on the potential affordances and challenges avatars pose to African women. As AI is now often implicated in the creation of digital images, I thought DISI was a great environment to share ideas and insight into how to conceptualise these challenges and opportunities.

The attendees were divided into two groups: Fellows and Storytellers. Fellows were mostly early career researchers from diverse fields, such as cognitive science, computer science, ethnography,  and philosophy. The Storytellers were artists who created or told stories and had in their number an opera singer, a dancer, a weaver, a sci-fi author, a sound engineer and many others. The Storytellers brought spontaneity and life to what would surely have been a dreary three weeks with their creativity and their ability to spur unselfconscious expression in all the participants.

DISI 2023 began on a rainy evening, the first of several such rainy days, with an icebreaker designed to get Fellows and Storytellers to get to know each other. In the following days, we received a series of engaging lectures on topics as varied as brain evolution in foxes and dogs, extraterrestrial intelligence, psychosis and shared reality and the role of the arts in visualising conservation science. A typical summer school day had two ninety-minute lectures punctuated by two short recesses and a longer lunch break.

The lecture on Psychosis and Shared Reality was given by Professor Paul Fletcher, a Professor of Neuroscience from the University of Cambridge who had advised the development team of Hellblade, a multi-award-winning video game that vividly portrayed mental illness. This game put me in mind of several similar research projects ongoing at the CDT researching gaming and the mind. As a Nigerian, I reflected on the framing of psychosis and mental illness in my culture and the non-Western ways these ailments were treated and addressed. That first week, I was quite startled to find that two people I had spoken casually with at dinner and on my way to St Andrew’s were Faculty members. One of these was Dr. Zoe Sadokierski, an Associate Professor in Visual Communication at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, who gave a riveting lecture on visualising the cultural dimensions of conservation science using participatory methods.

In that first week, we were informed that we would all be working on at least one project, two at the most (more unofficially), and there was a pitching session over the course of two afternoons. I pitched two projects: The first project was to explore the aspirations, fears and hopes of my fellow participants using the Story Completion method, a qualitative research method with roots in Psychology, in which a researcher elicits fictional narratives from their participants using a brief prompt called a stem. This method helps participants discuss sensitive, controversial subjects by constructing a story told from the point of view of a stranger.

Many of the stories were entertaining and wildly imaginative, but I was particularly struck by the recurring anxiety that in 2073, the beautiful city of St Andrews would be submerged due to rising water levels. This seemed to me a reflection of how attached we had all become to that historic city, how attachment to places and things can come to help us care more.

For my second project, I and two friends (pictured below) interviewed six of our fellow DISI attendees for a podcast titled A Primatologist, a Cognitive Scientist and a Philosopher Walk into a(n Intergalactic) Bar. The idea was to get artists and researchers to tell an ignorant but curious alien on a flying turtle planet called Edna about their work and the Earth. These interviews sparked amazingly unintended reflective conversations about the nature of life on earth, our relationship with nature and human values, such as honesty. On the final day, we put together an audio trailer for some of the most insightful parts of these conversations as our final presentation.

Photo of our Podcast team. L-R: Antoine Bertin, Favour Borokini, & Matthew Henderson. #TeamEdna

Prone to being critical, I often felt disconcerted by what I perceived as an absence of emphasis on ethics. Having worked in technology ethics and policy, I felt prodded to question the impact and source of a lot of what I heard. In a session on the invisibility of technology, I felt extremely disturbed by the idea that good technology should be invisible. In fact, I felt that invisibility, the sort of melding into perception described as embodiment by postphenomenology, spoke more to efficiency than “good”, bearing in mind use cases such as surveillance.

There were some heated conversations, too, like the one on eugenics and scientific ethics in research. The question was how members of the public were expected to trust scientists if scientists felt ethically compelled not to carry out certain types of research or to withhold sensitive findings obtained during their research.

And the session on questioning the decline in “high-risk, high-return research”, which seemed, unsurprisingly, focused on research within the sciences, led to comments on funding cuts for social sciences, arts and the humanities resulting from the characterisation of these fields as low-risk and low-return, causing me to reflect that, ironically, the precarity of the latter, qualified them more as tagged high-risk, at least, if not high-return.

But the summer school wasn’t all lectures; and there were numerous other activities, including zoo and botanical garden trips, aquarium visits, beach walks, forest bathing and salons. During one such salon, we witnessed rousing performances from the storytellers amongst us in dance, music, literature and other forms of art.

An evening beach bonfire with a Frisbee game
Favour and two “dudes” at the entrance to the Edinburgh Zoo

I also joined a late evening expedition to listen to bats, organised by Antoine, one of my co-podcast partners. There was something sacred about walking in the shoes of the bats that evening as we blindfolded ourselves and relied on our partners to lead us in the dark with only the sense of touch, stumbling, as a small river rushed past.

I think the process of actually speaking with my fellow attendees caused me to feel warm towards them and their research. I believe ethics is always subjective, and our predisposition and social contexts impact what we view as ethical. At DISI, I found that ethics can be a journey, as I discovered unethical twists in my perspective.

It was my first time at the beach!
At the St Andrews Botanical Garden

This thawing made me enjoy DISI more, even as I confirmed that I enjoy solitary, rarefied retreats. As the final day drew near, I felt quite connected to several people and had made a few friends, who I knew, like the rarefied air, I would miss.

The success of DISI is in no small part due to the effort of the admin team, Erica Cartmill, Jacob Foster, Kensy Cooperrider, and Amanda McAlpin-Costa. Our feedback was constantly solicited, and they were quite open about the changes from last year.

I had a secret motive for attending. My research’s central focus is no longer AI, and I felt very out of place not having something I thought was core to the theme. But a conversation with Sofiia Rappe, a postdoctoral Philosophy and Linguistics Fellow, led to the realisation that the ability and desire to shapeshift is itself a manifestation of intelligence – one modelled in many non-human animals, reflecting awareness and cognition about how one fits in and how one should or ought to navigate their physical and social environment.

I look forward to returning someday.

With my friend Khadija, on the last day
After Cèilidh-ing, with Mia and Paty

You can listen to our podcast here: SpaceBar_Podcast – Trailer 

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A Reflection on The Connected Everything and Smart Products Beacon Summer School 2020

post by Cecily Pepper (2019 cohort)

My first summer school started with an invite via email. Despite my interest in the topic, my first thought was that robotics was not my area of expertise (coming from a social science background), so maybe I shouldn’t bother applying as I’d be out-of-my-depth. Although after some consideration, I thought it would create some great opportunities to meet new people from diverse backgrounds. So, I stopped worrying about my lack of knowledge in the area and just went for it; and I got a place!

The summer school was held digitally due to COVID-19 restrictions, which had both its benefits and pitfalls. On the first day, we were welcomed by Debra Fearnshaw and Professor Steve Benford, and were then given the opportunity to introduce ourselves. From this it was apparent that there was a wide variety of delegates from several universities, with a range of disciplines including social sciences, robotics, engineering and manufacturing. The first day mostly consisted of talks from experts about the challenges we face in connecting technology and the potential of co-robotics within the fields of agrirobotics, home and healthcare. The main task of the summer school was to create a cobot (collaborative robot) that could overcome some of the issues that COVID-19 has created or exacerbated. The issue that the group chose to address had to fall into one of the categories introduced on the first day: food production (agrirobotics), healthcare or home. Along with this challenge, more details were needed on function, technological components, and four key areas of the cobot design: ethics, communication, learning and safety. These aspects were introduced on the second day. After being split into groups at the end of the first day, I felt happy as my group had a range of experience and expertise between us, which I felt would bode well for the challenge as well as being beneficial for myself as I could learn something from everyone.

Similarly, the second day consisted mostly of talks, this time based on the four themes mentioned previously. The ethics discussion was interesting and included in-depth explanations around aspects to consider when reflecting upon the ethical consequences of our designs, such as privacy, law, security and personal ethics. An online activity followed the ethics talk but was soon interrupted by a technical glitch. Despite this, we were able to engage with alternative resources provided in order to reflect upon the ethics of our cobot design. This was useful both for our eventual design, as well as applying this to our own PhD research.

The other themes then followed, including a discussion around interaction and communication in technology. This was an insightful introduction to voice user interfaces and alike, and what the current research is focusing on in this field. While fascinating on its own, it was also useful in thinking about how to apply this to our cobot design, and which features may be useful or necessary for our cobot’s functionality. A talk on the third theme of learning was then delivered, including details about facial recognition and machine learning, and the applications of these in the field of robotics. Likewise, this was useful in reflecting upon how these features may be applicable in our design. Finally, the theme of safety was considered. This talk provided us with the knowledge and ability to consider safety aspects of our cobot, which was particularly apt when considering COVID safety implications too. Overall, the first two days were quite lengthy in terms of screen time (despite some breaks), and I found myself wilting slightly towards the end. However, I think we could all understand and sympathise in the difficulty of minimising screen time when there is a short space of time to complete all of the summer school activities.

On the final day, we split into our teams to create our cobot. This day was personally my favourite part of the summer school, as it was fantastic to work with such a variety of people who all brought different skills to the group. Together, we developed a cobot design and went through the themes from the previous day, ensuring we met the design brief and covered all bases. Probably the biggest challenge was keeping it simple, as we had so many ideas between us. Despite our abundance of ideas, we were strict with ourselves as a group to focus and keep the design simplistic. Additionally, the five-minute presentation time meant that we had to keep our design simple yet effective. We then presented our home assistant cobot, Squishy. Squishy was an inflatable, soft cobot designed to assist carers in lifting patients who were bed-bound (as occupational injuries are a significant problem within the care industry). Squishy’s soft design enabled comfort for the patient being lifted, while the modular design provided a cost-effective solution and the possibility of added-extras if necessary. Along with this, Squishy was beneficial in that it consisted of wipe-clean surfaces to enable effective cleaning in light of COVID-19, as well as aiding social distancing by reducing the need for carer-patient contact. Other features of Squishy included machine-learned skeletal tracking and thermal cameras to aid safe functionality, and minimal personal data collection to maintain ethical standards. After the presentations and following questions, the judges deliberated. Results were in…my team were the winners! While I was happy to have won with my team, the most fruitful part of the experience for me was meeting and learning from others who had different backgrounds, perceptions and ideas.

Overall, I felt the summer school was well-organised and a fantastic opportunity to work with new people from diverse backgrounds, and I was very glad to be a part of it. I’m also pleased I overcame the ‘Imposter Syndrome’ feeling of not believing I would know enough or have enough experience to be a valuable delegate in the summer school. So, my advice to all students would be: don’t underestimate what you can contribute, don’t overthink it, and just go for it; you might end up winning!

The Summer School was funded by EPSRC through the Connected Everything II network plus (EP/S036113/1)

 

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Attending the 20th Annual Qualitative Research Summer Intensive  

post by Jenn Layton Annable (2020 cohort)

As an autistic PhD student, the benefits and opportunities gained at Postgraduate Summer Schools are of course the same for me as everyone else. As an autistic person though, the travel, overwhelming venues and intense social interaction can make attendance often challenging and sometimes impossible. The chance to participate in the two-day online ‘Fundamentals of Qualitative Research’, part of the wider 20th Annual Qualitative Research Summer Intensive, which was delivered digitally was a chance to attend a summer school avoiding the associated difficulties I have because of my neurodivergence.

The classes were led by Johnny Saldana across both days; a highly experienced qualitative methods researcher and author, with content adapted from his book ‘Qualitative Research Analyzing Life. Prior to registering for the summer intensive class, I discussed the course with my supervision team, sharing its outcomes along with the background and professional experience of Johnny. Specific points of connection to my own work were Johnny’s focus on arts-based methods, an area of research which had emerged as relevant to my academic disciplines, positionality and aspirations.

The fundamentals class was advertised as being suitable for beginners, to gain a wider understanding of qualitative methods, as well as a refresher for more experienced academics who also wanted to develop skills and experience in teaching qualitative enquiry in the context of their practice. These different aspects of the course and its convener made it applicable to my current PhD research stage. As I am writing my year one progression review document, I am required to complete a methods and methodology statement. Despite engaging with different texts, I felt I lacked confidence and knowledge in this area because I had yet not been able to find a taught course relevant to what I was interested in. The fundamentals course offered the chance to evaluate the conclusions I had reached about which methods I hoped to use, learn more about how to develop a research study design that included them and justify the choices I had made, or not, in my progression review.

Having started my PhD journey six months into the pandemic I have engaged with numerous and varied platforms, formats and degrees of success in the delivery of study materials. One of my earliest memories within the Horizon CDT lockdown offering was that of a teams call where the sound simply would not be made to work, despite a number of experienced computer science professors in attendance. Since then there has been a running CDT joke of how many computer scientists it takes to make a video conference work. At the time the answer was more than we had available.

The content, technical and personal delivery of the fundamentals course was flawless. Johnny used a mix of slides and verbal delivery supplemented with short video and sound bytes from popular films and television series. The latter inclusion was especially welcomed, breaking up what might have been, at times, dry study matter with humour and wit, as well as making the learning accessible via its presentation through popular culture characters and plots. Johnny was supported by a number of participant facilitators who organised breakout rooms, read data examples and prompted questions and comments that appeared in the chat function. This avoided breaking the flow of the course and ensured excellent timekeeping. Anyone considering a digitally delivered course would do well to research the provider and their experience in digital conferences and study. It is very easy, with the whole internet available on a second tab to become distracted whilst learning remotely. I am pleased to say this was not something I struggled with; a testimony to the smooth delivery and technical capabilities of the support and administration teams as much as Johnny’s obvious expertise in and enjoyment of qualitative research.

A balance was struck between delivered materials and practical exercises throughout the course. Over the two days, there were several chances to practise the skills being taught. These included a multi-stage data analysis exercise together with individual and collaborative autoethnographic writing in small breakout rooms to enhance understanding of how key assertions are constructed from coding and thematic analysis. This connected the theory being taught with practical applications, essential in embedding learning. It also enabled the chance to consider how each person might want to adapt what they did, with input from Johnny in real-time.

Overall, the fundamental course was one of the better, if not the best, multiple-participant online learning experiences I have had to date. I have gained insight into best practices in the delivery of higher-level learning through digital formats as well as how to present to and engage with students and audiences digitally. These additional indirect benefits were not explicitly stated in the course objectives, however, my attendance developed my academic ‘soft skills’ of presentation, course design and delivery alongside my knowledge in the discipline of qualitative research. Seeking and being aware of additional value such as this in different learning contexts has been invaluable in my professional development whilst undertaking my PhD.

As I have hoped to demonstrate, my personal preference for attending virtual conferences and classes extends beyond my accessibility needs is well justified. I have found that the virtual opening up of such events makes opportunities to meet, learn from and engage with people from a wider variety of cultures, backgrounds and professional career levels much greater. The Covid-19 pandemic necessitated moving events online. Many have chosen to remain so, either running parallel in-person/digital tracks, the opportunity to watch live streams or developing new types of hybrid attendance. This general trend towards different ways of participation is exciting and relevant to my research subject as well as my professional development. I am exploring how digital communities of female perceived autistic people can find collective meaning together through digital communities of interest situated in digital spaces like Facebook, Reddit, Discord Servers and digital messenger apps. The strategies developed organically within these contexts might inform the creation of more effective digital learning and academic community building, and vice versa.

For anyone interested in accessing academic communities of interest I would highly recommend exploring such platforms and asking for recommendations for suitable groups within professional networks. If nothing is available perhaps think about setting one up yourself. This style of academic connecting and networking is increasingly encouraged and recognised, within the framework of social media platforms as a valuable place to connect with other scholars, as well as seek participants. Johnny Saldana, in the fundamentals course, encouraged participants towards this type of professional relationship forming, as did the convener of another course on autoethnography as a research method that I attended online earlier in the year.

The worth of digital communities as places to seek diverse academic study, publishing and conference presentation opportunities can no longer be denied. I would encourage academics at all levels of their career to utilise these if they have not already done so.

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Royal United Services Institute (RUSI): Trusting Machines?

Royal United Services Institute (RUSI): Trusting Machines? Cross-sector lessons from Healthcare and Security, 30 June – 2 July 2021

post by Kathryn Baguley (2020 cohort)

Overview of event

The event ran 14 sessions over three days which meant that the time passed quickly.  The variety was incredible, with presenters from varied multidisciplinary backgrounds and many different ways of presenting.  It was great to see so many professionals with contrasting opinions getting together and challenging each other and the audience.

Why this event?

My interest in this conference stemmed from the involvement of my industry partner, the Trustworthy Autonomous Systems hub (TAS), and wanting to hear the speaker contributions by academics at the University of Nottingham and the Horizon CDT.  The conference focus on security and healthcare sectors was outside my usual work, so I thought the sessions would provide new things for me to consider. I was particularly interested in gaining insights to help me decide on some case studies and get some ideas on incorporating the ‘trust’ element into my research.

Learnings from sessions

Owing to the number of sessions, I have grouped my learnings by category:

The dramatic and thought-provoking use of the arts

I had never considered the possibilities and effects of using the arts as a lens for AI, even as a long-standing amateur musician. This is a point I will carry forward, maybe not so much for my PhD but training and embedding in my consultancy work.

The work of the TAS hub

It was great to learn more about my industry partner, particularly its interest in health and security.  I can now build this into my thoughts on choosing two further case studies for my research.  Reflecting on the conference, I am making enquiries with the NHS AI Lab Virtual Hub to see whether there are relevant case studies for my research.

Looking at the possible interactions of the human and the machine

I believe overall, in a good way, I came away from the event with more questions for me to ponder, such as:  ‘If the human and the machine were able to confuse each other with their identity, how should we manage and consider the possible consequences of this?’ My takeaway was that trust is a two-way street between the human and the machine.

Aspects of trust

I’d never considered how humans already trust animals and how this works, so the Guide Dogs talk was entirely different for me to think about; the power the dogs have and how the person has to trust the dog for the relationship to work.  Also, the session of Dr Freedman where he discussed equating trust to a bank account brought the concept alive too.   Ensuring that the bank account does not go into the ‘red’ is vital since red signifies a violation of trust, and recovery is difficult. Positive experiences reinforce trust, and thus there is a need to keep this topped up.

The area of trust also left me with a lot of questions which I need to think about how they will feature in my research, such as ‘Can you trust a person?’, ‘Do we trust people more than machines?’ and ‘Do we exaggerate our abilities and those of our fellow humans?’  The example of not telling the difference between a picture and a deepfake but thinking we can is undoubtedly something for us to ponder.  As the previous example shows, there is a fallacy that a human is more trustworthy in some cases. Also, Prof Denis Noble suggested that we have judges because we don’t trust ourselves.

I have reflected on the importance of being able to define trust and trustworthiness.  Doctor Jonathan Ives described trust as ‘to believe as expected’, whereas trustworthiness is ‘to have a good reason to trust based on past events’.  The example he gave of theory and principle helps show this point in that the principle of gravity and the apple falling from the tree; however, we cannot view AI in the same way.

The discussion around trust being an emotion was fascinating, because as a lawyer, it made me question how we could even begin to regulate this.  I also wondered how this fit in with emotional AI and the current regulation we have.  I believe that there may be a place for this in my research.

The global context of AI

This area considered whether there is an arms race here, and it was interesting to ponder whether any past technology has ever had the same disruptive capacity.

The value of data in healthcare

There were so many genuinely great examples showing how NHS data can help people in many situations, from imaging solutions to cancer treatment.  I also found the Data Lens part very interesting, enabling a search function for databases within health and social care to find data for research purposes.  The ability to undertake research to help medical prevention and treatment is excellent.  I also found it interesting that the NHS use the database to reduce professional indemnity claims. I wondered about the parameters in place to ensure the use of this data for good.

The development of frameworks

The NHSX is working with the Ada Lovelace Foundation to create an AI risk assessment like a DPIA. NHS looking to have a joined-up approach between regulators and have mapped the stages of this.  I am looking for the mapping exercise and may request it if I’m unable to locate it.  I was also encouraged to hear how many organisations benefit from public engagement and expect this from their innovators.

Overall learnings from the event

    • Healthcare could derive a possible case study for my research
    • I have more considerations to think about how to build trust into my research
    • Regulation done in the right way can be a driving force for innovation
    • Don’t assume that your technology is answering your problem
    • It’s ok to have questions without answers
    • Debating the problems can lead to interesting, friendly challenges and new ideas
    • Massive learning point: understand the problem
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Not-Equal Summer School

post by Jimiama Mafeni Mase (2018 cohort)

I participated in Not-Equal Summer School, a virtual summer school about social justice and digital economy. The summer school ran from the 7th of June to the 11th of June. It was designed to equip participants with tools to understand and support social justice in this digital economy. Participants were grouped into teams according to their research or career interests (i.e. urban environment, health & care, eco workers & labour, public services, and education & technology), to explore existing and emerging technologies and examine how power and social justice evolve with these technologies.

The first day was simply an introduction with a talk about the evolution of social justice in digital economies and machine learning. The key speakers presented some major topics about the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems for social justice such as the relational structure of AI, the AI modelling pipeline, and the influence of AI and Big Data on human rights. A common issue among the talks was around machine learning model predictions’ interpretability, reliability and bias, and the complexity of the data used to train the models as data are usually collected at different stages in the pipeline.

The second day consisted of workshops that explored the use of gestures to express the consequences of power and social injustice in our work places, research and lives. Later, the identified gestures were used to propose designs of new utopian technologies. My team proposed a recruitment technology that considers hope, transparency and fairness as candidates usually face racial, gender and age bias and discrimination. Our gesture was ‘finger crossed’, which signified our hope for a recruitment technology that will be fair and transparent in its recruitment process. The day ended with an interesting webinar about human and collaborative work-practices of data science to improve social justice in AI.

Digital commons was the topic of Day 3. Commoning is the collective and collaborative governance of material resources and shared knowledge. During the day, we were required to define a common in our areas of interest. My team examined commoning of hygiene and health at the community level. We identified key actors in this space as health care professionals, sanitation workers, and residents. We identified key barriers in the implementation of such a common such as the impact of different jobs and responsibilities, different working schedules, and partnerships with external stakeholders e.g. the city council or NHS. We concluded the workshops by presenting ways of ensuring the success of our proposed digital commons, such as, creating rules and procedures to guide the behaviours of the actors, and emphasised that the rules need to be collectively developed. The day ended with a webinar about making data work for social justice.

The themes of the fourth day were systems change & power dynamics, and working culture. We explored the challenges and opportunities in working cultures and power dynamics to support social justice. Key challenges identified were working with senior stakeholders, managing external partners, limited funds and budget, project deadlines, and resource availability. Later, we discussed methods of improving working cultures and power dynamics such as bringing stakeholders together, confidence to speak up, adopt perspectives that do not necessarily come in research, creating allies, and rapid prototyping. We also proposed that institutions introduce power dynamics and working cultures training courses. The day ended with a webinar about using imagination and storytelling for social transformations and social movements. The speakers emphasised  the importance of visualising the kind of futures we want or imagine.

The summer school finished with two intensive workshops about ‘design fiction’.  That is, research and prototyping design fiction methods for the digital world to envision socially just futures. My team focused on a design fiction for the community, where members of the community could have equal opportunities to care, knowledge, and support with the use of community cobots. The cobots will act upon encrypted information with no personal data, to assist members of the community. We imagined such a cobot will not have access to any personal or individual information, and all members will have equal rights and responses from the cobot. These utopian brainstorming and imagination workshops were a great way to close the summer school. During the last hours of the day, we shared our thoughts about the summer school and each participant was asked to summarise their experience with three words. My words were ‘collaboration’, ‘fairness’ and ‘power’.

It is important to mention that we used Miro throughout the summer school. Miro is a whiteboard and visual collaborative online platform for remote team collaboration. It was my first encounter with the platform but familiarising myself with it was not difficult.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Safe and Trusted Artificial Intelligence 2021

post by Oliver Miles (2018 cohort)

Over three days from 12th-14th July 2021, I attended and participated in the Safe and Trusted Artificial Intelligence (STAI) summer school, hosted by Imperial College and Kings College London. Tutorials were given by leading academics, experts from British Telecom (BT) presented a session on industry applications, and I along with several other PhD students took part in a workshop speculating on AI interventions within the healthcare setting, presenting our work back to the wider group. In the following, I’ll summarise key contributors’ thoughts on what is meant by ‘safe and trusted’ in the context of AI and I’ll outline the themes and applications covered during the school I found to be most relevant to my own work. Two salient lessons for me expanded on contemporary efforts to reconcile accuracy with interpretability in models driving AI systems, and on efforts to systematically gauge human-human/human-machine alignment of values and norms, increasingly seen as critical to societal acceptance or rejection of autonomous systems.

When I read or hear the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’, even in the context of my peers’ research into present-day and familiar technologies such as collaborative robots or conversational agents, despite tangible examples in front of me I still seem to envision a future that leans toward science fiction. AI has always seemed to me to be intrinsically connected to simplistic, polarised visions of utopia or dystopia in which unity with some omnipotent, omniscient technology ultimately liberates or enslaves us. So, when it comes to considering STAI, I perhaps unsurprisingly default to ethical, moral, and philosophical standpoints of what a desirable future might look like. I obsess over a speculative AI’s apparent virtues and vices rather than considering the practical realities of how such futures are currently being realised and what my involvement in the process might mean for both me and the developing AI in question.

STAI began by addressing these big picture speculations as we considered the first theme – ethics of AI. According to AI professor Michael Rovatsos, ethical AI addresses the ‘public debate, impact, and human and social factors’ of technological developments, and the underlying values driving or maintaining interaction’ (2021). In a broad sense there was certainly agreement that ethical AI can and should be thought of as the management of a technology’s impact on contentious issues such as ‘…unemployment, inequality, (a sense of) humanity, racism, security, ‘evil genies’ (unintended consequences), ‘singularity’, ‘robot rights’ and so on (Rovatos, 2021).  An early challenge however was to consider ethics as itself an issue to be solved; a matter of finding agreement on processes and definitions as much as specific outcomes and grand narrative. In short, it felt like we were being challenged to consider ethical AI as simply…doing AI ethically! Think ‘ethics by design’, or perhaps in lay terms, pursuing a ‘means justified end’.

To illustrate this, if my guiding principles when creating an AI technology are present in the process as much as the end product, when I think of ‘safe’ AI; I might consider the extent to which my system gives ‘…assurance about its behavioural correctness’; and when I think of ‘trusted’ AI; I might consider the extent of human confidence in my system and its decision making’ (Luck, M. 2021). A distinction between means and end – or between process and goal – appeared subtle but important in these definitions: While ‘assurance’ or ‘confidence’ appear as end goals synonymous with safety and trustworthiness, they are intrinsically linked to processes of accuracy (behavioural correctness) and explicability (of its system and decision-making rationale).

In her tutorial linking explainability to trustworthiness, Dr Oana Cocarascu, lecturer in AI at King’s College London, gives an example of the inclination to exaggerate the trustworthiness in some types of data-driven modelling that ‘…while mathematically correct, are not human readable’ (Cocarascu, O). Morocho-Cayamcela et al. (2019) demonstrate this difficulty in reconciling accuracy with interpretability within the very processes critical to AI, creating a trade-off between fully attaining the two end goals in practice (Figure 1).

My first lesson for ‘doing AI ethically’ is therefore the imperative to demonstrate accuracy and explainability in tandem and without compromise to either. However, it doesn’t follow that this alone will ensure safe and trusted outcomes. A perfectly accurate and interpretable system may lead to confidence in mechanism, but what about confidence in an AI’s apparent agency?

In her tutorial ‘AI, norms and institutions’, Dr Nardine Osman talked about the ‘how’ of achieving STAI by means of harnessing values themselves. She convincingly demonstrated several approaches employing computational logic (e.g. ‘if-then’ rules) in decision making algorithms deployed to complex social systems. The following example shows values of freedom vs safety as contingent on behavioural norms in routine airport interactions expressed as a ‘norm net’ (Fig.2).

Serramia et al. visualise their linear approach to ethical decision making in autonomous systems, positioning conventionally qualitative phenomena – human values (e.g. safety) – as contingent on and supported by societal norms, e.g. of obligation to provide passports/forms (2018). Efforts to break down and operationalize abstract norms and values quantitatively (e.g. weighting by hypothetical preference, observed occurrence) demonstrate how apparent features of human agency such as situational discernment might become more commonplace in negotiating safe and trusted outcomes.  My second lesson and main takeaway from STAI’21 was therefore the imperative of sensitising AI, and design of AI, to the nuances of social values – distinguishing between value preferences, end-goals, social norms and so forth.

Lastly and significantly, attending and participating in STAI’21 has given me invaluable exposure to the practicalities of achieving desirable AI outcomes. The focus on ‘doing AI ethically’ has challenged me to pursue safety, trustworthiness, and other desirable qualities in my own work – mechanistically in terms of ensuring explainability of my methods and frameworks; and substantively, in terms of novel approaches to conceptualising values and positioning against social norms.

References

Cocarascu, O (2021) XAI/Explainable AI, Safe and Trusted AI Summer School, 2021 https://safeandtrustedai.org/events/xai-argument-mining/

Luck, M (2021), Introduction, Safe and Trusted AI Summer School, 2021 https://safeandtrustedai.org/event_category/summer-school-2021/

Morocho-Cayamcela, Manuel Eugenio & Lee, Haeyoung & Lim, Wansu. (2019). Machine Learning for 5G/B5G Mobile and Wireless Communications: Potential, Limitations, and Future Directions. IEEE Access. 7. 137184-137206. 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2942390.

Osman, N (2021) AI, Norms and Institutions, Safe and Trusted AI Summer School, 2021 https://safeandtrustedai.org/events/norms-and-agent-institutions/

Rovatsos, M (2021) Ethics of AI, Safe and Trusted AI Summer School, 2021 https://safeandtrustedai.org/events/ethics-of-ai/

Serramia, M., Lopez-Sanchez, M., Rodriguez-Aguilar, J. A., Rodriguez, M., Wooldridge, M., Morales, J., & Ansotegui, C. (2018). Moral Values in Norm Decision Making. IFAAMAS, 9. www.ifaamas.org

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Reflection of a Colloquium

post by Peter Boyes (2018 cohort)

As part of the programme with my industry partner Ordnance Survey (OS), each year I attend what they call a Research Workshop. It’s a multi-day trip down to their headquarters in Southampton, where they host all their sponsored PhD and Post-Doc students for a colloquium from their partner universities and programmes, both in the UK and a couple from abroad. The days consist of presentation sessions broken into themes of research, these presentations are given by each of the sponsored researchers to an audience of the other colloquium attendees and OS staff who drop in to relevant and interesting themes or talks over the days. In the breaks between presentation sessions there are poster sessions, each student presenting a poster of their work and able to talk with staff or other attendees there. These posters are also displayed over the course of the event to enable staff to drop by and take a look while they may be unable to attend a full presentation session, note questions and get in touch by email or later on in a break when the researcher is free. In addition there’s often a keynote speaker that kicks off the morning session talking around the general theme for each day.

As an annual event I have been able to attend at different stages of my PhD, and see progression across the visits. My view of the purpose of the event changed over appearances, and so did my confidence in my topic and myself. The conference-style event, presenting a poster, giving a talk, handling a Q&A with OS staff and fellow postgraduate researchers gave me a chance to learn from people going through the same process and some advice from them at their different stages of the postgraduate timeline. Over multiple poster sessions I honed the elevator pitch of my research for that year, and developed an understanding of my blind spots, the recurring questions that obviously I hadn’t anticipated or covered well enough in the poster, while developing my communication skills to multidisciplinary audiences. This was an opportunity to see others’ work that was similar to my field in different ways, and to practice communicating the research I was hoping to do or had done at the time of the workshop.

There is something to be said for not having any supervisors there, a little bit of a shock for me in my first year still settling into the doctoral training program at Nottingham. The student-supervisor relationship is a valuable one when navigating a PhD, but at this event I felt truly independent. At similar style events such as our Horizon CDT retreat I feel like even if they don’t contribute in my presentation, my supervisors are there in the background in the room or on the Teams call and may step in with comments or questions to jolt me along or help, but this wasn’t like that. This was more akin to what I expect conferences to feel like as I prepare to attend one and present later this year. Their contribution is there in the work, but I must be able to present and discuss the research as an independent researcher.

The event and this write-up gave me an exercise in reflecting on what stage I am at in my research. My first time attending, I was in the first year of the course, 5 months or so into my PhD and hadn’t exactly done an explicit research activity or carried out a study to talk about, I was still finding my feet. In that year, I talked mostly about my higher education background, my interests in a wide scope, essentially proposing questions I could explore and using the session to gauge some feedback on areas others thought could be interesting. This included areas to explore or advice on going down those paths, suggested literature or studies. Helpfully at this OS workshop there was an industry perspective on the applications and not just the theory or literature side or presentations.

In the next year, I could see for myself when making my presentation that my scope was narrowing, I was settling into an academic area, research questions were emerging less fuzzy, more defined even if not settled on at that point still. With the audience I was more engaged in discussion of conducted or planned studies and details of these, and looking towards potential research output goals and again the applicability to other sectors and industry.

With one of these trips to Southampton left to attend in my final run to thesis submission I will hopefully be in early write-up stages, and will be able to demonstrate some really interesting findings from this last year and my final study, and engage with those in their first years attending the workshop about their experiences in the PhD journey to that point.

To bring this to a conclusion, I would encourage postgraduate research to look for these colloquiums/consortiums even if not offered by your industry partner as they can help you engage with your research in a different way. These are an opportunity to participate without the same pressure or work of preparing a paper and submitting to a journal or conference, those are different experiences, both highly beneficial. I would also recommend in the way writing this has been for me, to engage with reflective exercises for your journey to recognise, even if for just yourself, the work you have been doing, the changes and narrowing of scope, and your understanding of a field or concepts. I would also encourage industry partners with multiple postgraduates across the country to try and organise events like these to support their development, and help to establish academic and industry networks they may be struggling with confidence or opportunities to build beyond their own centre or institution.

 

 

 

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Identity/Space/Place workshop

Post by
Harriet Cameron (2018 Cohort) and Velvet Spors (2017 Cohort)

📷 Felicia Black

Hi, our names are Harriet and Velvet, and we’re PhD students within the Horizon CDT. In September 2019 we ran a full day workshop as part of the Digital Economy Network summer school. The workshop was designed to reach academics from across a broad spectrum of subjects and schools of thought, and bring them together to explore how identity, space, and place (ISP) were present in their research.

We ran the workshop as a group of four researchers; Velvet, Harriet, Luke and Hanne, all of whom are currently at various stages of their PhD’s within Horizon, and all of whom have different academic and professional backgrounds. We came together as a group because we recognised that each of us had a strong link with identity, space and place within our work, and were keen on exploring how these concepts both shape, and are shaped by, a wealth of different influences. For instance, Harriet comes from a background in human geography, and explores situated identities in both virtual and physical worlds, and Velvet is interested in human-centred, holistic ways of being with each other as a way of caring for yourself—being explicitly and implicitly connected. Together, we were able to provide a broad basis of theoretical and practical knowledge about identity, space and place, in order to facilitate valuable discussions around the importance of these topics, and their impact on research practices and outcomes.

We split the day into three core sections, each to address a different aspect of ISP. The first part of the day was spent simply getting to grips with these ambiguous and diverse concepts, sharing each other’s understandings and reflecting on our own assumptions. In our first activity, we set everyone free to spend a few minutes running around Jubilee campus, and finding examples of identity, space, and place; sending photos back to us so we could then discuss what everyone had chosen and why. This was a fantastic exercise, because all the photos taken were unique and showed completely different interpretations of not just definitions of identity, space, and place, but also different interpretations of the spaces they interacted with.

📷 Jennifer Agwunobi

The second part of the day was designed to encourage reflection on how ISP affects daily life, and daily routines. We asked each delegate to draw a map of a route they take regularly or had recently taken, and then talked through what each person had created. Each map was highly individualised, in terms of what was represented, how those things were represented, and how the delegates showed their own personalities on their maps. This activity demonstrated not only how ISP impacts every single person on a mundane level, but it also allowed us to begin discussions on how technology shapes and is shaped by ISP at a day-to-day level.

📷 Jennifer Agwunobi

The third part of the day continued to draw on themes of technology in ISP and got everyone thinking about how ISP related technology might be shaping their research, and how technology could be used to capture and explore ISP more overtly. In this section we got everyone to play free games related to ISP in some way and talk through which elements from our earlier discussions were apparent in the games, and which were more hidden. This allowed for some great exploration of how virtual and digital space, place and identity can be experienced, accessed and represented.

The last bit of our write-up contains personal reflections from each of us individually, showcased in a conversational presentation (if you feel like it, please read it out loud in two silly voices!).

Velvet: We ran the workshop not only to get researchers thinking about these complex themes and how they shape and are shaped by our research, but also as a part-experimental pilot and part sense-making activity: It was designed to feel the space out — literally and figuratively — to see if there was potential for a collective way of working and being with each other. Happily, the workshop was a success, and it seems that long term connections were made which will be fostered as a mechanism to continue these crucial discussions and share knowledge between participants.

Harriet: The multitude of voices we were lucky enough to bring together for the workshop, ranging from computer scientists, to engineers, to architects and more, contributed momentously to the positive outcomes we were able to draw from the day. It also demonstrated the value of these kind of events, where researchers with different ideas and perspectives come together, break each other out of their comfort zones, and question the assumptions that are all too easy to forget to question ourselves. It’s sometimes easy to become so involved in your own subject that you can forget the real-world applications and implications of concepts you may have come to take for granted. Hearing from those other perspectives not only re-centred us, but it also gave some fresh ideas and takes on those topics that we had almost forgotten to continue to critically examine. This was best demonstrated for me during our discussions defining space, place and identity early on in the day, when one delegate offered their definition of place as a “region in space, defined by co-ordinates”. This was so interesting, because they took their definition and applied it to cyberspace, comparing co-ordinates as used in the physical world, to URL’s used to navigate the internet. They explained that navigating websites, much like navigating physical places, requires you to narrow down your co-ordinates further and further, until you reach a point where you are capable of finding your exact destination. In the real world, this might be zooming in on your map app, or switching to a local paper map instead of a regional one. Online, this might mean navigating to the area of the website which contained the content you were interested it, by clicking through toolbars and hyperlinks. This offered a fresh perspective on navigating online spaces which I had never consciously considered before and has contributed to my own understanding of cyberspace.

Velvet: But apart from these overarching understandings and fresh impulses, running the workshop also generated insights for own personal research.

Harriet: A big part of my own research centres around trying to understand identities of individuals as situated, fluid constructs which are performed as part of social, cultural and political contexts. Part of the value of this workshop for me came in the form of being able to see those different identities demonstrated, not only in the context of students studying all over the UK taking part in a workshop at the University of Nottingham, but also in the ways that those different identities were reflected on during the activities and within the discussions. During the mapping activity for example, we were shown what priorities and performed identities the workshop participants had as part of their daily routine, be that in the form of their favourite shop, their place of worship, their favourite places to study, and so on. No two maps were drawn in the same way, even if they shared certain places or themes, demonstrating the breadth of experiences and the impact of our own identities on the landscape.

Velvet: On a very individual level, this workshop also showed me how people approach similar topics in very different, multifaceted ways. For my own PhD work, this means that I now feel even stronger about bringing people from different areas together and to create a safe, inclusive and open space together, so that synergies and a mingling of ideas can happen. When we first discussed doing this workshop, we were worried – perhaps even slightly apprehensive – about the experimental and open nature we wanted to implement. Most workshops we have attended in research or academic settings tend to be very directed, expert-led and focused on clearly defined goals or outcomes. In most of these workshops, we also bring ourselves in as a researcher or expert – a very different version of ourselves than in private. In a way, our workshop asked for a researcher perspective, but also a very private and personal one. Bringing an authentic version of yourself into an unknown space is difficult and a slightly scary undertaking – especially if you feel strongly about the concepts that are being discussed. Space, place and identity can become very personal very soon, especially since they are ideas and factors that everybody has experienced. Bringing lived experienced into a group requires a collective understanding of what it means to open up and how to approach it respectfully, without letting ideas go unchallenged. Now, having conducted this workshop, I am excited about exploring a variety of facilitation, openness and outlines with space/place/identity and in my own studies – especially how to do the whole process justice.

Harriet: In conclusion, hosting this workshop as part of a series of Digital Economy Network summer school activities was a fantastic opportunity to share and develop expertise and ideas, with a host of others who all brought their own invaluable perspectives to the workshop. On a personal note, it was also a much-appreciated plunge into facilitation and public speaking, in a way where I was able to practice those valuable skills, in a space with other researchers at similar points in their academic journey, whilst also facilitating and encouraging them to do the same.

Velvet: After a personal reflection and getting feedback, we aim to turn “Space/Place/identity” into a series of activities, with other workshops and get-togethers to exchange knowledge, but also to hold space for each other to be. How that’s going to look like in future? We are not entirely sure yet, but this workshop has laid out the groundwork for sure. We aim to facilitate it in an unconventional, experimental way that allows for a non-hierarchal way of organising ourselves. Maybe we are going back to web rings, individual HTML webpages – maybe we are going to use peer-seeded automated networks. Whatever shape it might take, we are excited to work on it collectively!

Finally, we want to shout out to Felicia Black and Monica Cano, whose patience and perseverance made this workshop not only possible, but a success. Thank you, Felicia and Monica!

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Summer School on The Human Aspects of Cyber-crime and Online Fraud

post by Neeshé Khan (2018 cohort)

This Summer School and workshop was hosted by the Kent Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Cyber Security (KirCCS) and School of Computing at the University Kent, the Institute of Applied Economics and Social Value at De Montfort University and International Association for Research in Economic Psychology (IAREP). It took place at Canterbury between 15th to the 17th of July lead by Dr Jason RC Nurse.

As I’m working on accidental insider threat within cybersecurity to examine human factors that trigger this threat, I was keen to attend this event as it would provide an overview of the issues around social engineering and associated forms of crime in the virtual and physical world – broadly sitting within my own research interests. Recent media has highlighted many cases where fraud and cybercrime have resulted from a mixture of social engineering and human vulnerabilities to gain undesirable outcomes including encryption of data to hold at ransom on an organisational and individual level. Whilst there is literature on cyber-psychology linking to malicious insiders and cybercriminals, there is little literature available that takes an interdisciplinary approach to tackle this problem, especially examining this from a psychological, economics, and cybercrime perspective. So the aim of the summer school was to introduce these disciplines and their relevance to be able to better understand this challenge. This was particularly important to me as I believe that all the global challenges being faced by the world today require collective interdisciplinary action to resolve them.

One of the highlights of attending this school was meeting a diverse range of about 40 attendees, which included different career stages within academia, people from industry, diversity in research being pursued and interests as well as diversity in ethnicity, age and academic backgrounds. Whilst most of the projects weren’t similar, it was still cohesive in terms of disciplines and understanding of cybersecurity. This allowed a space where I shared and received ideas and insights about this issue over workshop discussions and group dinners. Presentations were a mixture of academics from various universities including the University of Bristol and the University of Cambridge as well as law enforcement. I hope my notes below are of interest to anyone from psychology, economics, and cybersecurity fields taking an interdisciplinary approach to exploring cybercriminal and victim behaviour and traits, especially those involving malicious or intentional insiders.

Discussions included how the definition of cybercrime is hard to settle on as it means many different things for researchers, businesses, and individual users. Technology evolving has meant that many of the devices aren’t seen to be within the remit of cybercrime by the general public, for example, cybercrimes that happen through mobile phones or smart wearable devices are seen to be separate from the same crimes that occur through a desktop or a laptop. A way of looking at cybercrime is by categorising attacks that are ‘computer dependent’ (DoD, ransomware, etc) and those that are ‘computer-enabled’ (online fraud, phishing, etc). This can also be categorised through Crime in Technology, Crime against Technology, and Crime through Technology.

Cybercrime is a big challenge being faced by society and whilst there are numerous different types of cybercrimes, currently, popular ones include social engineering, online harassment, identity-related, hacking, and denial of service (DoS) and/or information. Social engineering and phishing attacks are the biggest attacks that are currently taking place. Cybercriminals are getting better at replicating official documents (less spelling mistakes, logos, branding, etc) and use a mixture of techniques that include misdirection and pressurising recipients to take action. Most classifications of cybercriminals are through using early techniques developed by the FBI’s human behaviour department and include the Dark Triad and OCEAN personality traits. Techniques used to investigate crimes in real life such as ‘method of operation’ (MO) and copycats seem to transfer relevantly well to cybercrime investigations.

Law enforcement believes that in their experience there is a strong link between gender, age, and mental ability and cybercriminals. Children test out their coding skills from lessons in schools to attack websites or online gaming platforms. There also appeared to be a strong link between online gaming habits, mental disorders such as ADHD and hacking. Whilst there are more cybercrimes reported to the police than crimes in the physical world, the task force is still suited for ‘boots on the ground’ than cybercrime. All individual reports of cybercrime are done through Action Fraud and involved cybercrimes that came from someone they knew such as disgruntled ex-partners. Threats included a wide spectrum but the most popular ones included fraud, abuse, blackmail, harassment, and defamation of character.

In psychology, cybercriminals are classified in similar ways to that of criminal profiling in real-world crimes. There is also interest in exploring victim traits since individuals who are a victim to an online attack are likely to be a victim to another attack in the future. When looking at cybercriminal profiling psychological and emotional states are key factors. Various online forums are researched to create a cybercriminal’s profile mainly through the following categorization: language used, attitudes towards work (for example in the case of a malicious insider threat), family characteristics, criminal history, aggressiveness, and social skill problems including integrity and historical background. However, this is challenging as personality traits and characteristics are easier to change online especially for narcissistic personality traits. However there is never a 100% certainty of creating a psychological profile of a cybercriminal, with very little research and involves stereotypical profiles such as ‘white, male, geek, like maths, spends a lot of time alone, plays online games, anti-social traits, etc. Often personality traits associated with ‘openness’ of individuals links to individuals being susceptible online to phishing and other scams.

Most important models of profiling are ‘inductive’ and ‘deductive’ criminal profiling. Inductive is using existing data to identify patterns and deductive is starting from the evidence and building up to the profile (deductive cybercriminal profile model). Deductive method is very popular and is designed by Nykodym et al 2005 but there’s also geographical profiling (Canter and Hammond 2003) that is starting to become more popular as a result of social engineering attacks. Economists are applying ‘willingness to pay’ (WTP) and ‘willingness to accept’ (WTA) models and game theory to ransomware attacks.

Overall, the summer school provided a great platform to create a new network, reaffirmed my understanding of the current approaches being adopted, offered insights to some of the research being conducted, and provided a platform to promote my research. 

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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.