Research group on Data Science and Big Data Analytics jointly with BRAC University Computer Club (BUCC) members organized a workshop on Human-Centered Robotics. The event was held on February 14th, 2019. The event took place at UB71201 of Brac University.
At first Hossain Arif, Assistant Professor of CSE, Brac University introduced the speaker named Aparajita Chowdhury to everyone. She is an alumnus of BracU who completed her MS from Finland. Aparajita Chowdhury completed her BS in Computer Science and Engineering from Brac University in 2015. She has completed her MS in Information Technology from Tampere University of Technology, Finland in January 2019. She has served as a research and teaching assistant at the Unit of Human Centered Technology in Tampere University. Her research interests include User Experience (UX), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and Human-Centered Robotics. The main points covered in the seminar are definition of User Experience and its importance in Human-Centered Robotics, purpose of conducting research on the University Student Mentoring Robot, Data collection and analysis during the research process and Different analysis methods and findings of the research.
She started the session with a grabber about user experience. She defined the user experience of robotics and also described what the customer wanted, what are their needs from a robot with the help of user experience. She further said that it’s very important for us to focus on the user experience of robotics as this field has progressed impressively. Moreover, she stated that we can develop robots according to our needs, explained the scopes of user experience in social robotics and pointed out the goals from a user of a robot. She also discussed the problems and objective of robots while developing them. Universities are also mentoring students to create robots. Furthermore, to make robots they targeted three cultures to make the functionalities diversified.
The speaker Aparajita Chowdhury introduced the human-centered robot through a video. The video showed how the robot named Pepper was interacting with her. She said that Pepper was created to help international students. After that, she talked about how she gathered user data. She secured the information of the participants in the interview by keeping them anonymous. Interviewees also signed user consent. Then she asked about the participants' background and the problems they were facing in their respective universities. Next, she created circumstances to see how Pepper would help in those situations. Consequently, she explained about content analysis in how she used affinity wall to analyze all the user data.
In the context, she then shared her user findings and target experience with us. From the three targeted cultures the results varied quite a bit as the Chinese and Indian people wanted Pepper to be more human-like, playful and friendly; on the other hand, Finnish people preferred the robot to be more playful, guiding and with no personal connection with the human whatsoever. Moreover, she said that the program implementation was done using Choreographe and Python. Furthermore, the robot had seven basic functionalities such as show the way, restaurant service, find a friend, activities, entertainment etc.
After that, the robot went through trials and user testing. The trials took place during orientation week with 33 participants where the findings were derived from questionnaires. The results were actually quite interesting. 11 participants thought Pepper was a guide, 14 people thought Pepper was a friend and the rest of them considered it as more like a member or classmate.
Then she enlightened the audience about how pepper works and what are the benefits of using it. Then she also talked about the difficulties she faced while making this robot. Then she quickly reviewed the whole thing and answered some questions from the audience. She also informed us that there is also one type of robot made by them which name is a new bot. She hopes that a lot of robots will be made by Brac University students. By thanking everyone she then passed the floor to Prof. Md Abdul Mottalib, Chairperson of CSE Department, Brac University. After saying a few words about how technology makes our life easy and how we came up the idea of making a robot. He concluded the event by giving a certificate to Aparajita Chowdhury and thanked her for the session.
The event wouldn’t have been successful without the help of BUCC members. Special thanks goes to Tiash Roy, Fahd Zakwan, Shihab Sharar, Jannatul Ferdous, Talha Bin Alam, Mohammed Mudabbir Hussain, Naavid Morshed, Afif Bin Jinnat, Ahnaf Rahman Khan, Nayem-Ul-Islam, Asif Shariar Likon, Asif Ahsan and Syed Zuhair Hossain. Thanks to Jannatul Ferdous, Sadia Rahman and Afif Bin Jinnat for helping with the press release.