Since my last update I have been somewhat productive. In September I traveled to Nice, France to attend the Teaching HRI to Humans workshop hosted at IROS 2008. I was bumped by my friend and colleague Dr. Jenny Burke to present a talk regarding my experiences at the 2008 HRI Young Pioneers workshop, and discuss what students expect from an HRI curriculum. I think it went rather well, due largely to the fact that, even though I had already created a presentation, I spent the entire flight to Europe contemplating what I was going to say. My presentation was the first day of the conference which allowed me to explore Nice and sit in on other talks the remainder of the week. After writing this I just remembered that I owe Jenny a paper.
Then in November I traveled to College Station, TX to assist Dr. Jenny Burke in data collection for a NIST exercise that was taking place at Disaster City. We were testing a paperless workload measure tool (Work-IT) that Jenny has been working on for a year or so. On this trip I was essentially a support ninja... I helped with data collection, used my script-fu to get us out of some binds, assisted with setting up and tearing down the maze, and got a little bit of a tan in the process.
Now the new year is upon us, and it looks like a large portion of it is already accounted for. I have three journal length drafts that I need to put back on the top of the stack and get them submitted. I also would like to do some sort of write up for the iPhone/Packbot interface that I developed over the summer of last year, and I need to work on that HRI paper that I just remembered that I owe Jenny.
Since I am down a major professor this semester I had to search beyond my typical research assistant funding, and was fortunate enough to secure a position as a TA. I've never been a TA before even though it's my third year as a graduate student... I have Dr. Murphy to thank for helping me pull that off. I've been assigned to the C for Engineers course with Dr. Turner, and this past Thursday was my first class. I was nervous at first, there are about 30 students in my lab, which is quite a bit larger than the audiences I've had to speak in front of in the past (if you don't count the time that I ran for class president in elementary school). Once I got past the initial awkwardness of being up there, and adjusted my voice so that people all the way in the back could hear me, things were fine. I think it's going to be a fun learning experience.
As far as classes go, I'm taking as few as possible. There just aren't that many graduate courses that keep my interest, they generally turn out to be a chore instead of a pleasure. I did find one class over in the Psychology department that I've registered for, and I think it's going to be a good one: Art, Design, and the Brain. It's taught by Dr. Sanocki, and he's teaching the course because the topic is a personal interest of his, that fact alone makes it worth taking to me. Part of our assigned reading comes from the book Emotional Design by Donald A. Norman. What really surprised me was that the last couple chapters in the book are actually dedicated to my thesis topic, not my specific work obviously (i have yet to publish) but similar. I've already done the assigned reading for next week and want to keep going.
I think this post covers most of what I've been meaning to blog about, but kept putting off. If it does take me until the end of this semester to update again, I hope that I can at least say it was because I was finishing up some of the publications that I've had collecting digital dust.