That’s a wrap! We’ve come a long way from reading FCC filings day 1 to our final presentation yesterday! Prior to this REU, I never appreciated the amount of hard work people put into the research behind the paper. I often read papers, just looking for the things that interested me but never really thought about the effort researchers put in to produce the paper, which itself is just the icing; the actual research一the experimental design, experiment execution, data processing and analysis一the hard part.

FINISHED RUNNING SESSIONS (as of yesterday) WOOHOO. On the one hand, am sad we only ran 12 pairs of participants and didn’t get more data, but on the other hand, am very grateful we only ran 12 pairs of participants :’) Anyway, the tedious work is over, for me at least (Isabelle is still working on acquiring the speech data which I’d say is equally as tedious as creating transcripts of every spoken utterance and every caption displayed in real time). I’m looking forward to taking a step back and looking at everything we’ve collected from a more holistic perspective (rather than being super focused on the details which is what I’ve been doing this past week).

Did 6 studies this past week. 6 more scheduled this upcoming week. Lots to do in not lots of time. Preprocessing the data for analysis is very labor intensive. Sad won’t have enough time as I’d like to do deeper analysis. Apologies for the short update this week. Will write up a more extensive reflection week 10. :)

Eek, IRB approval still has not come. At this point, best case scenario—we finish conducting studies end of week 9. Not ideal but nothing I can do. At least we spent this entire week getting extremely ready so that when IRB approval does come, we pounce.

Most of this week was spent touching up our study materials. I can’t wait for the IRB to approve our study, so we can start recruiting participants and run it soon. Right now, I am concerned that coordinating times where two participants, Isabelle and I are available will be difficult. Another complication is that we will have to match hearing and DHH/HL participants for topics of common interest. I also hope that our stringent headphone requirement does not eliminate too many potential participants’ eligibility for our study. I think the best case scenario right now is that we will finish conducting study sessions by the end of week 8. That does not leave us a lot of time to analyze the data we’ve collected which I anticipate will be time consuming since we still do not know exactly what we’ll be looking for.

Okay, so this idea of exploratory research really did not sink in for me until this week when we did our pilot studies. The wide variation we saw in behavior among different calling pairs made me realize that there is no way we can go into this study with a preset criteria that we will look for and analyze. Rather, we’ll have to go in with an open mind, observe the patterns, and from there, determine what data to collect and in what manner. I suspect the bulk of our findings will be qualitative, which bugs me, as a quantitative-oriented person. Of course, studies like this will set up and inspire future quantitative work that can provide more conclusive findings. But, laying the groundwork for a completely unexplored area is tough; one shouldn’t expect to id the problems and id the solutions all in one short study.

Ayyyy, spent this week preparing materials for our experiment and getting documents ready to submit for IRB approval. Took a hot sec earlier this week to figure out one technical aspect of our experiment since we don’t have access to the service that is typically used to run it. Had to problem solve and work with what we had. It made me realize that in research, often times when you’re doing something new that other researchers haven’t done before, you’ll have to think, make something yourself, think more, improve upon it and, of course, test it out. Then, make further improvements. And the exciting thing is—the thing you make isn’t even the end goal; its purpose is to fulfill just that one part of your experiment, which has much greater implications!

This week felt a bit shorter, but probably because it was shorter, haha! (no work Memorial Day Monday) We still got a decent amount of stuff done though! For one, we wrapped up the background research portion of our project and presented that to our peers on Thursday. I learned a lot from our peers’ presentations and noticed some concepts that tie into our research. The Sign Detection team noted a tradeoff between computation time and accuracy for sign detection systems, which is a prevalent issue in captioning services (what we are working on) as well. I learned what Web RTC is about from the group that’s working on the UX/UI of it. I had no idea Web RTC is so robust, capable of supporting more than one hundred clients without a loss in performance or a gain in latency :o! We will likely be using a Web RTC service (probably Google Meet) to simulate the ASR captioning portion of our study. Hopefully, we will figure out how to only display the captions of one speaker to the participants though. Linda has an idea, something to do with a VB-Cable…I think? The Caption Metrics team mentioned that DHH people tend to prefer verbatim over edited captions as verbatim captions more accurately capture what was said. That’s good to know and it provides even more rationale for our study which focuses on the accuracy of verbatim captions. The Caption UX/UI team brought up the disparity in health literacy between DHH and hearing individuals. This was my first time learning about health literacy and wow! It’s wicked important. One more sector where caption quality and accessibility have serious implications!

It’s over? How did this week feel longer than the last?! Okay, okay, I suppose I know why. So I spent a hefty chunk of this week just searching, scouring the web for recent research on various topics I thought would buff up our literature review and coming up with, well, not much. I suppose most researchers hit this point, when they’ve read a lot, got a good idea of what they want to do for their study, and there just isn’t any more research out there that’s closely aligned with what they’d like to do. It’s a sign, perhaps, indicating that you’re ready, ready to fill the gap in the literature with YOUR study! Can’t say it’s not frustrating though—spending hours upon hours searching instead of reading and thinking. Compared to week 1, definitely spent a greater portion of this week thinking rather than reading. Thought a lot about our study design: how to quantify results and operationalize some variables. Still a work in progress. Linda brought up a good point about a potential issue we may run into trying to measure one of our variables. Isabelle and I went ahead and downloaded the software we think we’ll be using to take our measurements and recorded a trial run using the platform we think we’ll use in our actual study. Next week, we’ll run our recording through in addition to a standardized baseline recording that I know should work and see if the issue does indeed emerge. We’ll figure something out from there.

Not going to lie, I feel like a month went by this past week! Definitely not yet accustomed to the lifestyle of chasing a singular, focused semi long-term pursuit. But, it’s been rewarding, and everyone I’ve worked with so far have been awesome. I’m on the telecom captions team. Isabelle, my fellow undergrad partner, comes from a linguistics background; she’s fascinated by the nuances of speech production, one of the focuses of our project! We have a faculty mentor, Linda, who’s experienced in experimental design and very knowledgeable in the field of captioning services for individuals with hearing loss. Through our meetings, she guides Isabelle and me to explore different avenues of interest; I really appreciate the direction Linda provides. It’s been a pleasure meeting with Katja, our graduate student mentor, each day to debrief. Dr. Christian, Co-PI and super fast responder on discord, helped me through a couple questions I had this week. Finally, Dr. Raja, PI, works hard to coordinate this whole program. Friday, I was receiving an error trying to build this webpage, in fact haha, and Dr. Raja jumped in to attempt to resolve the issue, very sweet of him.