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.

I wish we had more time to think on the data we had collected for our experiment instead of rushing to present it basically right after collection. Nevertheless, I believe we did learn a lot through this entire process and I feel more prepared to do something like this again. I guess research is a skill and, like any other skill, can be practiced. You get a little better each time.

On the topic of improvement, Isabelle and my final presentation yesterday did not go the best. I think a big part is due to the fact that we did not rehearse it together before we actually presented. Although I had rehearsed my portion by myself and informed Isabelle how long my part would take multiple times, Isabelle went significantly over for her portion so I ended up having to cut many pieces from my part and spoke at 185% the speed I had initially planned to. Isabelle had also added a last minute slide half an hour before we presented and spoke too long about that, so we were unable to finish the presentation. I was very disappointed because I think the final slide was the most important part一limitations and future work. Although we were able to sort of salvage it by bringing up some of the things I would have talked about in the final slide in the Q&A, I will definitely keep the lesson I learned yesterday in mind for the future and always run through a timed presentation with all group members together at least once, especially if any last minute changes are made.

As always, it was fantastic to learn about what the other teams had been up to. I found Dylan and Tian’s results to be very interesting and I am glad to hear that Gallaudet will be continuing the work they did. I was surprised that the correlations they found were very weak, but I suppose it makes sense given the variability from few participants and misunderstandings of one survey question they asked. One thing I’ve learned from this REU experience is that participants will misunderstand a question that seems clear more often than one would expect. Isabelle and I ran into that issue in our study. I am not sure how to ameliorate this problem other than to conduct qualitative data collection interview style or emphasize to participants that they must carefully read questions. What was also interesting from Dylan and Tian’s study was that they actually found that the WER metric correlated better than the ACE metric with user attitudes for live tv captions which did not confirm what they had found in their literature review. They did say ACE was designed for ASR-generated captions, so the different context may be why, but overall, very interesting. It was also wicked cool that Shane and Allison got to meet with one of the developers of the application they used for their study. It was interesting to see that the gestures they had come up with themselves actually pretty well reflected gestures their participants said would typically come up in a conversation. This REU has showed me that when you design your own experiment, it’s not always necessary to base every component on work that has already been done; there’s some liberty to use your own judgment…which Isabelle and I did a lot of :’) The way Joey and Ramzy analyzed ratings from their Deaf and Hard of Hearing participants separately elicited some insightful information as there did seem to be slight differences between the two groups. I would be interested to see what happens if they were analyzed together. Michelle and Sam’s presentation was nicely done as usual and they seemed to yield the most conclusive results out of all the teams. But, lots of opportunities for future work for all the groups!

The social hour after the presentations yesterday was a good time. I learned a bit more about my fellow interns’ personal lives, and it was just nice to chill in a more relaxed environment; although, it was still a bit weird with Zoom, having to constantly scan every box to see who was signing since there’s no signer detection unlike with voice. I definitely understand how frustrating it can be to not know who’s speaking especially when multiple people are. And I now see why there’s the rule about only the presenter having their camera on during the research presentation portion of the meeting as it was quite chaotic during the social hour when multiple people were signing at the same time.

So to conclude, I treasure the experience I had this summer and I am very grateful to all the mentors (Dr. Raja, Dr. Christian, Linda, Norman, and Katja), my partner, Isabelle, my fellow interns, and my mother (who made me food everyday so I didn’t need to leave work to make food myself) for everything they put in to the program to make it the excellent experience it was. Thanks y’all!

OUT,

Rio