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Dr. Croakie and I were very disappointed by today's weather. That didn't stop us from attending some neat talks today!
Housekeeping Robots"Magic Cards: A Paper Tag Interface for Implicit Robot Control"
These designers, from Singapore, created an alternative robot control interface that operates in a way more amenable to many folks who are faced with doing everyday household tasks. Using cards with commands placed in situ, robots respond and complete said tasks when the homeowner is out. Cards say things like "Vacuum here, or take out trash," and have a bar code in the background that is read by overhead cameras. Robots are deployed to those locations and perform the tasks.
Croakie says: it is a good idea, but the actual implementation was pretty weak.
Citizen Scientists"Pathfinder: An Online Collaboration Environment for Citizen Scientists"
Citizen scientists are everyday people who volunteer to collect field data in scientific studies. One of the biggest is the Christmas Day Bird Count - every year hundreds of thousands of people go out and count birds in their environment and report back to scientific sources with their findings. In 2007, 300 scientific publications came out of data collected by citizen scientists. This paper was about a system, called Pathfinder, that allows for public sharing and discussion of data collected by citizen scientists. The researcher claimed that the system helped everyday citizens become more deeply engaged with the scientific process.
Croakie says: interesting idea, but the research was done by recruiting 30 Microsoft employees to participate in this study. Microsoft employees are not everyday individuals, with no formal scientific training, and therefore, might have behaved differently than their target demographic. Why didn't they use citizen scientists who had participated in other citizen scientist studies?
Tee-board E-textiles for Teaching"The TeeBoard: An education-friendly construction platform for e-textiles and wearable computing"
The Tee-board is a combination of a t-shirt and a breadboard. This group used an e-textile created from a t-shirt pre-wired with a lilypad arduino microcontroller to teach K-6 students in a summer program. They found positive results and student engagement with this project.
Dr. Croakie says: We like light-up clothes, but Amaya says that conductive thread is a big loser. We are worried that the student's projects will break quickly after construction! Amaya asked the speaker why she decided to use t-shirts, which are vulnerable to flexion and tension caused by movement, instead of a more robust light-up accessory, like a belt or purse.