Preparing for Mock Poster Presentation and Finishing Demo

It's hard to believe eight weeks had went by already. This summer has been full of experiences that have help me grow as a person, as a computer scientist and as a professional.

Me and Marvis spent most of the week making small modifications to the poster she presented at XSEDE for the Mock Poster Presentation we had on Friday. We also received the specifications on making the final paper, so we started preparing a rough draft and deciding how we were gonna divide the work.

Even if we only have the demo as a rough draft, along with our mentors we have decided to see if we could show it at the SRS Poster Session. Since we don't have IRB approval to acquire data from human subjects we can't really record the responses from the people who try our demo. However, we would like to see their reactions and ask them if they have any feedback on how to improve it. After we got permissions from the SRS Poster Session coordinators, we spent a couple of days adding simple features to the demo so it could be more presentable at the session.

We have actually talked with Dr. Anne Bowen about continuing our research remotely on the next year. Even if they don't have funds to pay us for our work, I still consider it's a great opportunity to acquire more experience, especially because I actually enjoy doing this type of research, and it's a field that's hard to get research opportunities in my university. What Dr. Bowen told us is that we probably can get funding to go to conferences to present our research, in which the top conferences we want to go are the Society of Neuroscience and SIGGRAPH, which I'm super excited about.

Our next steps include submitting an IRB proposal to acquire permission to have human subjects, and making an interactive tool inside the demo of the Toronto Empathy Tool. This can be done as pre survey the volunteers will complete before experiencing the demo and a post survey after the demo.

For another part, we have another workshop at TACC called "From Mentee to Mentor" with Tommy Darwin. He talked mostly about graduate school and how to look for funding. It was very inspirational, especially when he said that we shouldn't do anything out of fear.

We had the Mock Poster Session in front of Dr.Bowen and TACC staff. Overall, most of the interns did a very good job on presenting. I consider that Marvis and me did a good job presenting our poster, and we good feedback from the audience. They were asking so many questions, Dr. Bowen had to pause it and make us proceed to the next poster. I'm very happy with our work and proud of most of my fellow coworkers.