QURPA Trip Report 2016

Joshua Riddell (17), a UQ Mechatronic Engineering student, was the lucky recipient of a QURPA placement in 2016.

Josh spent four weeks at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), from early January to early February 2016. He joined UQ PhD students Nikodem Rybak and Kristyn Hensby, whose visit was sponsored by UCSD's Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center. Nik studies within UQ ITEE's Complex & Intelligent Systems group and Kristyn is in the School of Psychology as a PhD candidate in developmental psychology.

QURPA-funded undergraduate engineering student Josh Riddell (left) and UQ PhD student Nikodem Rybak (right) with a new friend at UCSD. (Photo by Kristyn Hensby.)

Creating a toy story with the Rubi robot

By Josh Riddell

I worked on the Rubi project as part of my QURPA placement in a team with UQ PhD candidates Kristyn Hensby (developmental psychology) and Nikodem Rybak (software engineering).

While at UCSD we used the Rubi robot to conduct an investigation into the effectiveness of different modalities of delivering learning content, in particular the role of social aspects of learning in younger participants. We programmed Rubi to build various toys, and I programmed an interface which allowed accompanying speech and emotions to be easily scheduled. The ability of the children to imitate the building of these toys with a social robot such as Rubi will be compared to other delivery methods, including an assembly video played on a tablet and a human teacher.

I also worked at Gedeon Deák’s lab with Nikodem. Gideon’s lab has collected a very large data set of video and audio data with various interactions between mothers and children during simple games. The aim of our work was to apply machine learning techniques such as deep neural networks to this data to extract features such as emotion and spoken words from the speech. This would massively decrease the monetary cost and amount of time it takes to retrieve quantifiable data from these interactions since current methods involve manual human classification.

The highlight of the trip to UCSD was definitely meeting world-class researchers in their labs, as well as hearing their talks at the last Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center All Hands Meeting. As I'm a mechatronics engineering student, Mike Tolley’s soft robotics lab was particularly intriguing. I met a researcher in his lab who was working on a flexible robotic grabber which uses very strong electric fields to adhere to many surfaces and manipulate very delicate objects.

The trip offered a fantastic means for personal and professional development, and the chance to work on some very interesting projects at excellent facilities. I would definitely recommend the placement to other UQ students.

I would like to thank RCC and ITEE for making my trip to UCSD possible.