Welcome to Laura's Summer Project!
Greetings and salutations! My name is Laura Casperson, and I am one of the lucky few chosen for the Distributed Mentor Program, a part of the Computing Research Association Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research. I have recently completed my junior year at Cornell College and now am only one year away from completing my computer science major and pychology minor.
My mentor for this project is Cindy Grimm. She works here at Washington University in St. Louis for the Media and Machines lab in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering doing research on surface modeling, modeling and rendering for artists, and image capture.
Our goal this summer was to create and implement an experiment to determine how noticable Lewis the Robot is to the average human. We hope to learn what sorts of behaviors will make Lewis less noticible. It seems likely that robots will begin to have a greater presence in an average person's day in the not-so-distant future, so whatever we can do to reduce the novelty and noticeability of robots will make their presence in, say, an office setting far less disruptive. A full description of what we have so far can be found at the Research Description link. (Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties, I ended up working with a smaller robot, known as Aristo, instead of Lewis.)
Also, I will be keeping a journal of my work on this project. Entries will be made at least weekly, but probably more often than that as I like to write. If you have any more questions, please feel free to email me at l-casperson@cornellcollege.edu. Enjoy the show!