This week is officially the final week of internship. Wow…. I definitely enjoyed working with Gallaudet, learning a lot about research paper and the study. Many topics were news but as weeks went by, it became more familiar and a topic that I am comfortable discussing easily. Today I crammed a lot to fix up our research paper. There were so many errors and sentences that didn’t make sense so I had my sister help me out. Anything that she gets confused about, that is a sign that it needs to be fixed. So far, it is going well. Only a paragraph or two left to fix then I am done. I am unsure if I should ask mentors to skim it over and give us any feedback but it is the last day and I’m exhausted from this. I also forgot I have homework due tonight so I need to finish this, the research paper and then focus on my homework. We had our final presentation yesterday and it went great! My sister sent out a message asking for help or tips of where to go for the best WIFI place. One person reached out to her and offered her a church office place. I was concerned about wifi but they say they do live streaming every Sunday and it works beautifully. AND IT WAS FREE! So I accepted their office and went there. WOW their speed is like 200 mbps. 160 more than back home!! It was perfect. My partner told me that I had no freezing, no dropping frame, no choppy and no sudden fast/slow timing. It was amazing. I did not realize how much I miss that speed like back at school and back at my old home. I think that is all I could write. Too exhausted to think of graceful and amazing words to describe the experience of working here and working with mentors. I do however appreciate working with Katja and others a lot. They all were great mentors! And I look forward to the future either working with them or keeping in touch with them.

Whew. This week has been a busy week. My partner and I worked for almost 6 days this week and last week for a lot of interviews. We gathered over 40 people but a lot of those were fake or people that don’t meet our criteria. So far we got 22 studies done but got rid of one study due to a person lying about him being deaf/hoh and knowing ASL. On top of that, I got severe cold sickness on Saturday evening and it lasted almost the whole week. First day and second day were the worst but after that I started to get better and was out of the foggy head stage. But because I was so sick and busy with work, I kind of neglect my school work. No late submission so far but I have one assignment due just before midnight today and I have not started it yet. It is 5 pm now. YIKES! Anyway, I felt like my partner and I did really well and we had great discussions and plans. We gathered information and prepared for the presentation yesterday. It went well and we were able to share a lot of our discussion analyzes of our results. The result and discussion only make me want to do more study based on information we got. For example, does this caption setting and RTT setting change based on academic environment and entertainment environment? Will the participant respond to change? Another thing that pops up in my head but never discusses it with teams but I wonder if it was possible that captions are moveable and that participants can move the caption to wherever they want? Instead of the default setting and firmly staying in that bottom inside of the video, is it possible for us to grab that transparent box with captions and move it wherever and resize to whatever we want? The possibilities of those are endless!

Yay our vacation is over. Wait, I must be nuts to celebrate that our vacation is over? Lol Well i enjoyed my vacation. I remodeled my parent’s bathroom but in the end they said the painting color was too light so it might be repainted someday. Hopefully when I am not home! This week we start preparing and doing some interviews to gather our datas. We had few in the beginning and felt good to go. We suddenly got more than 20 people to sign up for our study but only to realize that maybe some of them are the same person, repeatedly scamming us out of money or whatever. It was disappointing and a waste of our time slot. Not all participants we scheduled are failures. We got some decent numbers from asking many of our friends and by our private Facebook message. Currently we have done 10 studies but will be deleting one study due to suspicions that he is hearing and not deaf as our requirement said so. I also modify and kept updating to tidy up our spreadsheets for our participants. I love excel (Google Spreadsheet) because to see how it is set up and how to navigate the numbers and details was fun. I set up at least 4 that I can remember. One was to highlight the row if the column checkbox for study was checked (true) the row will be highlighted in green. If that participant is disqualified for whatever reason, their row will be highlighted in red! No show will be yellow. Sam asked to add blue to the row for today’s meeting so that we don’t have to search too many on the list. We have 39+ participants on records plus few other details below that so it was a lot of information and colors. So I typed up a box of information to count how many colors and how many had done this or that. It was enjoyable for me. I also learned that Google Spreadsheet can not provide a conditional format for a sheet that is based on another sheet. Excel could do that. Interesting! There is a way to fool Google to do that but it will cause bugs and issues in our spreadsheet so it was not worth attempting it. I shared that template with another team and hopefully they felt it was beneful for them to use with their study. So far, I think we will have legit 15 studies done by next week. We need 5 or more to reach that level of complete datas. I had sent off information to my buddies online. I don’t know if they are willing to do it. I did tell them, $80 for less than 3 hours! That is a pretty good wage! LoL. I don’t know if that will work but who knows.

YAY! Our study had been approved by IRB on Wednesday so we are ready to rock n rolling! However I want to have a pilot study with one of the boss’ mentors because I felt like they would have better research questions for our surveys. The entire time during the past few pilot studies with many colleagues and a mentor, I felt unsafastifed with our survey questions. I just could not figure out why or how to change it. I recalled how both boss mentors had good research questions and how they were able to name what kind of research questions we should use such as Likert. During Wednesday’s practice with Dr. C. Vogler, he was able to run through our research study and gave us good feedback. I asked him to be part of our study a few days ago because he was the one who mentioned a lot about Likert scale and other scales that I don’t remember. His feedback was that reading/following and understanding questions was too similar and is confusing on what we mean. So we changed that to “How easy was it for you to understand the captions?” and “How easy was it for you to see the captions and the speaker at the same time?”. This, I hope, is vastly better than our old one. Whew. Dr. CV also mentioned NetPromoter questions that we can try out. Another term that I learned related to research questions so that was a learning experience. I wish to pick his brain more. I definitely enjoyed this part of research so far and I think I might take more classes with similar experience here. The only part I dislike so far is literature review. It takes so long lol.

This week has been an interesting and most busy week so far. Sam and I were busy editing some videos and checking/adding captions for our study. Once we have all of those ready, we share it with our mentors. :\ Only to find our videos were not good enough to use and they suggested that we make our own videos with speakers who spoke clearly. We use our video in the interview as if we were in live interactive conversation with the pre-recording. So we madly rushed and asked other people in our program to help us with pre-recording of the speaker. We asked Ramzy and Katja (our mentor) to speak for our parts. Almost all the videos work great except for one part with an elephant story video. I might have to pre recording that again or maybe ask my father who (I believe) does speak clearly. I also have to change the script of the elephant story because there was not much interaction in that video. I also need to change the last 3 setting questions of RTT because there was no way for us to recognize that our user did notice the captions changed between each setting. But overall I think our study is ready with some minor changes. I’m thankful for Sam to be my partner so we both work together well and Sam pushed our study to be almost as good as it can be. In a way I felt like he had some OCD to make sure our method is perfectly done. I do too but in some areas such as making sure our user is comfortable and that we are prepared to do an interview when it is time.

Today’s blog is a day earlier due to the Juneteenth holiday (tomorrow - 18th) and we get the day off. That was nice. 😊 This week was, at first, dragging on with no purpose for me. But eventually I found my niche and was able to keep working on my tasks. In the beginning, there was not much to do from my end because Sam is responsible for coding while I am responsible for questions, handling interview aspects, and preparing for it. All that is left is the demo part of the coding. Hence waiting for Sam but after meeting with mentor Katja and Sam, I was able to help out Sam more. I took over the video clips to record and edit for our interview while Sam continued to work on the coding part. I also set up and am almost finished with the ppt presentation in time for next week. I found a neat website that gives me a professional cool background for my ppt, slidesGo. Pretty cool!

This week is to focus on the method section of our research paper. I actually enjoyed this part because to me, it is like an outline which I loved! The outline of our method study is to father 20 people and then interview them using our WebRTC. Before I dig deeper on our method section, on Monday and Tuesday I felt like it was a slow day because Sam and I felt we did not know where to go after literature review. Actually, we did a little more editing on our literature review. It is not 100% done due to some content and our APA footnotes but the overall concept is pretty done. I am sure we will always go back to it at the end of our term to double check it.

Monday was a holiday day! No work! YAY. I used that day to cut and stain pieces of Pine woods for my bedroom wall. Kind of like a shiplap wall. Anyway, this week, Sam and I were preparing to present our Lit Review to work on Thursday. We collected, read, analyzed and wrote up our summaries in the Literature Review Paper. Then set up our PowerPoint to present. Right now, the Literature Review Paper paragraphs are not transiting right so hopefully by the end of today or next week, it will flow right. We gathered about 10 sources on the topic of WebRTC and captions. I am thinking we should also collect maybe one or two more sources based on the increasing number of people using virtual meetings since COVID-19 started. If we have the statistics of that, it would validate our reason why it is necessary to do research on the best default captions that most or all webRTC should have.

Second week of internship and it had been most amazing and yet so confusing. I guess the second week is usually the time where the research team would double down and decide on their research question. This week Sam and I decided to focus on the UI of captions in webRTC. The research question we came up with was “How do the types of WebRTC caption UI affect the understanding of DHH participants in a video conference environment?”. These questions required a lot of different sources including webRTC, UI, and some captions. This progress of research is getting serious (not that it wasn’t serious the whole time). Last week, the feeling was not urge to do paper work. This week, I am starting to feel the urge to start thinking of how and what to write in our research paper. I am grateful to be partnered with Sam because he has a better technological mind than me while I am more of a design person so together we work well.

First week of internship is new and odd for me. I just finished my spring semester at RIT like recently Thursday before flying back to my parents’ new home in Texas. I literally only had the weekend to get all settled in my parents’ home and set up my brand BIG new room. I learned that I don’t technically have the wifi ready. This house is using a data plan and hooked up to the data wifi for it. UGH! Nonetheless, I rolled up my sleeves and was ready to work on Monday. We had orientation and it was nice to see everybody and meet mentors and superviser of my internship. Most of the time, my team (Sam Sit) and I just focus on researching for sources about our topic, WebRTC. Each team has their own project going on and we happen to have webRTC with little research into RTT, Real-Time Text. WebRTC and RTT are new terms for me and I find this topic very interesting. I knew about those topics but never had the words for them. I am looking forward to doing more with this research progress. I also learned that as a research intern, we will be doing our own research and put it down in paper! We will be publishing our paper! WHOA. I guess I never thought about that. I just assume that we are there to learn and support/work with their own research. That would be cool to publish something in my name along with my partner, Sam.