Weekly Progress Update
This week, I will be working through preliminary research into related subjects and request interviews with people who have experience with certain facets that I will be tapping into during my project.
Data Sonification
Data Sonification will be extremely important for this project. Turning data into sound in a way that young students can understand will be necessary for this projects success. There are many aspects of data sonification that I did not think about before I did some research over this week.
Data Sonification refers to displaying data through sound. A lot of the ideas that I learned about this subject came from a LinkedIn Learning podcast interview between Bill Shander, Miriam Quick, and Duncan Geere. This field of data display has been historically underutilized.
It is most notably used in the field of astronomy. Outside of astronomy, it is am underutilized field. Data Sonification has some drawbacks, especially in comparison to Data Visualization. Sonification is challenging to represent to the public. Everyone knows about bars, lines, and dots, but a lot of people do not have the knowledge of tempo, pitch, and dynamics. At this moment in time, Data Sonification is mostly used as an art form. It may not be as versatile as the visual representation.
This does not mean that auditory representation of data does not have its positives. It can be harder hitting than visual data. It also can be used as a tool for equity, because it allows visually impaired people to interpret data that they normally may not be able to.
Robotics
I watched a short LinkedIn Learning course on the most important skills for a robotics engineer to have. The course is from Free the Data Academy and Ben Sullins. Three aspects of robots that stood out to me is the sensor and actuator combination, the programming, and the human-computer interaction. Actuators are how a robot moves, it turns electrical signals into movement. Sensors are how a robot takes in information. Programming takes in the data from the sensors, and then tell the robot to move in a specific way dependent on the data. It will use algorithms to move more effectively, efficiently, or interact with complex environments safely. Human-computer interaction may be the most important idea for robotics in the upcoming years. Robotics have gotten to a point where they can do tasks better than humans in many scenarios, but they still are not well trained in interacting with humans.
Interview Requests
I requested informational interviews from two people this week. The people I contacted are Sean Rowe and Robert Grover. Sean Rowe runs the Hatfield Marine Science Visitor Center through Oregon State University. Robert Grover is the CEO of aRobotics, the company responsible for DataBots. They both responded to me, and I am in the process of setting up informational interviews with them. I will write longer posts after I speak with them.
I am also in the process of setting up a tour at Chet Udell’s OPEnS Lab at Oregon State University. OPEnS stands for Openly Published Environmental Sensing. They make environmental sensors, build open sourced code for environmental sensing, and deploy the sensors into the real world. The lab’s work with environmental and biological sensing could provide helpful insight for my work in collecting sensor data from plants.
