Like every week before, the Remora team had a busy week. We worked on prototyping using tools provided to us by our liaisons which let us analyze the elements on screen. This should help us identify user intent and eventually create a system of identifying inefficient behavior and linking it to a user intent to provide accurate suggestions. We also worked prepared for our PDR Report presentation to our liaisons, incorporating the suggestions and advice given to us last week into our report. The presentation went well, and we confirmed with our liaisons that we are on track with delivering our product on time. We will continue pushing to finish our product as quickly and as polished as possible, though!
This week also included Professional Development Workshops. As a team, we all attended Dr. Manuel’s “A Thorough Introduction to the Scrum Framework” workshop, which helped us better understand how we can use Scrum to improve our workflow and design our product in a timely manner. Afterwards, we participated in Professor McKenzie’s workshop which helped us understand psychological safety and ensure that every member of the Remora team is safe to voice their opinions and concerns. It is important that no team member feels stifled or like they can not voice any worries or ideas, and this workshop helped us create more structure to back this ideology.
Next week, we will continue prototyping and improving our PDR, slowly preparing for prototype inspection day. We will also prepare any ideas and work we have done so far for our coach and liaison meetings.
This week was mostly spent prototyping, preparing for the PDR Presentation and eventually presenting it to three other groups. This week was extremely useful in helping us narrow down what exactly is feasible for our project, as well as letting us receive advice and feedback from other teams. We also got to see what other teams, such as AuditBot, were working on, how their product would likely turn out, and what their progress was. It was useful insight into where we stood among out peers, and I’m happy to say we are on track.
Afterwards, we worked on refining our Preliminary Design Review using the advice we received after our presentation and discussing where we could improve for future presentations involving our Remora AI product. We also brought the topic up with our coach, who helped us better understand the advice and how we could move forward in our project. As we keep working throughout the week, we will continue prototyping and refining our PDR for when we present it to our project liaisons.
This week, the Remora AI team focused our efforts onto beginning data collection and prototyping for the JAWS coach. After deciding on the structure for our project and what data we could and would be collecting, we started working together to build prototypes and proof of concepts for how the data necessary for our product would be collected. This included a python prototype that collects user keystrokes and detects keystroke sequences, and a prototype using the JAWS scripting language which collects user inputs and triggers a message to the user if a keystroke is pressed 5 times in quick succession.
We also decided on a SCRUM framework for our project using Jira while deciding on our project roadmap, which we introduced to our project coach during our weekly meeting. During this meeting and the meeting with our project liaison, we additionally discussed our prototypes and what directions we could move towards when building more sophisticated prototypes, as well as what tools we could use within JAWS to collect more useful information about user intent and inefficiency. Lastly, we completed our Preliminary Design Review draft.
Next week, we will be be polishing our Preliminary Design Review draft and converting it into a PowerPoint presentation for the presentation on Tuesday. We anticipate that, using what we learned from our meetings this week, we will make further progress in prototyping next week.
This week, we prioritized our decision for the structure of our JAWS coach and our collection of data to make this project possible. After planning a mock-up structure and researching on the types of user events we could track and collect, as well as testing the JAWS program ourselves, we met with our coach to discuss this and further solidify our ideas. We came up with a three-part system architecture, including a data layer, an intelligence layer, and a coaching layer.
After meeting again to clarify what we learned from the meeting and prepare more, we brought our idea for our project architecture and data collection to the project liaisons. This was our first time meeting in person, so we made sure to do our best in introducing and presenting ourselves. In this meeting, we became better informed on the type of data JAWS tracks, expectations that Vispero have for us, and what our goals and priorities for this project should be. After our meeting, we went out for a dinner hosted by the liaisons. We enjoyed ramen not only with our entire group, but with the Team DataRex, the other group sponsored by Vispero!
Lastly, some of our members attended the White Belt Quality Training, hosted by Florida Power & Light. It was a very informative and fun event, and we learned how to be more efficient and how to work better as a team. Next week, we will begin our data collection and the prototyping for our project.
Hello everyone, and welcome to our team’s blog! We’re Team Remora AI, and we’ll be working with Vispero, an assistive technology company, on the JAWS Coach project. Our product will act as an AI-powered analysis and assistance tool, which will detect inefficient usage patterns from users of Vispero’s JAWS Screen Reader Software and provide accurate, tailored, and unobtrusive suggestions on how to use the software more efficiently. The JAWS Coach should help users with visual impairments use JAWS to work quicker and work smarter. Throughout the year, we’ll be updating this blog to log our progress, accomplishments, and over-all journey to bring our product to fruition.
During our second week, we met as a team for the first time this semester and got to know each other and the scope of work for our project. We also exchanged contact information and planned when we would be free for our weekly Liaison meeting, our weekly Coach meeting, and our HWLEE Prototyping Lab In-Person Safety Training for the next week. Lastly, we briefly discussed our team roles during our initial meeting, and later decided on rotating roles every few weeks in order to give everyone experience in every role.
Our team members are:
Paapa Kusi – Team Leader
Matthew Lozito – Template Manager
Gabriel Duenas – Scribe and Web Master
Kriti Shah – Research Librarian
Abigail Zheng – Timekeeper
Devina Tikkoo – Facilitator
After our initial meeting, we discussed ideas for team names and logos (which I will say, we and especially Matthew did a good job). Finally, we had our first meeting with our Coach on Thursday, where we introduced ourselves, discussed the scope of work, and decided on where and when to meet going forward.
Meetings and Research | Week 3
This week was quite the eventful week for the Remora AI team! For our first task, we finalized the first version of our team name and logo and presented them, as well as our general project pitch, to the class. After getting feedback from the class and discussing more ideas, we came up with this!
The Remora AI Team logo.
As mentioned earlier, we are Team Remora AI. We’re named after Remoras, which are fish that attach to the bottom of sharks and clean them in return for nutrients. Our program will work alongside and attached to the JAWS software, taking in information and providing advice, so Remora AI seemed like a fitting name!
On Wednesday, we had our HWLEE Prototyping Lab In-Person Safety Training. We learned a lot more about what we would need to do in IPPD, as well as how to stay safe in the Prototyping Lab and how to utilize the facilities.
On Thursday, we had our second weekly meeting with our coach. We recapped our previous meeting, and discussed the possible infrastructure and framework we could use for our project. We also discussed how we could develop our inefficient-use pattern library, what the pipeline could look like, and considerations we should make while building it. Lastly, we shared our team name and logo and explained its meaning (and I’m happy to say she liked it) and discussed plans for our next meeting.
On Friday, we met with project liaison for the first time. We shared our names and team roles, and discussed similar topics to our first two meetings with our coach. We clarified the scope of work and what resources Vispero would provide for us to help our development of the JAWS AI coach. We also considered what the success criteria for our project would be and more project specifications, such as privacy and AI services. We concluded our meeting by ensuring the same time and date worked for future meetings.
We plan on meeting with our coach and liaison again during the fourth week, discussing our personal research, further specifying what our project requirements and success criteria could be, and deciding where to start as we move from research to prototyping.
