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for CS UG Students

Welcome to the lab. Please read the following page for all details related to your work with us. If you have further questions or would like to contribute to this page, don't hesitate to get in touch with either your supervisor or

@Diar Karim⁠

for access.

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General Expectations and communication

You will have contact with the project supervisor or supervisors (one in CS and one in Psychology).

As contact time with the project supervisors depend on the expertise and requirements of the project, during progress of the terms, contact frequency usually changes. You might meet more regularly with other lab members for the technical development of the project, especially in the November-January period. The project supervisors might be present in some of these meetings, but as the technical development of the project might require substantial time, the supervisors might attend only a portion of the meeting.

You are expected to commit an appropriate amount of time to the project.

You are expected to communicate your needs, progress, and any problem that might arise via email.

When writing to lab members, copy your supervisors for their records (the supervisor will not reply to the email). When writing your supervisor, consider having other members of the lab in Cc. Similarly, when replying to emails from lab members, please make sure you use the “Reply All” option instead of the “Reply” option to ensure all relevant parties in the original email are kept in the loop.

Following an in-person meeting, you are expected to follow up with an email with a brief summary or bullet points of the topics discussed and actions required by you, including all relevant parties in the email. This email should be sent to the supervisor and lab members involved in the project. It is up to you whether to include other students in your research group (if any).

When setting up a meeting with a lab member or your supervisor, especially the first few times, ensure you turn up in the lab a few minutes before the meeting time to ensure you gain proper access to the building or labs.

If you cannot attend a meeting, please inform all relevant parties.

If you cannot find any person in the lab or the zoom room after 5 minutes from the scheduled meeting time, email the supervisor and any members of the lab helping with the supervision of your project. The chances are that the meeting is taking place in another room, or the link might be wrong.

Read relevant papers from

here⁠

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All team members who have been given independent lab access, including CS students, need to have an induction to the lab, and this is achieved by reading this guide, especially the health and safety and lab access pages.

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Expectations for Running Experiments or User Studies

Before running any study that involves participants, several steps must be taken:

Your supervisor approves your ethics protocol, including

consent forms and info sheet⁠

(which should be exactly the ones reviewed by the ethics committee, otherwise an amendment needs to be filed).

There is a risk assessment in place for the activity.

The experiment has been tested and approved by your supervisor.

You have collected data with pilot participants (lab members and peers).

You have analysed the pilot data and discussed it with your supervisor.

You have discussed, and your supervisor has approved, a way to

recruit⁠

(where appropriate, participant recruiting should be done through RPS/SONA), pay or give credit to participants.

Lab spaces are booked using the VR Lab calendar (send the calendar invitation to vrlabbham@gmail.com)

Cubicles are booked using the appropriate form available in the Canvas project course.

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Expectations for writing your thesis

You are expected to produce a scientific piece of written work in the form of a journal article. This is where you will describe the motivations for conducting your experiment, the background literature, your hypothesis, methods, results, and discussion.

For a good grade, it is essential that you work on a draft well in advance of the deadline.

Check the guideline for your project, and, if allowed, it would be good to use a standard template, as provided here →

Elsevier-template.doc.docx

2.2 MB

⁠

Here is the structure that a paper based on experimental work should have:

Abstract

The abstract is also evaluated for clarity, completeness and choices of details to include.

Acknowledgements

(optional)

Table of content

Introduction

Start with a sentence about the general topic of the work and conclude the paragraph with the motivation for the research.

The literature review should be structured according to the topics covered in your thesis. Each paragraph should have an introductory sentence and a conclusion of what is known about the research and what is still unclear.

The way you write your introduction should lead to the last paragraph: your study plans. It should contain the hypotheses to be tested in the experiment and the predicted results and a summary of reasons for the predictions.

Methods

* Software components

Consider having a graph with all main modules and the information that they share.

* Planning

Consider having a Gannt Chart to describe how you develop the software

* Participants

Number of participants and description of the population

Recruitment

Participant compensation

End the section with ethics consideration and approval process

* Materials

Setup, including a description of all hardware with a summary of the characteristics that are important for the experiment (e.g. screen size and viewing distance, resolution, sound intensity). The reader should be able to reproduce the conditions of your experiment only using the details provided here. Consider adding pictures if they could be of aid to the understanding.

List the software employed in the experiment.

Describe any stimuli or media the experiment employs (audio or visual recording or objects to be touched). Consider adding a figure to show the screen or the stimuli employed and how they were used.

* Procedure

Experimental design

Conditions

Independent and dependent variables

* Analysis

Data processing employed

What kind of statistical tests will be used?

Results

Here make sure you only describe your results and statistics outcomes, i.e. what trends you found and whether these trends and differences are statistically different. Make clear how the results relate to the hypothesis at the end of the introduction but do not include any interpretations which belong to the discussions section.

Discussions

Descriptive summary of the results, what effects you have registered and what you haven’t.

Interpretation of results concerning the hypotheses at the end of the introduction. If you haven’t found what you expected, you should try to reason why this was the case and what could have been done differently.

Conclusions

No new information should be provided here. This is the summary of what you looked for and found.

Say what impact have the results from this study.

References

List the papers you have read and cited in your report

Appendix

Include any material like consent forms, questionnaires,

You should discuss your thesis as much as possible with your supervisor because this is what you are evaluated on for your final grade (although the work is not graded by your supervisor).

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Timeline

Week 8: demonstration

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Your Demonstration.pdf

3.5 MB

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