ROB 498 /599: Computational Human-Robot Interaction Fall 2023

Project guidelines

There are a few different project options:

• A thorough literature review. A successful literature review goes beyond just cataloguing past work; it builds commentary and offers insights for future research and practice.
• A technical contribution. These can be inspired by the topics discussed in class, e.g., extensions on past papers or based on novel, well-motivated ideas. The top venue in HRI, the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction accepts submissions along five different tracks (link). These tracks may serve as inspiration for technical contributions made as part of student projects.
• A tutorial. Tutorials are insightful discussions of tools, techniques, and frameworks, designed to communicate to a broad peer audience. They are often packaged in blogs, keynotes, videos, or notes. Some great examples can be found in the Resources page.
• A reproducibility study. Attempting to reproduce the findings of published papers is an important part of scientific practice. Doing so enables a deeper understanding of prior work and it is often a contribution on its own (see e.g., the studies attempting to replicate the properties of LK99).

Students should form teams and attend office hours to develop a project direction with the help of the instructor.

Presentations

All students will be involved in a few different types presentations:

• Paper presentations. For each paper, there will be a 15' presentation (main) meant to give a summary of the paper, and a shorter 5' "dirty laundry" presentation (e.g., technical limitations, things that could be improved, etc). This is meant to encourage discussion and motivate the practice of openly discussing paper limitations.
• Project update presentations. These are meant to be short (5') presentations discussing the progress on the project, a month before the final project deliverable. It is an opportunity for the teams to get feedback from a peer audience.
• Final project presentations. Each team will give a 10' presentation on its project at the end of the semester.

Reports

There will be three reports:

• Project proposal. This is a 2-page document pitching a project idea. The document should contain: 1) an abstract; 2) a discussion of prior work; 3) a technical summary; 4) an evaluation plan; 5) a timeline.
• Project update report. This is a 2-page document meant to enable us to understand the status of each project and provide timely feedback. It is expected to be a revised version of the project proposal. It should highlight any modifications to the initial plan, and report the accomplished technical progress and any preliminary results.
• Final project report. This is expected to be a 8 page, paper-style document containing the following components: 1) abstract; 2) related work; 3) technical approach; 4) results; 5) discussion. The discussion should contain a reflection on lessons learned, and limitations of the approach/methodology followed.

Students are encouraged to typeset their reports using LaTeX. A useful template is found here. Students are encouraged to complete their projects towards a submission at a relevant venue (e.g., HRI, RSS, IROS, AAMAS).