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Computing Sciences

Category: Research

A Real Head Turner: Exploring the Campus with The Boston Dynamics Spot Robot Dog

Technology never fails to amaze us with its advancements, making our lives a little more comfortable in the process. It might be an exceedingly difficult question to answer whether technology has adapted to human needs or humans have adapted to technological solutions as a part and parcel of their lives. The world of today might as well have been a killer science fiction story from 50 years ago. Something we have seen many times in science fiction movies suddenly jumps right in front of us. Such an event recently took place in Robostudio at Tampere University. And it's safe to say that this event felt as close as it gets to a scary robot uprising, but somehow in a positive manner!

Learning how to co-learn: Student-children interaction with robots

In May 2022 we piloted something novel in Robostudio. A voluntary group of Human-Technology Interaction students got a chance to try out co-learning and facilitation of younger pupils (4th and 6th grade) on different kinds of learning tasks related to social robots. The tasks took place on the learning stations with Pepper, Nao and Clicbot, and in addition we had a longer task about storytelling with Alphamini. The tasks varied a lot when it comes to their content and the interaction needed between the students and pupils. No one can state that the task was too easy, so we raise a hat for these brave students who took this challenge, and we warmly thank the participating pupils who came to Robostudio and gave this chance and challenge for us 😊 From the teacher’s perspective the workshops were smooth and everybody seemed to handle their tasks successfully, and also the pupils seemed to enjoy the workshop, interaction and the robotic tasks. Everybody was able to learn a lot, but not necessarily the same things. Please read the story to find out how it went from the students’ perspective and what they learned!

Welcome to Robostudio!

We have opened a brand new Robostudio in TAU Hervanta campus. Robostudio is a multidisciplinary co-learning space to work with lovely social robots. It is dedicated for educational purposes and the activity is strongly connected to research as well. User Experience in Robotics course runs in this space, as well as social robotics-related thesis projects. We are also running other kinds of co-learning events and workshops where we invite for example school pupils to learn with us.

Computing Sciences at the annual SEFI conference

The teachers and researchers from CS attended SEFI 2021 conference “Blended Learning in Engineering Education: challenging, enlightening – and lasting?” held remotely due to the covid pandemic. Four papers from Computing Sciences were presented covering topics from ethics, learning path visualization, automatic grading and educating web developers - a strong representation of several aspects of computing education.

AI Hub pilot with Trialwell: Usability evaluation of the Trialwell web platform to recruit participants for clinical and non-clinical trials

Trialwell supports researches by recruiting appropriate participants. AI Hub conducted a pilot study with Trialwell to evaluate their webservice with potential participants. The mission of AI Hub is to provide Aritifical Intelligence (AI) related guidance for small and medium sized companies (SMEs) free of charge. Since Trialwell will use AI to match participants’ profile with appropriate research trial, AI Hub agreed to conduct a pilot project to evaluate the usability and usefulness of the system.