<aside> 💡 Erica Fu is a rising junior majoring in Information Systems with not one, not two, but three minors: Design, Computer Science, and HCI! During this summer, she worked on two projects in CMU CoEx Lab, CHIMPS Lab, and DIG Lab.
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I worked on two projects this summer. One project was called Adulting 101, which ****I started working on last summer. This project is a collaboration between the CoEx Lab and CHIMPS Lab at CMU. The focus of this project is to teach people how to adopt good cybersecurity habits. Users complete daily tasks that challenge them to adopt both adulting and cybersecurity habits in the hopes of showing users that good cybersecurity habits are an important and necessary part of being an adult.
My other project is called Zeno and is a project within the CHIMPS and CMU DIG labs. This project focuses on evaluating machine learning models (ML) with more than one metric. When ML models are evaluated with one metric, the results are not applicable to understanding the model’s performance across different use cases. The way Zeno goes about this is slicing data into different sections. For example, if you had a bunch of images you wanted to test a model on, you could slice your data in a way so that one slice contains only very bright images. You could then test your model on that slice. By testing your model across different slices, you get a better idea of how your model will perform overall in the real world.
Within Adulting 101, I was working as an IOS developer, so I was coding the app. For Zeno, I worked more on the UX development and writing the research paper. I would create sketches and get feedback on those sketches and go to higher fidelity wireframes from there. Because I wasn’t working on the project when it first started, I would use previous research done by the team to justify my design choices or talk to the developers to align with what they were imagining. Though I had different main roles on each of the projects, I was able to contribute to both projects in a variety of ways.
I actually got involved with both projects in a similar way. At the end of spring semester, I wanted to find something to get involved with during the summer. There are applications for summer research programs like the HCI REU, but I just looked through different labs’ current projects and emailed people whose projects I was interested in. When sending out emails, I included why I was interested in the project as well as relevant experience I have. Because I was sending out emails at the beginning of the summer, some projects had already found students to work in the lab. However, there were still projects willing to take on new people.
I worked with a PhD student for one of the projects. I really like working with PhD students because they’re still students so it’s easier to relate to them, and they sometimes feel more approachable than professors. I was also able to ask them about their experiences as a PhD student which was really interesting as well.
I became interested in the Zeno project because I took AI, Society, and Humanity which got me thinking about ML more than I had in the past. I never expected to be working on an ML project like Zeno but it ended up being a good experience!
Don’t be afraid to reach out to projects! You might get rejected, but that’s okay. There are a lot of different projects going on, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on. You won’t really find the kinds of HCI labs and research CMU has anywhere else, so if you’re interested in HCI research, this is the place to get involved. Don’t hesitate to reach out to projects!