Past TI Summer Projects

Student: Sophia Pegolo

Advisor: Dr. Kristina Striegnitz (Associate Professor of Computer Science)

As a student researcher in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), my project explored how non-linguistic utterances (NLUs), such as beeps, tones, or synthesized instrument sounds, can be designed to improve communication between humans and robots. While facial expressions and language have been widely studied as expressive tools in HRI, NLUs remain relatively under explored despite their perceived emotional effectiveness in robotic media characters like Wall-E and R2-D2 as well as their strong connection to music, something known to successfully convey emotions. Our work draws inspiration from these expressive models and investigates how sound-based signals can support conveying emotions and intentions in robot communication without relying upon human mimicry.

This summer, I had the opportunity to take an academic deep-dive into this field and design a study based around our on-campus social robot, Valerie. Through a survey, participants were presented with three different character descriptions, a variety of human-robot interaction scenarios, and an array of different instruments and synthesized sounds to play the NLU melodies. These sounds represent different potential “voices” for our characters, and we have the participants assess which sounds fit the best, given the context of character and scenario. Establishing an effective voice is crucial for this future work’s significance. Though not yet conducted, this study hopes to lay the groundwork for future exploration of NLUs as tools to make robot communication more intuitive, emotionally rich, and effective.

Student: Ushna Khan

Advisor: Dr. Sarina Kuersteiner (Assistant Professor of History)

During my eight-week research collaboration with Professor Sarina Kuersteiner funded by the Templeton Institute, I delved into the intriguing origins of the word “risk” (Latin resicum), which some scholars propose stems from the Arabic word “rizq,” meaning divine provision, livelihood, sustenance, and more. Through Professor Kuersteiner’s study of resicum, we explored the idea that this term was not merely adopted by Europeans due to economic necessity or legal impediments but rather as a result of cultural exchanges with merchants from the eastern Mediterranean. This research has broadened our understanding of how legal institutions and economic practices were influenced by the cross-cultural interactions of medieval traders.

Student: Emmett Parkerson

Advisor: Dr. Carolyn Rodak (Chair, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering)

As a student conducting research under the support of the Templeton Institute, my project involves multiple disciplines including environmental science and engineering as well as the social sciences and humanities. I worked with publicly available wastewater release event data displayed on the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) website, which served as the basis for my research. Of my three research phases, the first was to clean and organize the NYSDEC website data in a way that made it presentable and easy to follow. The second phase consisted of calculating and evaluating the three metrics of reliability (occurrence), resilience (duration), and vulnerability (volume), known as RRV. Phase three, which I am yet to start, will involve developing new environmental justice indices using the mapping capabilities of ArcGIS spatially to analyze wastewater release data layered with other data from New York State, such as demographics, average income, population, and more. My goal is not only to make the wastewater release data easy to comprehend but also to use it to display noteworthy trends, such as which months show comparatively higher or lower RRV values and how New York State’s overall RRV is trending over the past eight years.

The idea is that if my improvements of New York State wastewater release data (including raw, processed, and GIS data layered with demographics, etc.) could be made available to the public, this increased public awareness would lead to more wastewater system improvement demands, thus providing a greater incentive for the state to invest additional funding in substantial infrastructural improvements, especially regarding any trends with marginalized communities and higher instances of failing sewer systems. Infrastructural improvements regarding our sewer systems and treatment plants begin with identifying the source, and this sewage discharge data can now be used efficiently and applied to the underlying problem: fixing the wastewater infrastructure of New York State.