Year in Review: 2017

This will be my last post for 2017, and what better way to end the year than with my customary review of the year? Right back at the start of the year I set some goals, and I reviewed them halfway through. Let's see how I've done now that the working year is at its end...

On the Blog

* At least 24 posts - the same as last year. Done! This is Post 25, so even if we discount the cheeky "placeholder" post in April, I've hit this target.
* At least 2 posts per month - to avoid having gluts followed by long silences. I'll tick this one off as done, despite a few wobbles. I technically missed this in January (by a day!), only made it in April by cheating, and there are a few a places where I ended up with a review and non-review post in quick succession (or had gaps of three weeks or more between posts), but I think met the spirit of it. The "tick-tock" approach of doing a review and non-review post each month works well, since it's stopped me from just padding with short review posts, and encourages me to have regular deadlines for getting content out. Even if it does mean that it tends to be two posts a the end of the month!
* At least 4 non-review posts (since I managed 3 last year), to avoid the blog being nothing but a diary of how busy I am: Done! I managed three in the first half of the year, and five in the second, for a total of eight. 

Research

* Deliver the Tracking People and Augmenting the Body projects: Done!
* Submit at least five grant applications as either PI or Co-I: Done! I managed six in the end, and three of them got funded to boot, with one still waiting to be heard from.  This will probably go down as the best success rate in my life, so I'll savour this moment before my success rate regresses to mean!
* Submit at least two papers to high quality journals: Done, though both are still under review.
* Get the new iteration of FATKAT into experimental use: Done! PhD student Latif Azyze has been hard at work on this, and I've had a couple of undergraduate project students developing a new three axis version.
* Get PSAT (the postural sway assessment tool) finished and field tested. Done!
* Adapt our grip model to address feedback and corrections: Not done, though progress has been made.

Other

* Get an "Engineering Imagination" discussion group up and running for postgraduate students in iDRO. Not done. I got a bit overtaken by events, and with the Robotics@Leeds and N8 Robotics and Autonomous Systems Student Networks getting up and running, I've opted to focus my energies there instead.

* Make some inventions. Not done. This has definitely been a weak spot this year. While grants have been succesful, I haven't been managing to put a lot of time into my own making activities.

* Formulate a reading list for the Engineering Imagination. Not done. That big list of books is still sat there, and hasn't made its way into an actual list.

Unexpected Highlights
Of course, opportunities arise during the course of the year that I wasn't aware of back in January. These mostly fall under the "grant applications" headings, so they have sort of already been covered, but a few were particularly notable opportunities that came along:

SUITCEYES: I mentioned this in my last post, and you'll be hearing a lot about it over the next few years, I expect. It's been a huge part of this year, and the opportunity to join the consortium came right of out of the blue last February. It wasn't even on the radar at the start of the year, so getting stuck into it will be really exciting. Of course, now there's just the thorny issue of delivering.

APEX - Engineering the Imagination: This was a call for proposals that came out of nowhere, and Stuart and I decided to have a go, if only to force us to think through our ideas on augmenting the body in more detail. It's paid off handsomely, and the process of developing an "empathy hand" is throwing up some really interesting questions, and to cap it all, we've been selected to exhibit down at the British Academy's Summer Showcase next June. This one definitely needs a blog post in the new year!

Robots, Puppets and Humans: What's the Difference? This was another one that I've blogged about elsewhere, which really gave me the opportunity to think about my work from another angle. It was good fun, and contrasting the approaches of Samit, Anzir and myself was really interesting.

So, not a bad year, all-in-all. Join me next year when I'll be looking ahead to what I hope to achieve in 2018...

SUITCEYES

No, it's not a typo: it's an acronym: Smart, User-friendly, Interactive, Cognition-Enhancer, Yielding Extended Sensosphere. Let me explain.

One of the big features of this year (and by extension, the next three years as well!) was a successful bid to the EU's Horizon 2020 Funding Scheme for a 3-year project to explore the use of smart textiles to provide haptic communication and navigation aids for deafblind people. The project is worth €2.4 Million, and has a consortium of five academic partners and two industrial partners from seven countries. You can find more detail on the partners than I could possibly fit into this post at the project's official website.

This builds upon - among other things - the work I undertook with Brian Henson and Bryan Matthews on haptic navigation aids for the visually impaired in the Department for Transport -funded WHISPER project (remember WHISPER?).  Whereas there we looked at barriers to navigation, and the potential for haptic aids to navigation, this project takes the whole approach to a much deeper level, bringing in expertise on Smart Textiles (The University of Borås, Sweden, who are co-ordinating the project), machine learning and object recognition (Centre for Research & Technology Hellas, Greece), psychophysics (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands) and gamification (Offenburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany), a major producer of adaptive technology (Harpo, Poland) and a producer of tactile books (the delightfully named Les Doigts Qui Rêvent). This focuses on the broader issue of communication, beyond just the requirement for navigation, and emphasises the needs of deafblind individuals, rather than just the visually-impaired.

The work at Leeds focuses on two of the work packages making up the project: engaging with deafblind people to explore their needs and ensure that the project remains focused on addressing these; and exploring the use of haptic signals to aid navigation. The latter goes beyond the simple use of distance sensors and vibration motors that we explored in WHISPER: we'll be looking at bringing in inertial and GPS measures to enrich the navigation information, and by bringing in work from the other partners, we'll be exploring more sophisticated haptic signals (and a more sophisticated interface than wristbands with vibration motors attached!), and the use of object recognition from a camera feed. 

We'll be kicking the project off with a symposium at Borås in January: From Touch to Cognition.

I can't wait to get started!