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Pages
About Me
About me
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Posts
Im Having Fun And You Cant Stop Me
In the past, I’ve been accused of having “too much fun,” at work. That it “looks like I don’t do anything,” and I’m “always off away from the lab.” I post “too many photos of having fun,” and am generally far too cheery when folks ask me how I’m doing. Apparently, “fantastic!” and “living the dream!” are inappropriate responses to this question. It’s as if having fun, enjoying my lab, loving the fact that my work is the bomb-diggity, means that I can’t possibly be doing any real work.
The Hype is Real, but the Tech is Not.
Human-Computer interaction is hard, but our technological interfaces have improved over time. From terminal commands to touchpads, and text to voice interfaces, consumer electronics industries understand that ease-of-use is of the utmost importance to customers. The ultimate evolution of this idea is a frictionless Brain-Computer Interface (BCI).
Report Responsibly
How can we, as scientists, do better to inform the public of what we’re actually doing?
Stop Asking People How They Feel About Robots
Humans are notoriously bad at self-reporting everything about ourselves, from our nutritional habits to sleep patterns. So, it always strikes me as odd that social roboticists seem to insist on “measuring,” social personality traits with surveys and personal reports.
Humans Especially Encourage To Apply: Why You Should Not Be Afraid Of Robots
As a new PhD student, starting at a new university, in a new city, in a new country, I’ve found myself introducing my work to many new people lately. I have worked in and (plan to, remember, just started) study machine learning for social and emotional interactions in robots. I’ve experimented with many ways to introduce this topic: “emotional intelligence, but for robots,” “social robotics,” “machine learning for robotic emotions.” Try as I might, I always get some flavor of this response:
Concrete Examples.
“Women are socialized to…”
I’ve had many friends basically say they don’t believe “women are raised to…” and use this skepticism to put the burden of gender inequality on women. Here are some concrete examples I can think of that support the idea that, currently, women are brought up in society to…
Graduate School Dreams
An honest, cheeky, unfiltered brain dump of why I’m ready to go back. Partially an exercise to aid writing my statement of purpose, maybe somebody else can solidify
Dev Chat Interview
A chat for my friends’ blog series, reposted from original found here
Wonder Woman was Bullshit Feminism and I Am Mad About It.
Obligatory Spoiler Alert.
On Fleece Pants
Just some great pants.
AI, Racism, and Bad Data
Dark skin and Scottish accents and societally engrained biases, oh my!
Paradox of Awareness
Being a woman is really, really weird. As, I assume, being a man can be really, really weird. But I put forth the idea that being a woman leads to a constant rollercoaster of crazy second-guessing and walking a stupidly fine line between “being assertive” and “playing the victim.”
Deep Learning, Evolution, and Why Intelligence is not (just) Recognition
There has been a lot of talk recently about Deep Learning. Namely, how its recent resurgence is kicking ass across the board on machine learning benchmarks left and right. At the 2010 (and 2012) ImageNet Large Scale Image Recognition Competition, a group from University of Toronto, led by Geoffrey Hinton, built a neural net which outperformed the competition by 10% reduction in classification error rate (misrecognizing an image, so saying a picture that is in fact of a magnifying glass is a photo of scissors). This essentially brought neural networks back into play for the field of computer vision, where it dominates what most of us consider to be the coolest latest technology. Facebook’s face recognition? Neural network. Google’s self-driving cars? Controlled by neural nets. The tempting logical jump to make here is: artificial intelligence? Let’s just use a neural net!
Actually, What Tim Hunt Said Was Bad.
When loving, well-meaning men in my life don’t understand the problem with gender separation, I try to write.
education
Data Science Intern, AI for Good
Volunteer internship with (AI for Good)[aiforgood.co.uk] working on mixed-method data analysis for project in collaboration with (Care Leavers)[https://www.careleavers.com/] and (Spectra)[https://spectraconnect.co.uk/] to identify obstacles and improve outcomes for children leaving government care.
Volunteer Data Analyst, DataKind
Data analyst on project involving NLP and text mining to gather data on human trafficking.
Girls Computer Club
Mentor and Organizer
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- Instructor and curriculum designer for the Girls Computer Club for secondary school students.
- Recruited 20 girls from local secondary schools.
- Taught computer science basics, including sorting algorithms, pointers, and python basics.
Women in Computer Science
President
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- Coordinated logistics of club hackathons, speakers, and outreach.
- Led executive board in creating WiCS mission and club constitution.
- Grew club 4x over two years.
Girls Who Code
Instructor
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- Instructor for Girls Who Code program.
- Supplemented given curriculum with weekly lessons on computer science basics.
- Brought in speakers for work presentations, demos, and artists who employ technology in their work.
Cambridge Inventors Club
Volunteer Mentor & Organizer
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- Organized and designed engineering curriculum for Cambridge Inventors Club.
- 40 children age 11-13 each term participated weekly in engineering challenges, including engineering design principles like iterative testing and collaborative working.
Resilient Coders
Mentor and Organizer
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- Cogito corporate sponsor and technical mentor for Resilient Coders -- an organization which trains non-traditional background adult students to become software developers.
- Developed a 8-week "boot camp" curriculum for two apprenticeships.
- Trained apprentices in software development practices, and in presenting to company.
Girl Guiding
Volunteer
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- Troupe volunteer for Girl Guiding program, ages 9-11.
- Volunteer weekly with troupe leading leadership and cooperation building skills.
- Supervise weekend trips to museums and venues around Glasgow.
Student Representative
SRC Class Representative
- Gathered feedback on courses, program structure, and student experience.
- Participated in Student Council meetings to represent program cohort.
- Collaborated with faculty and staff on program and messaging improvements.
Athena SWAN
Committee Member
- On Student committee for department Athena SWAN chapter.
- Designed and implemented initiatives to encourage students to become STEM Ambassadors.
- Implemented metric gathering mechanism to track demographics of seminar and workshop participation.
- Collaborated with sociology department on evaluation metrics and surveys to ensure validity of efficacy reports.
Organizer: Hack Your Data Beautiful Workshop
Data Science Workshop for Qualitative Grad Students
Team lead for designing, organizing, and teaching 3-day datascience workshop including data mining, visualizations, and website hosting using R and R Studio for novices in qualitative research.
STEM Ambassadors
Volunteer
- Volunteer for STEM Ambassador program.
- Participate in career talks and robotics demos for high schoolers.
- Facilitate and mentor high school robotics team.
- Regularly volunteer with primary schools to teach STEAM lessons about team-based engineering.
Other Active Memberships
- Glasgow Ultimate Society
- Scottish Mountaineering Society
- University of Glasgow Triathalon Team
Social Robots Journal Club
Organizer
- Started and organized Social Robots Journal Club -- with student members from four departments across the university.
- Organized "Field Trip" to Edinburgh for Social Robotics exhibit.
- Organized "Bring Your Robot To Club" Day for cross-discipline idea exchange..
Active Academic Memberships
- British Computing Society
- British Psychological Society
- Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architecture Society
- Cognitive Science Society
- British Neuroscience Association
- University of Glasgow Robotics Society
- University of Glasgow FemEng
- University of Glasgow Entrepreneurship Society
experience
Research Assistant
Tufts University, Department of Biomedical Engineering
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- Research Assistant for Professor David Kaplan in silk lab.
- Developed directional freezing technique for silk solution.
- Trained in high-powered electron microscopy.
Teaching Assitant
Tufts University, Department of Computer Science
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- TA for CS courses: Introductory, Data Structures, Assembly Language Programming, and Machine Learning.
- Ran labs, graded assignments, held open office hours and 1-1 tutoring sessions.
- Participated in redesigning course curriculum for Machine Architecture and Assembly Language Programming.
Software Engineering Intern
Spotify Inc.
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- Full stack feature development of internal desktop application.
- Developed web APIs and GUI for music annotation tools.
Robot SDK Developer
Jibo Inc.
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- Employee 20(/110)
- Designed a series of tutorials from ”Getting Started” to advanced usage to onboard internal and external developers.
- Architected data APIs for dev tools to manage robot sensory input from cameras and microphones.
- Implemented frontend UI (React) and developer interfaces to build high-level skills.
- Won inaugural company culture award for "outstanding cultural contributions."
Character AI Developer
Jibo Inc.
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- Designed and implemented robotic bi-axial Emotion System and corresponding impacts on robot behavior.
- Fully implemented and maintained robot listening pipeline (main interface for interaction).
Senior Software Engineer
Cogito Corp.
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- Full-stack development of Role-Based User Management (RBUM) APIs
- Front-end React feature development
Software Consultant
Jibo Inc.
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- Continuing work to rearchitect APIs in cloud-based architecture.
Platform Team Lead
Cogito Corp.
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- Merged two software teams, technically and personally managed team of 10 full-time engineers.
- Oversaw top-to-bottom development and implementation of three client-facing features.
- Hired and onboarded three product managers, including one for another software team.
- Acted as Scrum master leading agile rituals (standup, planning, retro).
- Implemented and managed release pipeline, and later trained release manager.
projects
Category Formation
Category Learning and Acquisition with Connectionist Networks: A Proportional Difference Approach
Emotional System
Bi-Axial Emotional System
Drosophila
Genetic algorithms applied to LED badges 
publications
Neuroscience of Emotion: Book Review
2019 - 2019-01-07
An academic review of The Neuroscience of Emotion by Adolphs and Andersson.
Recommended citation: Saund, Carolyn. (2019). "Neuroscience of Emotion." The Psychologist. 32(1).
Responsibly Reporting Scientific Findings
2019 - 2019-01-09
An article on strategies young researchers can adopt in order to responsibly contextualize research to the general public.
Recommended citation: Saund, Carolyn. (2019). "Responsibly reporting neuroscientific findings" Bright Brains. British Neuroscience Association.
Psychological Statistics Workshop
2019 - 2019-03-29
An ERASMUS joint effort across 16 universities to foster collaboration and qualitative data analysis methods for students of Psychological Methods. Workshops on Copula Theory, Ising Models, Knowledge Space Theory, as well as a student showcase of an RShiny app.
See app here
See more information about the workshop here
service
Cambridge Inventor’s Club
CIC
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Engineering for Kids!
skills
Boston ML Meetup
Human-Computer Interfaces
It’s 2016, and humans don’t give instructions through terminals anymore. The future of interfaces is social. Natural language understanding, conversational dialogs, and subtle social cues are the new instruction set – what challenges exist in the vast field of HCI, and how can current machine learning techniques address them?
FameLab Scotland Finalist
FameLab Scottish first runner-up discussing what “smart” technology really means and why calling it “smart” is perhaps a bit of a misnomer.
Lesbians Who Tech
"Alexa, Read the Room."
Emotions govern so much of human behavior – why are voice agents taking so long to catch up? What does the future of an emotional voice interface look like, and how will the ability to perceive and express emotions influence the development of voice interfaces in the future?
SXSW
Social Robotics Workshop
What is a social robot? What applications are social robots uniquely suited for, and how can we design interactions that are useful, and socially fulfilling?
Women in Technology Conference
Imposter Syndrome
There’s earnest self-improvement and criticism, and then there’s crippling self-doubt. Learn techniques to differentiate between subtlties of the two, and identify self-sabotaging behaviors you can mitigate to reach your highest potential.
Github and You: A Guide to Commitment Issues
University of Glasgow Psychology Department
Speaker and Pannelist at Interactions: The Future of AI
Glasgow Theater Company
Pannelist and speaker following a production of a play about the role of emotional AI in the future.
Pint of Science
17 Things You Never Knew About Social Robots. Number 10 Will SHOCK You!
Crowdsourcing: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
University of Glasgow Psychology Department
Introduction to crowdsourcing for scientific data / workshop for Methods and Metascience group (professors and graduate students in UofG Psychology). Slides.
Three Minute Thesis finalist
3 Minute Thesis runner-up in postgraduate researchers at University of Glasgow. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/yGveWYGQOUE" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>