This week was dedicated to creating the initial menu a user sees when first opening the application. We anticipate a settings feature, a profile feature, an “add post” feature, and a link to other social media platforms. My individual task for the week is to explore the Twitter API and see how our application can extract data from a user’s tweets. Buckle up, because I forsee a bumpy (and ultimately successful) ride.

Monday June 18

Upon waking up this morning I received a lengthy email detailing what our deliverables for the week were. Needless to say, I was rather intimidated. I decided I would tackle one thing at a time and began my Monday morning designing my personal website. I found it rather enjoyable and had a good time choosing a color scheme and listing my skills. I used the website Wix to design my website. I have not yet finished it entirely and and anticipate finishing it by Tuesday, but look for the link to it at the end of this blog. I also received a nice email from our mystery peer reviewers. They said that they really liked our Related Works section and I was quite proud of that. I thought Ray and I did a good job on that section and it was nice to receive some acknowledgement of our hard work from people working on a different project. We could use some improvement in our methods according to one group, so those will have to be improved. Perhaps we should switch our methods from application to features to how we test our application in the field, but it will have to be completed first in order to do that. I looked at some more Xcode to finish off the day, and discovered my newfound proclivity for working on the conference room. I’m unsure of what it is, but I really enjoy working there. Perhaps it is all the open space and feeling of isolation. Hopefully this does not mean I am not a people person.

Tuesday June 19

I started the morning off by going to our weekly reading meetings. the articles we were assigned to read for the week were both quick reads, so it was a brief meeting (which I was thankful for due to the large amount of work I have for the week). We decided that the expository article Implementing an Intercultural Birth Care Policy was well done but not quite related to our works as there was no mention of HCI or sociotechnical intervention. The statistics in the introduction of the paper were useful, but we decided that more could have been sued to solidify commentary and findings. The second article, Designing For Meaningfulness: A Case Study Of A Pregnancy Wearable For Men, was all theory and was “a first world problem.” The methods were sound thought and there things to be learned. Ultimately, we rejected both papers from our theoretical journal. I then proceeded to complete my personal website for professional use and it looks quite spiffy. I had some problems converting over to the mobile display, but after some bug fixes it looks great on both a desktop and mobile display. I even used my new headshots that I received last week. The link is at the end of this blog. Next, I peer reviewed a paper. I cannot disclose much, as they are singly blinded, but I will say the methods section was stellar and that I cannot wait to see what the results will bring. Next I completed the reviewer response table for the week. The comments I received were all constructive and I appreciated them. I think peer review is an excellent way to receive feedback.
My comments were mostly aimed at the methods and demographics of the study. I addressed these concerns, but I will not be able to resolve the issue until the final application has been developed.

Wednesday June 20

I came, I saw, and I conquered today. I walked into work, unpacked my belongings, and rushed to the conference room to begin my work in solitude. I find myself highly productive in that room. I wonder if the atmosphere possesses any mind enhancing chemicals. Anyway, I dove into ShareLatex and began editing the document based on peer review comments and other areas I thought needed improvement. In order to achieve a finalized methods section, I am going to have to reorganize the order in which some of the subsections are presented, as to make room for the physical methods as opposed to methods of deployment.  Once the application is finished, or at least ready for beta testing, I can insert a section about how we tested and what areas of the applications produced significant effects and which areas needed to be improved upon. I gathered more reference for citation purposes in our introduction. The website Statista as well as the Pew Research Center have been great “watering holes” for numeric data which we utilized to supports claims and present trends. I also spent the day researching the Twitter API and found that I must be approved for premium developer access to implement a search API and a viewing and interaction API. I would say that our timeline may need to be altered and would love more time for development, but there’s no time for that (comic relief). Lastly, the we had a meeting about Graduate School application and what the arduous process looks like. The Grad students were helpful, thorough, and specific. They provided concrete examples as to what to expect during the process. I am still unsure if Graduate School is an option for me, but the anecdotes the students provided gave me some insight and will ultimately help to inform my decision.  I must remind myself that Rome was not built in a day.

Thursday June 21

I began the morning by meeting with James, Arash, and Ray. The meeting went very well and I was able to solidify my decision to work on the project and aid in developing after the REuU program has concluded. We discussed what avenues of publication may be possible if we get the application done on time and we may be able to present our work in a workshop, which was very exciting to me. Ray also made a major breakthrough this morning by getting the Facebook API to work with our application. If I can get approved for developer access for Twitter’s APIs we should be able to implement a pretty effective mutli-platform social media feature. Arash informed the team that he was making gains on his quick-access voice capture feature in the application, which was phenomenal news. Our next meeting we hope to discuss what other features and bug we are having with development. We also had our reading meeting this week and went over the video formats for our projects. I am excited to make the video, it looks like it will be a fun way ti capture our experience and broadcast it to those who are interested.

Friday June 22

This week we were supposed to elaborate on our failures as well as give a visual representation of our final outcome. Well, I would like to combine the two categories because the visual representation is my failure for the week. Despite Ray’s amazing breakthrough with the successful implementation of the Facebook API, we still have yet to generate the visual for our GUI. I hope we can accomplish this by next week. We had the Weekly program meeting in the morning and I watched Tom and Carla present. Both projects were interesting and I anticipate them being successful in the future. Precision Health is a field we do not see discussed too often, so I would like to see it integrated into our daily lives more. Next, we had a meeting to discuss our feelings with the program at the halfway point of our research. Lots of constructive comments were made and I was able to see everyone’s struggles and triumphs. It was really quite informative. I spent the rest of the day working on the ShareLatex document before our meeting at 3 about Networking with James and Dana.

Links/Deliverables

Website: https://msaganich10.wixsite.com/profile

Reviewer Response Table: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cFp-Gv_d1xhbkR3ajDTxnNJcWzM6zHHHL84zbXO8ho0/edit?usp=sharing