I arrived in Seoul with nary a clue as to what to expect. I was brought to a foreign land to do work that was so far, undecided. When I finally arrived at the lab the following Monday, I was presented to the folks working in ARIL. I met my peers who were mostly graduate students, and also Hyunji, who apparently would be working with Trevor and I on our project. She also had the responsibility of introducing us to Dr. Shin, who was not physically present, but instead had her voice being projected thousands of miles from the faraway land of Her Majesty and beans-on-toast to Hyunji’s cell phone. Using the magic of telecommunication via RF waves, Dr. Shin asked us if we were interested in accompanying her in her quest to program a robot dog to respond to gestures. So we did. To do so, we made our computer watch us as we flailed our arms in front of it, and it made sense of the nonsensical poses. Our computer then communicated with D1va using the ancient language of Python, and it sternly told the robot dog to carry out the commands that the user had issued using their arms, legs, feet, hands, head, torso, et cetera (D1va is the name that our team had decided to give to the robot dog, although to say that we gave D1va this name would be disrespectful. Although the robot had no real input on what their name would be, we feel that were we to give her a different name that was especially unfitting, if robots were to take over the world and make the human race their slaves, our team at ARIL would be one of the first targets of their insurrection. So in order to get ahead of this potential catastrophe, we suggested to the robot that her title should be D1va, and she accepted the name enthusiastically). During our long sit downs at our computers, D1va would nag and complain to be taken outside, so we would take her out on the occasional walk. We meandered around the university and then the neighborhood, and everywhere we went we raised heck and scared the populace. When D1va had gotten all the malice out of her system, we would return to work at our computers and eventually figured out a way to sternly talk to D1va using our hands instead of our whole body. Not knowing if we had struck gold with this innovation, we had to test whether people preferred this method of control. So, Trevor and I organized an experiment in which a user would take D1va through an obstacle course using both methods of control, body and hands, and then take a survey afterwards to give feedback. Our results showed a pretty even split with a slight preference for body gestures. Hip hip hooray we have quantifiable results to our experiment and now we are writing a paper on our progress, may our paper be published and our work be cited.

Outside da lab
I loved Seoul soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much !

Figure 1 – The cohort took a picture with one of the most famous frogs in the world !!!

Figure 2 – Hunter and Lili in front of one of the most famous brick walls in the world !!

Figure 3 – A thirsty tree drinking the lake water

Figure 4 – The drag queen asked Hunter for a picture definitely not the other way around

Figure 5 – Maheono pondering the political and economic state of the world

Figure 6 – Last known photograph of Justin Ryan before he turned evaporated

Figure 7 – Hunter took a picture with some of the most famous flamingos in the world !!!

Figure 8 – Uhh haha umm hahaha uhhh

Figure 9 – Lili and Hunter atop Mt. Gwanak
(Fun fact! Mt. Gwanak received its name from the meaning of Gwanak which means that the word Gwanak roughly translates to, bear with me now, it translates to “hat-shaped peak” in Korean which is where it receives its name from and why today people call the mountain Gwanak!)

Figure 10 – Hunter saw that the sky was orange and for some reason thought that earth had caught on fire and he cried for like ten minutes nonstop it was literally so funny

Figure 11 – LOL Trevor put his hat and glasses on the robot dog LMAO you cannot take this clown anywhere

Figure 12 – Lili ziplining
( Fun fact!: Ziplining is when a person attaches themselves to a pulley suspended in the air, and then uses gravity to take a controlled descent down the cable. While this use is mainly recreational and for the thrill-seeking type, this technology also has utility for cargo-delivery, cable cars, etc. For more information on zip lines, please refer to this wikipedia article – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_line )