This week was yet again swarmed with GTA work. Students have their first programming assignment for CS5590 this Thursday which means my office hours and inbox have been super crowded with queries ranging from the installation, setup and the actual concept and implementation of the assignment. I myself, ran into issues while doing this assignment so it was kind of expected. Also, started grading the paper summaries for students for each class. Speaking of paper summaries had to do loads of them for my own courses as well. For CS1054 students had their first quiz which once again called for a lot of pre quiz questions in and out of office hours. But I do enjoy being a part of someone’s first interaction with computer programming and them being fascinated by it.
For my own courses, another person reached out for Advanced Topics in HCI project, they have their own set of unique skills and I can think of ways they can be beneficial too but at the same time justifying more than two students on my project might be hard. I have however, left the ball in their court to decide if they want to extend this project in there area of expertise. Apart from that the Machine Learning Homework is due this week but the syllabus was not covered till yesterday’s class so I still have questions left to attempt before submission.
For research, Brendan had reached out to the authors of SurfShare to get access to their open-source repository. Which they did share with us, so that is good news. We now have a potential alternative to ML Remote Assist that has an AR device on both ends. It also has some other cool features such as duplicating object from the real world and manipulating the virtual replicas that can be of great assistance to our user study. However, I need two HoloLens 2 to run that code. The HoloLens 2 in our lab has been occupied for this week so that has been a blocker in actually testing the surfshare out. Furthermore, in the search of potential security threats while using VR devices in the medical context or otherwise, I read the following paper:
OVRSEEN: Auditing Network Traffic and Privacy Policies in Oculus VR
This paper evaluates the network traffic of applications from the oculus store and analyze the kinds of data collected, the purpose of it and finally how they disclose this in their privacy policies. The way they collect this network data and decrypt it specifically for oculus can also be of benefit to our study. I have the git repository for their code but again the headsets in the lab have been occupied so will hopefully be able to test this out as soon as there is an oculus available for use. The SurfShare will still be higher on priority list though.