This week we started formulating our research question from our literature review. We also started writing a presentation for our literature review in preparation to present our literature review progress next week. We had difficulties finding good research papers and scholarly articles to back up our topic (WebRTC) since it is so new. We researched stuff that is more relevant to our research question that focuses more on the UI/UX of the captions of WebRTC’s RTT. This sort of overlaps a bit with the caption UI/UX topic but not quite so because ours focuses on the WebRTC component.

We had a weekly meeting with our mentor Norman to clear up some confusion. He helped us to think of more ideas of what to do for our literature review process.

On the same day, we had a weekly meeting that checks in with everyone. Everyone briefly shared their research question/topic. Some of the teams didn’t have a clear-cut question, but they had a topic to look more into. They described some methods that they could use to answer their research question/topic which helps my team to visualize how we can strategize our research as well. We also got a bit of help from the caption UI/UX team; they provided us some useful research papers and articles. At the end of that meeting, Dr. Raja wanted to do an open floor for us to socialize because when the REU was in person, that’s what most people would do. Unfortunately, we were incredibly awkward in a virtual environment because we knew that everyone could see us, and only one person could talk at a time.

Throughout the week, we had daily check-ins with mentor Katja who gave us insights, ideas, words of encouragement, and useful resources to help us move along our process. I’m very thankful for all of the help that everyone so generously gives. Lastly, I write this blog to wrap up the week.