I entered the third week with the focus of finishing up the Literature Review and cleaning up any little issues that appear in the Literature Review. While the finalization of the Literature Review was happening, the development of the Update 1 - PowerPoint discussing our findings in our Literature Review and our research questions was occurring. We wanted to explain our findings so far that will help reinforce the research questions that we want to further research into. We had our program-wide weekly meeting and each project team gave their presentation on their Literature Review findings and their research questions. As my team, which includes Ramzy and I, we presented our work so far and got tremendous feedback from our mentors. Such as that we need more visualization in our presentation. We also need to make connections to other articles/studies relating to different aspects of captions as they will have important implications for understanding captions even though our research question is more focused on speaker identification and emotions. We do have these documents recorded in our spreadsheet listing all the articles. Even though those such articles have nothing to relate to speaker identification and emotions, it is still important to discuss other research that already exists and make connections to them.

As our topic is related to Captions UI/UX, we developed two research questions relating to speaker identification and emotions. The first one being; how do we incorporate paralingustic and emotive information in captions while retaining speaker identification? And our second research question; will incorporating paralinguistic and emotive information through the use of speaker identification help improve compression and retention for deaf and hard-of-hearing? As these research questions are not in final form. We have received feedback on these research questions such as considering other types of metrics rather than retention. There is nothing wrong with retention, it just important to consider other avenues.

As that was happening throughout the third week, our team has conducted two pilot studies with other members of the REU program, Michelle and Sam. Those two pilot studies went very well as we got used to the procedure of how to set up and conduct the study. As we will have one final pilot study on the fourth week on a Monday. Afterward, we will be planning on doing actual studies! Now as we head into the fourth week, we are considering the start of our research method design. We need to consider and start planning on development on a lot of different things such as what kind of research study we want to conduct, consent form, creating an ID code, data collection materials, flyers, and a study plan.