[lookit-research] Lookit update, winter 2019

[Kim Scott]

Happy almost spring, Lookit friends! Here's an update for winter 2019.

The news:

- *Platform development* is going well. You may have seen improvements to
the "study edit" view if you've been using Lookit or staging-Lookit,
including that you can now see your updated preview instantly upon changing
your JSON, without having to "re-build" your study. We've been focusing
recently on setting up permissions and workflows to enforce correct usage
of data. We're in the process of rolling out a "consent manager" tool in
the experimenter interface that lets you see all the consent videos and
record whether each one shows a parent making a consent statement. Only
once you "accept" a consent video can you see and download the associated
data and remaining video. This is something that anyone collecting data on
Lookit had to do anyway, but it was up to the individual lab to figure out
a process for checking consent before accessing and using data. The consent
manager eliminates that duplicated work and also reduces the possibility of
human error as the platform scales. (Here's what it looks like. That's
Lookit developer Rico; he looks happier in real life, I promise.)

[image: Screen Shot 2019-03-18 at 4.23.07 PM.png]


- *Adding functionality for the actual studies *is also chugging along!
I've been expanding methods for randomization and improving & generalizing
individual frames. (E.g., below is a video configuration frame where you
can specify text/images and whether the parent should be forced to "check
off" each instruction and/or to make an example video so they can check
their setup.) A lot of this work is invisible but should substantially
speed up future development and/or make it easier for other people to
contribute - e.g., updating dependencies and merging the
ember-lookit-frameplayer and exp-addons repos into a single application.

[image: ExpVideoConfigQuality.png]


- *Active studies*: Testing is ongoing for Flurps and Zazzes (Lisa
Chalik/Yarrow Dunham) and Your Baby, the Physicist (now run by Junyi Chu &
Liz Spelke, as Melissa Kline has moved to the Center for Open Science!),
although they're down for the moment while the MIT IRB reviews our renewal.

- *Funding* - we've submitted an invited proposal to the Spencer Foundation
that would cover several studies and a share of platform development, and
have a few other irons in the fire. (Rough state of affairs: if we were to
get all the funding we've applied for, we'd actually be set to carry out
our plans. But ideas are still very welcome!)

- *Legal - *we're about to start (in the next week, fingers crossed!) the
first three studies conducted under non-MIT IRBs, using the Lookit access
agreement! Institutions include Goldsmiths, London which needed an
additional data sharing agreement signed because of GDPR.

- MIT's Quest for Intelligence "Bridge" program is providing some engineer
time on *automated gaze coding,* first evaluating how starting points from
both Antonio Torralba's and Andreas Bulling's groups do on video of babies.
We have a small dataset and proposed standard <https://osf.io/xh54d/> posted
for groups who want to share video data towards this effort, and as a first
trial, a lot of data generously provided by Virginia Marchman to use for
training.

- *On a personal note*, I'm expecting a baby next month and will be out for
a bit! I'll follow up within the next few weeks with a leave plan for those
of you directly affected.

Where to see current plans and progress:

- Overall documentation <https://lookit.readthedocs.io/en/develop/> for
using platform, specific experiment frame docs
<https://lookit.github.io/exp-addons/modules/frames.html> (now with example
screenshots!)

- Information about the current status of the project, our longer-term
plans, how IRB approval works, etc. is available on the *"research-resources"
Github repo and wiki <https://github.com/lookit/research-resources/wiki>. *

- Development planning is organized on *Github Issues on the various
Lookit-related repositories <https://github.com/lookit>.* You can add your
own feature requests! Internal plans about what issues are being addressed
when, and how long that will take, are organized in CodeTree - we're happy
to add you to the project if you're curious.

Thanks for all your support and patience!

Kim

---
Kim Scott
Research scientist | Early Childhood Cognition Lab | MIT
W: www.mit.edu/~kimscott | Participate: lookit.mit.edu
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/private/lookit-research/attachments/20190318/ececcff1/attachment-0001.html
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Screen Shot 2019-03-18 at 4.23.07 PM.png
Type: image/png
Size: 342828 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/private/lookit-research/attachments/20190318/ececcff1/attachment-0002.png
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: ExpVideoConfigQuality.png
Type: image/png
Size: 372946 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/private/lookit-research/attachments/20190318/ececcff1/attachment-0003.png