[lookit-research] Lookit update, winter 2020
Kim Scott
kimscott at mit.edu
Wed Mar 18 11:07:37 EDT 2020
Happy St. Patrick's Day, Lookit friends!
Hope you're coping ok with social distancing measures. We've been getting a
lot of inquiries about running studies given that labs have shut down
in-person testing. The short answer is we're welcoming everyone to get
started, but you should understand that this won't be an immediate solution
(see updated wiki
<https://github.com/lookit/research-resources/wiki/UPDATED:-Preparing-your-study-for-Lookit>).
Here's the news about Lookit since the summer...
- We're aiming to *launch this spring*! (Yes, earlier than previously
estimated.) That means letting anyone develop and submit their own studies
on lookit.mit.edu. My APS Observer article
<https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/kids-in-their-comfort-zones>
has an overview of the current status and what people can do to get
started. (If you are interested in preparing a study to run on Lookit,
please go ahead and start on these steps - you don't need to ask for
permission, unless you have some specific concern you want to check in
about.)
-
A tutorial introduction
<https://lookit.readthedocs.io/en/develop/tutorial.html> to using Lookit
is now available so that new researchers can set aside a known amount of
time to work through step-by-step exercises and end up ready to put their
own studies online. We have about 12 people working through it as far as I
can tell. The first tutorial office hours
<https://lookit.readthedocs.io/en/develop/tutorial-access.html#where-to-go-for-help>
are this afternoon! I also presented a workshop on Lookit at the “Open
Developmental Science
<https://cogdevpreconference.wixsite.com/opendevscience>” preconference
at CDS this fall (materials available at that link).
- Undergrad student Kamaria Kaalund worked on social media outreach and
better understanding our participants' motivations during the fall term.
The quick conclusion? It's not as easy as we might hope to reach parents
via Facebook or Instagram, even using creative human-generated content :)
You can read her report on survey responses here
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AX2Ncacy_t46VQAgOZRfDmc_UToPEMTG_AEcUR2d-zM/edit?usp=sharing>.
- We have some new flyers
<https://github.com/lookit/research-resources/blob/master/Recruitment/Flyers%20Feb%202020(2).pdf>for
Lookit available. This turns out to have been exactly the wrong time to
make them, but someday when families are out and about at playgrounds,
libraries, etc. we will post them locally and are happy to send physical
copies to you if you want to help out!
- Our *beta testers* have continued testing, and a pilot of one
long-awaited study is now live: "Baby See, Baby Do?"
<https://lookit.mit.edu/studies/21dadb19-16bf-471c-b666-698905c8dcf9/>
(Laurie Bayet, American University) looks at *newborns' imitation of
parents* at home.asdas
*Platform development:*
- Rico's finishing up *transferring hosting* over from the Center for
Open Science, which will give us complete control over the CI/CD pipeline
and more ability to scale up. There are a lot more moving parts than I
realized.
- We also finished the *recruitment dashboard* which shows participation
and registration over time, as well as allowing tabulating by various
characteristics to evaluate how recruitment efforts work.
- I've made substantial changes to the *data download options* to make
it *easier to analyze and share data*, while minimizing the risk of
unintentional disclosure of personal information. You can now download an
overview with one line per response or a detailed file with data in a
fairly standard 'long' format, both with data dictionaries / dictionary
templates! You can omit potentially sensitive information like names, and
even download children's ages already rounded, to avoid storing birthdates
at all. By default Lookit now provides child and account IDs specific to
the study - so you don't have to worry about the potential for
de-anonymization via linking data across studies. (Changes summarized
here <https://github.com/lookit/lookit-api/issues/148> and here
<https://github.com/lookit/lookit-api/issues/321>)
- We've clarified some terminology and substantially simplified the user
interface for study editing. No more "building dependencies" (that's now
"building an experiment runner") and no more building separate containers
for the experiment vs. the preview. When selecting the version of the
experiment runner to use, you can see some information about what version
you're currently using and click "check for updates" to see what new is
available.
- *Study previews* now work exactly like participation, so that you can
see how everything works (including what your data and video downloads will
look like) without having to actually start your study. And you have the
option to share your study preview so that other experimenters can access
it to give feedback!
- The MIT’s Quest for Intelligence “Bridge” program has been working on
evaluating solutions for* automated gaze coding* of developmental video,
using datasets from Lookit and from Virginia Marchman’s lab. The most
promising starting point, OpenGaze
<https://perceptual.mpi-inf.mpg.de/opengaze-toolkit-released/>, has
proven extremely hard to get running at all; they're still trying, but also
exploring some other avenues. A visiting PhD student from Antonio
Torralba's group here at MIT will be working on using an entirely new
approach (reflection of the screen on the eye), which I think will be a
longer-term solution if it works out. I do still think we need a dedicated
person on this project, but realistically this is on hold for now given the
pandemic and general disruption to labs.
- A bunch more technical progress has happened in the background. It's
not very exciting to tell you bugs you didn't know existed are fixed... but
they
<https://github.com/lookit/lookit-api/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed>
are
<https://github.com/lookit/ember-lookit-frameplayer/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed>
.
*Funding:*
- Lookit is part of a collaborative Simons proposal to pilot a cognitive
task battery (approximate number, prosocial agent preferences, visual
prediction, CDI, ...) in infant sibs of kids with autism.
- We have funding for Rico and me for at least the next 12-18 months,
but are still looking for ways to hire other necessary staff (recruitment,
study support, someday ideally another developer), include more students,
bring in consultants as needed, etc. We're working with MIT Open Learning
on a broader fundraising strategy, but for now, *if you have a project
you plan to run on Lookit and you're applying for funding*, we'd be
grateful to hear about it and discuss writing in some appropriate amount of
support for the platform!
*What's next:*
- Before launch we have a few features to finish up, but our major
priority is getting an *independent review of potential security issues*
(risk assessment/scan, penetration testing). We're interviewing several
companies now; administrative issues regarding setting up a contract while
everything's shut down are the major unknown that will affect launch
timing.
- One of my priorities is adding experimental components to cover
typical things people want to do on Lookit. If you have an idea of the
study designs you want to run, it’d be really helpful to comment here
<https://github.com/lookit/ember-lookit-frameplayer/issues/72>
describing functionality you would ideally like.
*Learn more / get involved:*
-
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>
.
-
Documentation <https://lookit.readthedocs.io/en/develop/> about using
Lookit
<https://lookit.github.io/ember-lookit-frameplayer/modules/frames.html>
-
Development planning is organized on Github Issues on the various
Lookit-related repositories <https://github.com/lookit>. Check out
what’s planned when under “projects,” add your own feature requests, or
pick something to work on!
all the best,
Kim
---
Kim Scott
Research scientist | Early Childhood Cognition Lab | MI
*T*W: www.mit.edu/~kimscott | Participate: https://lookit.mit.edu
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