Internship Inside Out
From Code to Emotional Insights
Hello everyone! This is Adel and Nadia, and we’re here to share our experience as undergraduate interns for this 2024 summer. In this internship, we participated in developing the LLM-assisted mobile diary app that helps users reflect on their emotions, with built-in emotion analysis powered by LLM. This allows users to write daily entries and receive feedback that supports their emotional growthInitially, Nadia was assigned with the front-end-focused tasks while Adel handled the back end, but as the project progressed, we both dove into full-stack development, broadening our technical skills. We also explored several diary application designs, covering both research contributions and commercial applications. In addition, we also conducted a small initial user study to verify our proposed approach.
Throughout the two-month internship, we’ve summarized our experiences through our research diaries.
Nadia’s Research Diary:
During my first internship as an undergraduate researcher, I’ve learned a lot about HCI research. As a double major in BTM at KAIST, I’m used to focusing on what users want when creating a product, without much thought on the methods behind creating them. So, I initially approached the internship with that mindset. However, as the project went on, I realized that research is not just about making something–it’s about justifying why we developed it, why we chose certain tools, and every other detail along the way. At first it hurts reading the comments and suggestions from the mentors and other lab members, but after giving some thought I realized why they called it constructive criticism. I’ve also learned more efficient development techniques and become familiar with key research tools and methods in HCI. Despite not knowing a lot of those things, they never made me feel small about it, which I think made IC Lab a really supportive environment for personal and professional growth. I think this experience has solidified my interest in pursuing HCI in the future.
Adel’s Research Diary:
“Oh, you’re a CS student, you must’ve known how to code an app.”
Nope, I actually never developed an app before, or at least properly. The project I did before mostly ended until the Figma prototype, we did not implement it. So, I applied to this internship in the hope of getting experience in mobile app development, which I got. But, throughout the internship, there is more to learn than just developing the app. I learned how to simplify things in real life and interpret them to things that can be implemented using codes, which in this case is how human brains store and recall memories. I never thought I would need to understand human brains to do a CS project. So, to code is one thing, but to think about the concept is a whole different thing.
This is my first time being surrounded by a lot of HCI graduate students so it is interesting to hear a lot of opinions and feedback during the presentations. I also got a glimpse of a CS graduate school life both through this project and socializing with people in HCI lunch, which might help me decide on the next step after finishing my undergraduate study.
To recap, here is my internship experience in Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotion!
Overall, this internship has served as a foundation for our future endeavors in the realm of HCI research. Shout out to Thu, Yugyeong, and Gyuwon for becoming such an amazing mentor for us, sharing a lot of things, and taking care of us for the past two months. We would also like to thank the other lab members for their constructive feedback and for sharing a different point of view in seeing our project. Last but not least, we would like to extend our gratitude to Prof Uichin Lee for providing us with an amazing internship opportunity in IC Lab. With the experience we’ve gathered from this internship, we hope we can make a genuine contribution to the HCI research society.
About Us
