The sporting transfer season my be on hold but QxLab has two new additions for the summer. Every year summer interns join the lab to gain experience working in a research environment.
Last year’s summer intern, Matthew Parker, from Texas Tech University, developed a Unity application for VR experiments using an Oculus Quest to investigate the effect of the spatial audio on the perception of speech. This led to a 2019 publication at AICS. Matthew was in touch to let us know that he has been offered a PhD position beginning later in the year at Rice University.
![](http://qxlab.ucd.ie/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Photo_khushboo-e1591297285274-150x150.jpg)
This year, Khushboo Satpute and Qijian Zhang join the lab from the UCD MSc programme. Khushboo has over 6 years of experience working in academia. She is working on a chatbot system for mental health research using the Google DialogFlow Cloud Platform. This work is in collaboration with Prof. Louise McHugh in the UCD School of Psychology.
![](http://qxlab.ucd.ie/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bio_Photo-e1591297140962-150x150.jpg)
Qijian has experience in front end web development and is developing of web-based listening and speech test platform.
This year our interns are the first to experience remote internships due to the COVID-19 campus closure. The lab social Zoom sessions and Slack channels keep us in touch and we hope that they will enjoy their experience working in QxLab.