In 2019 I was employed as a Research Assistant to the Psycholody Dept. with Abertay University, funded by the Norman Fraser Design Trust, to work with Human Resources Intelligence on the development of HaRi-Bot. HaRi-Bot is an artificial intelligence chatbot that deals with human resource requests, an additional member to a company's HR team.

I first encountered HRI during the 2018 Abertay Challenege internship where I acted as lead designer on multiple teams, one of which was tasked with developing a prototype for HaRi-Bot. I maintained a professional relationship with HRI while completing the fourth year of my degree, offering technical opinions or design guidance as the HaRi-Bot prototype I had helped develop was taken forward and turned into a real product.

Working on HaRi-Bot gave me the opportunity to work with cutting edge artificial intelligence technology from Microsoft, and introduced me to a developing websites with ASP.NET MVC architecture, working with SQL databases, HTML, Javascript, and a variety of web development packages.

My time working with HRI was in many ways a trial by fire, in which I gained valuable experiencing solving problems as a solo developer, working with a client under time constraints, and working with unfamiliar programming languages, tools, and codebases. Though not all the skills I learned will directly translate into video game development skills, the work experience as a programmer I gained was invaluable.