Hey,  everyone! For our inaugural blog post, I’d like to tell you a bit about who we are, and what to expect from our company and our blog.

I’m Lauren Schmidt.  I’ve got a background in cognitive science research as well as computer science, and I’ve spent many hours hacking together online experiments using various online tools that were built without scientists in mind — as well as coding experiments from scratch.  I’ve also spent lots of hours trying to recruit participants to come into the lab for experiments, and working to make our schedules align.  Now I’d like to make everyone else’s research a lot easier, as well as my own.   That’s why I’ve co-founded HeadLamp Research.   Working with me on this project is Hilary Mason.  She’s a professor of computer science and an experienced developer who has a history of building technical tools to help people access and analyze data.  We both want to make people’s lives easier and more fun.

We’re setting up an online platform that’s powerful enough for all researchers to design studies on, while also being easy to use — whether or not you have any programming experience.  We’re also going to essentially play matchmaker for researchers and participants; if you’re a researcher who needs participants for a study, we’ll help you find the people you need, with the demographics and skills you require.  If you want to participate in some fun studies and make some money, we’ll make it simple for you to find rewarding studies to participate in.  We’ll  make payment easy as well.

In this blog, we’ll keep you updated about the development of our research tools.  We’ll also be discussing the needs of researchers online, the demographics and interests of people participating in studies online, and other data we collect or run across in our own research.  We’ll be showing some graphs and figures, because we love data!

Stick around!  We’re looking forward to sharing our ideas and hearing yours.