Team Grape Expectations completed their System Level Design Review this Tuesday!

An entire semester’s work culminated in SLDR, which was the final IPPD event of the year. At this event, our team was able to present our work to an audience of our peers, coaches, and liaisons. The presentation went very well, and it was rewarding to share all that we’ve done this semester as well as our plans for the coming semester! Our team was able to also watch the SLDR presentations of Teams Easy Money and Keysaurus. Some of these teams we had seen in previous reviews, and others we had never seen before, so it was interesting to see teams’ progress.

The SLDR event was more than the actual presentation – there was networking and a keynote speaker, which the team really enjoyed. Being able to talk with other team members, coaches, and liaisons in a stress-free environment led to some engaging conversations. The keynote speaker Mr. Jamie Kraft’s presentation was also very interesting, as he combined both business and engineering under the concept of innovation. It was very inspiring to consider the possibilities of what we can do as engineers, both in the context of our IPPD project and in general.

Overall, Team Grape Expectations has had a spectacular semester and we are very grape-ful to have accomplished all that we’ve done so far. Be on the lookout for us in the new year as we continue our project!

This week, Team Grape Expectations continued preparing for our System Level Design Review (SLDR) event by creating content and practicing presenting.

After receiving and reviewing critiques from our judges at PID, we were ready to begin work on improving the prototype and developing our SLDR presentation. The content in the presentation was updated to reflect improvements in the project. Additionally, we consolidated some slides while expanding on others, which we believe will help the audience’s overall comprehension of our project.

On Tuesday, we had a peer review event for SLDR, where we were able to present the current version of our SLDR presentation in order to get feedback from our peers and faculty members. We also got to see the presentations of teams Easy Money, Simplicitea, and Multivision. Having a group of peers with such diverse backgrounds was incredibly helpful for feedback purposes; some students could point out very specific details, while others gave us a good gauge of how audiences who are unfamiliar with the project concepts would react to the presentation. The questions from our peers and subsequent feedback will inform the changes and updates we make to our current SLDR presentation.

Next week is the final event (and final blog post!) of the semester. Stay tuned to see our final presentation!

Team Grape Expectations has completed their Prototype Inspection Day!

This week, our team was able to present the work we’ve completed on our prototype to a panel of judges consisting of faculty and staff associated with the IPPD program. We were super excited to show off all our hard work and receive feedback so we can continue improving our model!

At PID, we presented a brief background of the project, explained its importance, and presented the sources for the data that were used in our prototype. Then, we demonstrated the two software models we have thus far: our fire prediction model and our drought prediction model. In talking to our judges, we were able to identify weak points of the project and use their feedback to make improvements.

In the next few weeks, we will be preparing for our System Level Design Review (SLDR) presentation, which is our major end-of-year review of what we have done over this entire semester. With the improvements we now know to make to our prototype, we will have plenty of work before SLDR, but we’re excited to see how far we can bring this concept by the end of the semester.

This week Team Grape Expectations has been making great progress towards our prototype.

We are working hard on our prediction models. Currently, there are two models in development: drought prediction, and fire prediction. As the names suggest, the models are going to be used to predict whether or not there is a drought and/or fire, the severity of the event, and the duration of the event. These models are first drafts and have not yet been refined, so they will not be entirely accurate yet, but that is what we will work on for the rest of the semester.

We have also been developing a presentation for the biological engineering team to discuss at PID. With this presentation, the BE team will be able to receive feedback on the types of sources they are using, and hope to potentially have new sources recommended to them if judges are familiar with the topic.

In class this week, we listened to a very helpful presentation about negotiating offers by Erin Lin of the CCC. Since our team is all upper level students who will have job offers soon, learning how to conduct ourselves in an interview and how to talk to potential employers about offers was informative and will be directly relevant.

Team Grape Expectations has focused its efforts onto prototype creation in anticipation of Prototype Inspection Day in two weeks.

In class this week, we were able to have a long discussion about what we want our presentation to look like at PID. Similarly to how our actual project is working, we will be splitting our display into computer science and biological engineering components. The CS team will show their version of a wireframe of our intended model, which will include desired final functionality as well as key details like model training time. The biological engineering team will present the databases they have found so far. The CS and BE teams will be more connected at this presentation because the BE databases are directly feeding into the CS model, so everything is beginning to be integrated.

In order to have a fully functioning model, the the ML model will have had to be trained for a significant amount of time, which is not feasible to achieve by PID. However, if possible, we hope to have a smaller, simpler version of our final model (think a model that can predict whether or not there will be a fire at a particular location). We will be sure to post progress updates as we begin getting results from this simple model.

This week turned our focus to our prototype, which we aim to have completed in the beginning-middle of November. With our new findings in data sources in previous weeks, we are on track to having a model that can predict the likelihood of a fire.

Our CS team is hard at work creating visualizations of the data we currently have in order to demonstrate proof-of-concept. They are also starting the framework for our predictive model! Our Biological team is continuing to research for new, relevant sources of data so that the model can make the predictions as accurately as possible. They are also working with the CS team to transfer over the data we do have now.

This will be a couple of busy upcoming weeks, but it will be worth it to have a predictive prototype. Check back for updates on our progress!

This week, Team Grape Expectations presented our PDR to Terraview! The PDR let us showcase all of the work we’ve done up to this point of the semester, and it was very rewarding to see everything culminate in this big presentation. We had the opportunity to exhibit our PDR to our liaison, as well as the Head of Innovation at Terraview. The presentation went very well, and we are excited to keep showing off our work to Terraview as the project progresses.

In project progress this week, we began the process of integrating the found databases into our model. We have started gathering data in the correct formats that will be usable for our model, and transitioning any data that is not the correct format into a more usable one. The CS team should be able to have a working predictive model soon!