Blog Posts

Full Sprint Ahead

This past week has been extremely busy with the team preparing for prototype day!

Our team has set a very ambitious plan to present a live demo that will involve a workable version of our project. We hope that doing so will allow us to get feedback on both the technical design of our project as well as the user experience, as it relates to interacting with the pipeline.

Preparing for prototype day has been a very valuable experience for the team. From a technical perspective, it has encouraged us to productionize the models inside of our Jupyter notebooks. It has also forced us to consider different edge cases that may arise when users interact with the model.

We are looking forward to all of the feedback we get from the judges!

Planning Our Next Race

Things are very busy for the FAST Team! Next week is the Prototype Presentation day and we will be presenting our prototype to a panel of judges for feedback.

Each member of the group has been working on a distinct aspect of the project in order to develop the prototype. A lot of progress has been made so far and we are looking forward to our presentation! This will set us up well for next semester as we implement our project.

As part of the prototype development we have had the opportunity to work with some of the latest computer vision technology and with HiperGator. It has been a very valuable experience that will serve us well in our future endeavors.

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Sprinting Full Speed Ahead

Now that we have completed the PDR presentation things are getting very busy as we prepare for the upcoming prototype presentation day.

Last week we compiled all of the feedback we got from the PDR presentation and created a prototype plan. We have identified one module of the project — our bread and butter — that we will focus on for the prototype presentation day. We only have a few weeks to prepare this modules, so it is all hands on deck as we work to create this deliverable.

The group has divided into sub-teams that are each set to tackle one aspect of this module. Hopefully, by dividing up the module into distinct tasks we will be able to achieve something demonstrable by the prototype day. We will have some difficulties because there is still a lot of work to be done in acquiring the data that will be used in the final product, but there are some shortcuts we can take to achieve workable results come prototype presentation day.

Finishing First (or third)

This past week was very busy with the culmination of the PDR presentation. Here are some highlights:

  • Attended workshops on Professional Engineering Advice and Agile
  • Visit Fanatics and Present PDR
  • Team Bonding

Due to other teams being out for their PDR presentations, the IPPD program did not hold regular classes this week. Instead, we attended a series of two workshops during class time. One of the workshops that was hosted by an engineer from Raytheon, who gave advice for engineers entering the workforce. At the end of the workshop he hosted an interactive quiz based on the material from the workshop. F.A.S.T.’s very own Gabriel Brosula (playing for Gabriel Hernandez) came in third place – earning him some Raytheon swag.

We also went to Jacksonville this week and visited Fanatics HQ to prepare our presentation. We received some great feedback and really enjoyed our time in Jacksonville. Photos from this event will be in our blog next week!

Stretching for the Race

We are wrapping up another busy week of IPPD! The primary focus of this week has been preparing for the upcoming PDR presentation. We have been working closely with our Liaison and Coach to prepare a presentation that will both show off all of the progress we have made and ensure that we are all on the same page.

Some highlights of this week include:

  • Deliver the presentation to an audience
  • Receive data from Fanatics
  • Plan trip to Jacksonville

We will be visiting Fanatics headquarters in Jacksonville next week! Engineers from California happen to be in the office on the day that we are visiting, so it will be a great opportunity to make connections with the company. We are looking forward to it!

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Learning to Pitch

Dr. Lawrence Tinker

Today makes the completion of another very busy week! Some of the highlights include:

  • Developing our elevator pitches in a workshop
  • Testing baseline models using popular data sets
  • Working towards the PDS presentation

This week we participated in a workshop with Dr. Lawrence Tinker where we learned to pitch our project to a variety of audiences. At the same time we are each working on developing baseline models for each of the components of our machine learning pipeline. We have create Jupyter Notebooks that we presented to Fanatics to get feedback on our current approaches. We have further split up each of the tasks, so that we each have an area to focus on. At the end of the semester we will be compiling all of these components for the presentation of our prototype.

We have also been working hard on preparing our PDR presentation and paper. For this assignment we will be compiling all of our project documents into a 20 minute presentation and paper. For this assignment we will be traveling to Fanatics and sharing our vision for the project. This will be useful for ensuring we are on the same page as Fanatics, while also getting to make a connection with them in person. We are looking forward to sharing it with them and meeting the team!

Earning Our Name

This week was cut short due to Hurricane Irma. School was cancelled, so we do not have as many updates to give as normal. However, we do have some new to report from this past weekend!

This past Sunday the team participated in the Six Sigma White Belt Training hosted by Florida Power and Light. This workshop introduced the concepts of Six Sigma – namely, how to improve the efficiency and efficacy of a process. In this training we were presented with a messy car-sales process and were tasked to approach the Six Sigma principles to improves this process. Each team derived and then implemented their own solutions. Our team came up with the most effective solution and selling the highest amount of cars in the shortest time — living up to our name, FAST.

Planning The Race

Our first team photo!

We have reached the end of the third week! In this blog post we will talk about the primary focus of this week – planning! The foundation of every successful project is a well-though and thorough plan. That is why we have worked as a team to create a project roadmap that gives us flexibility as a team, while also allowing flexibility. We also had our first liaison meeting this week and they emphasized the importance on their end of establishing dates by which we will have deliverable available. We will be presenting this project roadmap to our clients this week to get feedback and ensure that we are all on the same page!

Other accomplishments this week include:

  • Compile individual project pitches into baseline design
  • First meeting with Liaison
  • Updating and finalizing Scope of Work
  • HiperGator training and onboarding
  • Complete Project Design Specification document

Next week is going to be busy! We will be completing our first month report, which will include finalized versions of the reports that we have been working on and our review of literature. We also hope to start generating baseline metrics for some of the machine learning models that we have identified in our research.

Learning How to Run

Our Logo

Today marks the end of the second week with our team! We have been very busy this week working on the early stages of our project and finishing all of the IPPD on-boarding tasks. We are officially presenting our team logo, the Hermes Sandal, which represents the importance of speed to our project.

This week we began reviewing the literature surrounding computer vision, object detection, and other machine learning models in an effort to begin developing a strategy for our system. Our project has a huge research component due to the novelty of the problem. Clearly, we want our final product to be fast; the goal of this literature review is to learn approaches we can take to achieve this speed along with an acceptable accuracy. The product of this review is going to be a pitch from each team member as to what our end-to-end machine learning pipeline should look like – more on that next week!

For this upcoming week we will also be finalizing our scope of work, splitting the components of projects into “wants” and “needs”, and outlining quantifiable measures for these specifications. We will also be finalizing both our organizational roles, as well as our technical roles on the team. Speaking of technology, we are going to be completing HiperGator training this week so that we can gain access to that system.

We look forward to the week ahead and hope to have some more exciting updates for you next week!

Off to a FAST Start

Fanatics Logo

Hi! Welcome to the start of our blog series! We are Team 7 for the IPPD program, and we will be working with Fanatics, Inc for the Fall and Spring Semesters. In this blog series, we will document our experiences on this journey of innovation and discovery. Our team name is FAST, and it stands for Fanatics Apparel Search Tool.

As the first week comes to an end, we are happy to share some of the fun moments with our team. It was uplifting to know that every single one of the five members was given their 1st choice project because it shows that we are all very passionate and committed to this project. Getting to know each other and working together during this week’s lecture, also gave a great outlook on how well we will communicate throughout this project. We also worked on a Scope of Work (SoW) document in which we all worked individually and then compiled the best responses to form a unified SoW. This unified SoW helped us to understand the project on a deeper level and it sparked some really interesting questions.

We are looking forward to meeting with both our coach and liaison next week to help clarify our questions, and to learn more about the project’s deadlines and requirements.

If you wish to know more about our individual team members, make sure you visit our Meet This Team tab for more information!