Hey everyone,

We’ve just had a big week before Thanksgiving break! We had our Prototype Inspection Day (PID) on Tuesday, where we demonstrated our prototype to several rounds of judges. On Wednesday, we traveled to Clearwater to present our prototype to our sponsors Thursday morning. We also had a lecture the following Tuesday to discuss what our SLDR will be like.

Prototype Inspection Day (PID)

On this day, we demonstrated our prototype to three rounds of judges. They varied in their backgrounds, which gave us different perspectives of how we should have conveyed our project. For example, one of our judges was not as aware of how large language models were trained, while another was a machine learning professor. This variance led us to consider questions that we had not considered when thinking about the questions that we would be asked. Additionally, it gave us more insight into how we could change our demonstration itself. Many judges found the more technical parts of our presentation challenging and preferred to focus on our demo.

Clearwater Travel

At Clearwater, we were going to give a presentation to 40+ Freedom Scientific employees, who were mainly involved in the engineering side of the company. Here, we gave an updated and longer version of the presentation that we gave at PID. Then, we gave a demo of our Copilot. Here, we received more feedback that was related to JAWS, given that our audience included advanced JAWS users.

Preparing for System Level Design Review (SLDR)

In our lecture on the Tuesday following PID, we discussed starting our draft for the SLDR report. This report will detail the process of developing a successful deliverable Copilot. That will be what is coming up this next week – we will be finishing up our SLDR draft, stay tuned!