Although Final Design Review (FDR) arrived rapidly on Tuesday, April 23rd, the CHAMPS were prepared for the five-hour-long event. The day began with setup and liaisons-only presentations, followed by a fantastic panel featuring Miguel Abdo. Shortly thereafter, the team presented to Verifone, EchoPilot with Freedom Scientific, and Solaris with Captured Sun. The ballroom doors promptly opened to guests at 5 p.m. and the CHAMPS continued their successful presentations into the afternoon. Unfortunately, all good things come to an end and the CHAMPS bid the attending students, liaisons, and faculty goodbye. The team has since been working on delivering the project documents and completing the final checklist. As promised, readers can now view the CHAMPS promotional video at the end of the blog.

The CHAMPS would like to thank the Verifone liaisons, Darryl Miller, Brian Russell, and Miguel Abdo, for their hands-on collaboration and support, Dr. Rong Zhang for her continued guidance and generosity, and the IPPD faculty for their encouragement and the opportunity to participate in the IPPD program. While this blog post concludes the project and semester, the CHAMPS intend to remain in contact with their liaisons and hope to meet again. This project brought together a wonderful team and will remain a cherished memory as each member graduates. Go Gators!

The CHAMPS recently concluded their Final Design Review (FDR) poster. This digital piece will be featured throughout the event as the CHAMPS detail their hard work to an audience of university faculty, students, and IPPD liaisons. The poster aims to summarize the overall project problem and solution as seen in the machine learning system design, model engineering procedures, and inference server specifications. The CHAMPS also included a link to a short project demonstration that will be explained in detail during the presentation.

With roughly two weeks left before final documentation and project work is due, the CHAMPS spent this week actively completing the long list of tasks ahead. The model engineering team tackled more model training, serving environment setup, and evaluations. Meanwhile, the feature engineering team split to progress through the prototype client and additional feature adjustments. The CHAMPS are also writing project documentation, guides, and Final Design Review (FDR) reports into the next week. Other work that requires the team’s attention is the promotional video and FDR presentation. Despite the looming workload, thanks to Coach Ronnie’s guidance, the team remains on track to successfully deliver the project to the Verifone liaisons. Stay tuned for the FDR report draft review and overall team progress.

What a busy, yet productive week. The CHAMPS completed a successful presentation during Prototype Inspection Day (PID) and filmed a draft of their promotional video. The team presented to four committee members including coach Rong “Ronnie” Zhang, Laura Cruz Castro, Edwin Marte, and Gadhaun Aslam on Tuesday, April 2nd. Their feedback emphasized a need to refine the testing plan as well as some adjustments to the presentation for further clarity. The CHAMPS have since regrouped with coach Ronnie to discuss the action plan for next week. Aside from conducting more testing and improving model accuracy, the team will also prioritize documentation materials and a simple user interface. As for the promotional video, the team filmed a short skit depicting a gas station customer, store owner, credit card thief, and CHAMPS engineer to showcase the importance of the project. The team will be receiving feedback from other IPPD students and will release the polished video in the upcoming weeks.

The CHAMPS are now a month away from the Final Design Review (FDR) and rapidly completing model adjustments for the upcoming Prototype Inspection Day (PID) next Tuesday. The model engineering team designed a prototype system for the model-serving strategy and enhanced the ensemble method to discuss results during the weekly liaison meeting. Meanwhile, the feature engineering team is actively tackling the real-time preprocessing functionality. Since the week is also busy with the completion of PID presentation materials, the CHAMPS will begin shooting the promotional video next week. Nevertheless, the team continues to remain on track and is excited to share their progress with Brian and Darryl each week. Stay tuned for behind-the-scenes clips from filming day.

The CHAMPS are quickly readjusting to their school routines and prioritizing project work for the month ahead. As promised, the team returned with model outputs for Brian and Darryl to review this week. Although the finish line is rapidly approaching, the team left Thursday’s meeting with positive feedback. The next step for the project remains the implementation of real-time analysis and fine-tuning model output. On Tuesday afternoon the CHAMPS attended a creative lecture on storytelling with Dr. Elif Akçali, Associate Professor in Industrial & Systems Engineering at the University of Florida. The purpose of the class was to brainstorm storyboards for the upcoming project promotional video. Consequently, the CHAMPS spent a portion of their week drafting an enticing storyboard and planning a short film schedule. While the final video will certainly be featured on the blog, the current plan is to shoot at a local gas station with Verifone hardware in a week or two.

The team is currently enjoying some time away from school on a week-long spring break. Nevertheless, the CHAMPS will return to weekly meetings with new model output to review. The ensemble method is provided promising results with fewer than 5 warnings per day. Although the team concluded a few results were likely not anomalous events, the Verifone liaisons will be able to confirm model accuracy next week.

The CHAMPS are approaching Spring Break with steady progress throughout the week. The feature engineering team implemented and tested several feature reduction methods—albeit with minimal success. However, research and evaluation is necessary due to the project’s complexity. The feature engineering team will attempt different approaches to further understand and refine the models. Nevertheless, the CHAMPS progressed on the testing front with the creation of synthetic data based on known anomalies reported by Verifone. The model engineering team implemented an ensemble method and will finetune the prediction system next week. Recently, the team also reviewed the Final Design Report (FDR) outline with the Verifone liaisons and coach Ronnie. Although the CHAMPS will take time off during Spring Break, the team plans to improve model functionality briefly. Next week’s blog will cover how the team spent their holidays and the next steps for the AI Commander project.

Another week of celebration is upon the CHAMPS as the team completed a successful Qualification Review Board (QRB) 2 panel. On Tuesday, February 27th, the five team members presented an overview and status update of the AI Commander project to Dr. Catia Silva, Dr. Rong “Ronnie” Zhang, and Dr. Cheryl Resch. The CHAMPS received positive feedback from all three coaches as well as several recommendations. More specifically, the QRB 2 committee suggested the team explore label propagation with clustering to combat the challenges of the unlabeled dataset. The CHAMPS will research and possibly implement this method in the following weeks to bypass training delays due to the restrictions on Verifone to obtain flagged data. Nevertheless, the team remains in consistent contact with the Verifone liaisons as their knowledge and approval are crucial for the model validation plan. Now that the pressure of QRB is over, the CHAMPS will resume regular project work. The feature engineering team is continuing feature reduction and creating synthetic testing data. Meanwhile, the model engineering team will implement an ensemble method to determine final model predictions. Keep up the good work everyone!