As the Qualification Review Board (QRB) committee of coaches emphasized a couple of weeks ago, the Commander project lacks a model output evaluation method. While the CHAMPS continued to improve the models this week, the team prioritized developing testing data with Verifone liaisons, Darryl Miller and Brian Russell. Due to persistent legal constraints, the two liaison engineers are unable to provide flagged data from real-life fraudulent occurrences. Nevertheless, the CHAMPS and coach Dr. Zhang met with Brian and Darryl on Thursday to notate examples of anomalous behavior. The team can now fine-tune the models and features to catch the sequences highlighted by the liaisons. In the meantime, the CHAMPS accomplished a variety of tasks this week. The model team finished training the sequence-to-sequence model and built an interference pipeline. Concurrently, the feature engineering team created variance functions, analyzed feature reduction methods, and improved the unified preprocessor. The CHAMPS are expecting to receive more data from Brian and Darryl for training purposes next week and continue to steadily progress through the semester.

The CHAMPS began outlining the Final Design Report this week and with that, they reprioritized the list of necessary tasks and improvements. Deadlines are slowly approaching, but the team is determined to progress every couple of days. The model engineering team recently developed a proposal for a model architecture capable of handling the amount of data the Commander Site Controllers would be transmitting. Although implementation for this advanced model is still underway, the model engineering team also constructed a test pipeline. Meanwhile, the feature engineering team restructured the model preprocessing and added specialized features for two more event types. The feature engineering team then began combating the inefficiency of the current models by using singular value decomposition (SVD) for dimensionality reduction. In the next couple of days, the CHAMPS will be evaluating and fine-tuning the SVD functionality for the upcoming model architecture as well as researching other methods of feature reduction. Stay tuned for how the team progresses as they remain focused on project work.

February is off to a busy start for the CHAMPS. On Tuesday, January 30th, 2024, the team delivered their Qualification Review Board (QRB) presentation to a committee of coaches including Dr. Rong Zhang, Dr. Jorg Peters, and Dr. Catia Silva. The presentation discussed the project overview and progress as well as risks and mitigation strategies. Based on the feedback, the CHAMPS performed well with only a few adjustments to make to their ongoing plan. Dr. Silva explained that the team lacks a model output evaluation method and recommended that the CHAMPS utilize synthetic data to measure accuracy. The team has since discussed this issue with Verifone on Thursday and the liaisons are actively working to provide data for testing purposes. The QRB review committee also deliberated that the presentation lacked system usage and process details. Consequently, the CHAMPS are addressing these comments for the QRB 2 presentation on February 27th by including system design diagrams, deployment outlines, and the motivation behind each model architecture. During the rest of the week, the team also made progress with dimensionality reduction, researching ensemble methods, and implementing the isolation forest. The CHAMPS will continue working on these tasks into the next week with hopeful results of increased model efficiency.

Welcome back to the weekly CHAMPS update! The team is steadily overcoming challenges as members prepare for the Qualification Review Board (QRB) panel next Tuesday. Michael and John successfully debugged the training issue while Sarah began feature reduction on specific events to simplify the model. The CHAMPS are continuing to explore a sequence-to-sequence model to later build individual models for select event types. However, since Sara and Itzel completed analyzing the journal events provided by Verifone, the team can proceed with refactoring and dimensionality reduction. Although the CHAMPS require more data and examples of anomalous events for improved model accuracy, members are moving forward with the information available. In other news, the CHAMPS are finalizing their QRB presentation this weekend and practicing for the first panel. The upcoming blog will cover the team performance and feedback as well as model progress. 

Although the team is early into the spring semester, the CHAMPS have already increased collaborative efforts to maintain project deadlines. For example, the CHAMPS embraced the use of Jira for weekly tracking, improving project management, and updating the Gantt chart to accurately reflect the semester’s roadmap. Itzel and Sara analyzed the remaining event types while Sarah focused on performing feature reduction on existing IP and credit card features. Michael continued work on system optimization and began tackling a CNN-LSTM retraining issue. Simultaneously, John focused on researching and developing a detailed report on the sequence-to-sequence model. The team also reconnected with Verifone sponsors, Darryl Miller and Brian Russell, this week. The CHAMPS must now compile a list of requests and questions based on their analysis. Members will continue to analyze events into the next week for feature reduction and optimization. At the moment the team is working closely with coach Dr. Rong Zhang to collaboratively debug a training issue. Stay tuned for further updates on this exciting journey.

Welcome back to the official team blog that follows the journey of five IPPD students and their project for Verifone. The CHAMPS members have rang in the new year and returned from the holidays. Today marks the end of the first week of classes and the team has spent these past few days regrouping and refinding the action plan for the semester. The team created Gantt charts to enhance project management and assigned upcoming tasks to each member. Next week the CHAMPS will meet with Verifone liaisons Darryl Miller and Brian Russell to analyze the current state of the model and discuss the remaining tasks.