Team Banary and others actively listening to the inspiring Engineering Ethics lecture.

This week marked the first week back from the long winter break. Gone is the spacious surroundings between different teams, as we move from Turlington Hall to CSE 119, a more traditional classroom environment. It was great to see everyone again and share stories of our winter break adventures before beginning our lesson on Standard of Care for Engineers, taught by the esteemed guest lecturer: WIlliam J. “Bill” McElroy, Professional Engineer.

This lecture challenged us to improve our understanding of engineering ethics, emphasizing the importance of creating with care and ensuring the intent is never to harm the user. We explored how credibility, a function of both character and competence, is the driving force for adhering to the Standard of Care. As a wise one said, “If we don’t believe in the messenger, we won’t believe the message.” This idea captured the essence for leadership, showcasing how trust, integrity, and alignment between actions and words transform into credibility.

As Banary’s project, CodeMine, is a software project, the Standard of Care is still important. CodeMine is not intended to harm the user’s data or cause the user’s computer to implode.

Following the inspirational lecture, Banary had just 10 minutes to create a presentation outlining our semester plan, which we would later present in class for 5 minutes. We quickly split up into different sections: Critical Path, January Work Breakdown, and Risks & Mitigation Strategies. This gave us an opportunity to reflect on our present accomplishments and organize an action plan for the month. In just eight minutes, we completed our presentation and confidently delivered our plan of action.

During the Q&A session, we addressed keys questions, such as, “What if the path you follow does not yield a solution?”, to which we answered “We will document every step we did to get to a solution, and if it does not work out, we will have evidence that it did not.”

Overall, this week was an excellent start to the semester. We’re excited to implement the new method, known as a recurrent neural network (RNN), into CodeMine and continue making progress on our project. As well as discussing this method with our RTX liaisons to keep informed.

— Team Banary