The Setup:

The long-awaited Prototype Inspection Day finally arrived, and Team Cemantics was ready to showcase all our hard work. As we reached the Rion Ballroom on the third floor of the Reitz Union, we were met with an impressive and sophisticated setup. A large front desk with volunteers kept everything running smoothly. The atmosphere was filled with excitement and nerves as some teams were still setting up while others looked calm and confident.

We greeted Dr. Edward, who wished us the best for the event, and quickly got to work. Using the monitor, extension box, and cables we got, we set up our station with three displays — one showing our AI Days poster, one for our prototype implementation, and another for our pitch presentation. Within minutes, we were ready to begin.

First Interaction:

Our first judges were Professor Cheryl Resch and PhD student Roubin Chen. The presentation flowed naturally from introduction to requirements, theory, solution, and implementation. It felt authentic since we had not rehearsed it before. Their questions focused on backend functionality and testing methods, helping us refine our answers for the next rounds.

Second Interaction:

Next, we presented to our coach, Dr. Sanethia V Thomas, and Professor Andrea Goncher. Wanting to be perfect in front of our coach made us a little anxious, and our delivery lost its smoothness. We received valuable feedback on security validation, data access control, and model choices for vectorization and retrieval. This helped us realign our structure for the next session.

Third Interaction:

Our final session was with a former IPPD student and Professor Rhog Zhang. They shared that our poster was crowded and encouraged more visuals for large screen readability. They also reminded us that having all six members present would better reflect teamwork, even though our two person approach kept the pitch seamless.

In the end, the day was a great success. The feedback we received was thoughtful and practical. We immediately used it to improve our implementation and later gave a demo to our liaisons on the following day, who were very happy with our progress. Their encouragement keeps us motivated as we continue refining the system for the upcoming SLDR.