Portfolio BLOG by Lee Zheng Wee

Its one more week to demo day!!! and we have completed most of our project thankfully. The only thing left is to patch up on our report and improve on some of the functionalities in our system. It is currently working very well, what we expected. For the facial recognition wise, it is very accurate in detecting and registering faces now.  There’s not much available to discuss this week as we are just patching up on some main features and working on new improvements concepts. Meanwhile, enjoy some of our screenshots of our system.

One of our main feature to improve accuracy, is by making sure that only one person is being detected at one time

Week 15 is here and Sprint 4 has just started! Most of our project has been completed and this week should be our final week of preparation before we prepare everything for Demo Day and our final presentation! Hopefully we can get things done and ready by this week.

For features wise, we have decided to implement a blink feature, which could improve a lot of accuracy within the system, basically making sure that users don’t just use a photo of their friends to mark this attendance. For their attendance to be marked, they will have to blink in front of the camera such that it will take their attendance. Hopefully this will improve the usability of our system and make it more innovative and reliable for students. Currently, for Website wise, we have worked out on most of our features already and they are functional, but still trying on how to improve on the different UIs. 

This Week marks the end of sprint 3!! After this sprint, we have completed majority of the facial recognition attendance system and it is more accurate than ever! We are now trying to fix it up to find a way to prevent users from using pictures to mark attendance, by helping their friends who are absent. Currently we are also working on our WEB prototype to display the attendance in a more systematic way with graphs and Charts to showcase the attendance system.

Some Changes we are intending to make, to alert users of their attendance when it falls near the minimum attendance required, and also maybe some security features would be neat too. Hopefully we would be able to push for the best features by the demo day which is happening after the next sprint. We don’t have much time but we will try our best!!!

After a huge hiatus from our Portfolio Project and spending time on our other modules/assignments, we have finally come back to continue on our Portfolio project, Eyeris after many weeks.

As the week started and as we conducted constant daily scrums, we have decided to change alot of things and requirements from our previous weeks of assignment and building. We found alot of requirements to be very unrealistic in many ways, therefore had to scrap some of them away, such as “ tracking student’s attentiveness” which was just a little too far of our reach in our opinions. However, we also have decided to add more requirements to the scrum board that will fit in our project nicely, more realistic goals to strive for and what really matters, such as the analysis side of the attendance and allowing others to check attendance. 

This week we have done alot more planning than technical materials and objectives, whereby i hope to be able to complete the requirements. Oh and also its the first week of Sprint 3 already so we better get going quick!

Week 6 has just started but unfortunately, we will be pausing our portfolio project progress for now and focus on other assignments. We have taken the time from Hackathon last week to clearly visualise what needs to be done and implement it in a more efficient way.

Hackathon day has arrived!!! For this week we were given 3 full days to focus on our project and develop our product for smart campus. After the 3 days, we were tasked to pitch our product to our teacher-in-charge and also another external tutor acting as the product owner. For these 3 days, we made several progress in our face tracking and could keep attendance according to the class. Additionally we also implemented a website using asp.net to import data from the attendance excel sheet system, and also a login system for students and lecturers alike. 

After it was over, they chose a group to present in front of the cohort. Unfortunately, we didn’t get picked but I am still very glad that me and my team’s progress at how productive we were.

Another week has past and for this week, we made quite a bit of progress for our project. We got our code running! and it can detect our faces now. How it works is that we add our faces as images into an image bank, and the code will run the camera to check whether we can be found in the image bank. If our faces are not, it will display as “unknown”. Currently we are nowhere near completing this feature but i feel its a very good start! 

For week 3, we learnt the process of Sprint planning so that we can further our project and follow the format of things. We also learnt the details of the physical Scrum board and the Digital Scrum board. I feel like for this week we have really furthered our planning phase and all of us generally know most of our system requirements already which is good progress from last week. Apart from that, we also setup our digital scrum board using Trello, which lists the details and backlog of the current sprint we are doing, also putting in the user points to each of the user stories. Now that the inception deck is completed, we can get into things and start with the coding ! Here’s some of the pictures and progress we made from this week!

^^^Screenshots from our digital scrum board, Trello

After brainstorming with my team for some ideas on what to do, we have come up with a smart solution which will improve the smart classroom. We have decided to produce a facial recognition system which stores in attendance through the student’s face and registers automatically, instead of the traditional way that we are using now. For now, this is the main feature that we have come up with for our project and we plan to start brainstorming for more additional features before the next sprint review so that we can get things done. Another thing we did this week was creating our Scrum board!!! We started on some of our user stories by writing down our requirements and starting our first sprint, pasting these user stories on the board.  Eyeris, improving the smart classroom, a smart campus solution

This marks the start of my Portfolio 2 project and for my project ! I have chosen to do Smart solutions for Smart campus and hopefully I will be able to work well with my team. Since i personally know my team as they are my classmates, i believe that we will be able to come up with something interesting and exciting by cooperating well with one another. We have nor really decided on what we want to do as of yet but all i know is this is going to be a big project, hope it goes well !!!

For the other talk, I attended the SmartNation Connect Talk. 

As part of the nation’s push to create a tech-enabled solutions, The smart nations initiatives are developed to solve these problems in a technological advanced way. By creating a tech-savvy society, it will help bridge concerns of the nation and provide opportunities for the community to solve these problems.

There were 2 speakers, one of which regarding Geonomic being implemented into Singapore’s data infrastructure system and the other regarding improving daily lives with sensors.

For one of the FP2 talks i attended Echelon Asia Summit 2019. Echelon is a technology event where you learn, discover and meet for opportunities across Asia’s emerging markets and ecosystem.

It features Founders, Future, and Capital: Three stages that feature veteran and upcoming entrepreneurs, tech trends and insights, and discussions about the investment landscape in Asia.

I attended one of the talks in eichelon regarding the topic of Blockchain technology. Basically it is a growing list of records, called , which are linked using cryptography. Through the talk i have learnt the different ways of how blockchain technology is used, such as digital currency and online information. Being a series of data recorded, each of these blocks are securely stored and bound to one another using cryptography principles.

I learnt the importance of data and information being distributed and also hope can go attend more talks some day regarding this issue.

 For our service learning project, we were supposed to teach the elderly the importance of keeping up culturally with society through technology and being culturally aware by teaching them how to use their mobile phones. We visited Radin Mas CC on 2 different Saturdays, the first being on , with the planning of this event happening over the span of the 2 months we had. For the 2 different Sessions, me and my class went with 3 other classes since the project was too large to handle by one class. I didn’t really know what to expect since I had little to no experience in this field hence was feeling quite nervous. Honestly, we were just hoping that everything was going to go according to plan since we had done so much planning. I was then given the tutor role in the Chinese class since I could speak Chinese. Each class would have a presenter and a set of slides and we were supposed to teach them according to what was being presented. Thankfully most of my classmates got assigned the same roles and I knew most of the tutors in the room. After everything was set up, the elderly came in and thankfully, I was assigned a very kind and caring elderly woman. 

As time passed, while guiding her through the session she had talked about many personal stuff, and I felt it was very fun to talk to her about it. Guess that was when I realised I could also learn something from this service learning experience. It was really very exciting to share my stories and listen to hers as it made me feel at ease. It did not seem like I was teaching, rather me sharing information while she shared hers. The elderly woman I got was a very optimistic and down to earth person, she had a lot of personal experience in the past which makes her think that happiness is the number one thing everyone should live by as she emphasised it countless of times.

This experience had given me a lot of motivation to continue to learn stuff that i do not know about just like the elderly and never give up. The good thing about this experience or service learning in general from my perspective, is that not only do the elderly learn, I also get to grow personally through the experience.

Based on Academic learning,

I feel the skills needed to execute this service I mainly patience and open-mindedness. For this particular session, we are dealing with the elderly whom are not technologically advanced and sometimes are slower in their way of thinking. Thankfully, for my elder, she had learnt and absorbed most of what I had taught her. I was afraid she would not get it at first but after letting her try out the phone and testing her on some of the features I could see that she was able to use the phone which made me quite elated. I felt very happy as it turned out to be a success after all the planning that our class had done and I’m glad that I was able to help out someone else after all.

Based on Personal Growth

During the experience, I personally felt nervous since I didn’t know if I would be much help to the old folks. I was quite anxious before the session because there  was not much training given and was scared I was going to screw it up. However, during the session itself I felt more comfortable as the elderly were actually very friendly and talkative. They shared their experiences and I soon realised that we had a lot in common. I also learnt how wrong my stereotypes were. Before the session, I perceived the seniors to be quite annoying as they can tend to be very grumpy and nag at times. I thought that it would be very boring and they wouldn’t be attentive. After the session I learnt that although there is an age gap, they can be very fun to talk to and are very willing learners. Some values that I have learnt are that learning is a life long process as shown by my partner i was teaching.

Based on Civic Learning,

Through talking with the elderly and learning more about them, I realised that one thing that i can take note, is learning through experience. Similar stories they have shared have helped them grow into who they are today and i feel it is important for us, in our early ages to experience everything, to take the extra bit of risk and opportunity to go through these experiences. It will not only help as grow as people but also improve ourselves.

For FP2, we have been given the opportunity to do service-learning and for Service-learning, me and my class would be going to Radin Mas CC to teach elderly citizens how to use mobile phones.

I have not really done service-learning before and don’t really know what to expect. What we have been taught about service learning is that the beneficiary should be able to learn something but i also hope that i could get some experience and learn something new from this opportunity. 

My opinion on the Service-Learning Beneficiaries is that we should try our best to help them as much as they can. Since they have willingly signed up for this program, we should put in more effort to allow them to catch up with technology and teach them something useful. I feel that it will really help them a lot in their daily lives and can actually interact more with their family members in turn. I have actually helped elderly folks before and through my experience I have learnt that they are actually very nice and friendly people even though others may complain about them. I feel a certain way to help them and find them very pitiful which motivates me to help them out.

For my feelings towards participating in Service-Learning, i feel both nervous and excited at the same time. Since i have not done this before i do not know what to expect and hence feel a bit of nervousness. However, I am also excited because more opportunities could blossom from this one and who knows maybe i would start enjoying the experience and want to do more of it, which is why i feel a little bit of excitement.

This is the last week of our project. IT’s been a long journey and me and my partner are proud to be done with this sleep deprivation project. Hope to be able to develop on such ideas in the future but glad that this is finally over. Anyways, this is a poster that me and my partner made for the demo day of our project.