Reaction All Years

Project Description:

Our client is Karie a local restaurant owner of Pressed – Ottawa. Pressed is a neighbourhood gourmet sandwich bar and coffeehouse restaurant frequently hosting performances and events. Due to Covid-19 Karie pivoted her business model to include grocery store like service for her local community. Currently, Karie receives grocery orders/requests through Google Forms and handles payments via e-transfers. The logistics and bookkeeping for the currently implemented system are done all on pen and paper. Making tracking and management a nightmare for her so far. She has requested simply to use an online ordering system that automates her current issues.
The system that we have developed allows customers to order online, send a notification to the owner that an order has been placed with the option of either rejecting or accepting the order. As the owner currently doesn’t require online payment so the monetary transaction would be completed by e-transfer. For inventory management, the owner can use various reports such as sales volume, number of individual items sold, top trending items etc. She can see them as daily, weekly, monthly reports and also has the option to choose dates custom-wise. The owner can also download the report as MS Excel or CSV file. This feature would help her with bookkeeping and also tracks how many items she needs to order for the next delivery/week. The system also has a delivery or pickup option. We also developed an accompanying android app that allows a customer to sign up/sign in and then place an order.
The learning experience for this project has been completely different as we had to overcome the challenges posed by Covid-19. Instead of meeting physically, we had to meet virtually which is a different ballgame entirely. The project has taught us how to communicate with an actual client, understand her requirement and meet her expectations. Each project member has different strengths, and, in this project, we tried to bring the best of each member.

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Project Description:

There are many situations in which you may need to surveil an area and watch for certain events to occur. Perhaps you need to know how much traffic travels through a particular road and collect that data to find out how busy that road is on a given day, or maybe you need to watch for corroded pipes at a facility and report their location to a technician so they can be replaced. These situations brought a need for the system we built, which is an object detection application that can detect instances of objects such as people and cars within digital images and videos. In addition to object detection, we’ve also implemented basic analytics to count the number of objects of each type in the video and live stream.

Over the course of 8 months, we faced many challenges. At first, the project was going to be a single application, then it developed to become a full stack web application which resulted in many changes that had to be made, as well as challenges with the transfer of data from one application to another. We utilized modern technologies to build our full-stack web application. We used ReactJS since it’s a well-known and supported web front-end technology. Our back end consists of a Spring Boot application connected to a MongoDB database. It was important to have a non-relational database since the data we’re passing is very dynamic. Finally, machine learning and object detection are best performed using Python as it fully supports all the libraries and functions required by our project.

While we have overcome and came up with solutions for some of the challenges that we faced, there are still objectives that we couldn’t achieve. Our Jetson project was initially planned to work on a drone with a Jetson Nano device attached to run our object detection Python code. However, because of the travel restriction due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we didn’t have access to the device and the ability to work together on the hardware. For that reason, our code is only developed and tested on our BYOD. Secondly, the project infrastructures are running mostly on Google Cloud Platform and would be costly in the future to operate. For now, we have been conservatively using our limited trial credit for this project, which will be expired this December. Thirdly, our detection code still has some major problems with its accuracy; more time is required to work on this problem in the future. Last but not least, we planned to add analytics functionality to the app, but as our project has multiple layers of applications that are written in different technologies, setting and maintaining the connections between them consumed most of our already limited time.

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Project Description:

Background:
The marine way project was started by our client, Lisa Chen. She is a passionate marine biologist and environmental educator. She brought this idea to keep our marine environment safe and clean as well as make it sustainable.
Purpose of the project:
Fishing in the ocean happens everywhere throughout a year. As the marine environment is unpredictable and harsh, accidents occur anytime, and fishing gears can be broken unexpectedly. Then, fishing gears which are broken or worn out are sometimes thrown away unethically. Thus, there are a lot of abandoned, lost, and discarded ‘ghost’ fishing gears in the ocean. To protect ocean environment, Fisheries and Oceans Canada get a report from people about the information they found, using given form. Need comes from this point. The form contains many information to fill in but can be automated. Our application is going to help people report the ‘ghost’ fishing gear.
Description of scope:
The main feature of the application is reporting of abandoned fishing gear to the Department of Fisheries and Ocean. Based on the user’s pre-inputted content and location information, it minimizes additional input. Indeed, it embeds generating and sending a form to Fisheries and Oceans Canada for user’s convenience. The application runs on Android. It displays maps, supporting offline uses. To report finding, it will generate a pdf form with minimized user input. To keep those reports and account information, a database is required. Additional features which might be beneficial to users, for example weather and tide information, can be added.
Description of the end users:
Although the application can be used by anyone who wants to report, the majority of users are fishermen. Also, it would be usually used outdoors under hard situations. Therefore, a clear and concise user interface is essential.

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Project Description:

Our client sells cosplay costumes, accessories, and materials. They need an app to track the conventions they participate in as vendors. Our app includes reminders for application and payment due dates, allows the user to track sales and expenses associated with a show, and export expenses as a csv file. The app calculates the total profits or losses from a show to help the vendor determine if the show was profitable or not.

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Project Description:

“Let’s Talk Butts”, led by Lisa Chen, initially started off as a community project which was restricted to Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. The project is designed to educate the community about environmental pollution resulting from cigarette butt litter, which is the number one litter item in the world. The second major function of the project was organizing community cleanup events and engaging the community towards solving this global issue. The organization is currently planning to install cigarette butt collection canisters and ashtrays in public places in the community, enabling people to dispose of the butts via these canisters instead of littering the ground. These butts can then be collected and sent off for recycling.

The organization is currently using traditional methods to educate people by using printed material. In addition, they have a social media page on Facebook with can be located at https://www.facebook.com/letstalkbutts. These methods have been a hinderance and inconvenience to the growth of the organization which resulted in the creation of this project.

To facilitate the growth of the organization Team 11, which is composed of a team of developers from Algonquin College developed a dynamic website for the Let’s Talk Butts Organization.

This provided Lisa with a more effective online platform in which she can engage her stakeholders. It is also manageable and scalable for future initiatives. The website enables users to access information in the two official languages, English, and French. It also includes two maps; one that highlights the location of the cannisters and the other that identifies current and past clean up locations. Furthermore, users will be able to submit clean up data which will later be added to the counters displayed on the page that will indicate the number of cigarette butts removed, number of volunteers who participated as well as the amount of water saved.

The team started by gathering information regarding the requirements of this project, then selected the stack of technologies that can best meet the requirements of the project. Initially, the team selected WordPress a web content management system written in PHP as one of the technologies that was to be used to develop the web application, at the request of the client. However, we encountered some challenges with WordPress. The team, in consultation with the project advisor and the client decided to move to a software stack which is composed of: PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS and a MySQL database.

In addition, in consultation with Lisa, the website will be hosted under the domain, oceanicimpact.org. This new name aligns with the clients wish to further scale the organization globally, and since cigarette butts leach toxic chemicals into water, it also aligns with the current initiatives in place with the organization.

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Project Description:

Productivity software is an application that helps the user to do or make various things such as documents, worksheets, etc. Our project is about the productivity software that focuses on to-do list management. Our project is an Android application which helps user to save their daily tasks. Our project has a frontend Android Application which connect to the backend RESTful Server using JEE and stores the tasks to a secure database (Local/Cloud). We have implemented CRUD functionality to the Android Application which allows the user to easily add, delete, and make changes to the task as per their requirements.

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Project Description:

Sayworks is an independent client based company developing a vertical search engine to aid college graduates, and struggling job seekers in the Information Technology field. The client realized the difficulties posed by the rapidly evolving tech climate and the market’s demand for programmers, developers engineers etc.
In this current day and time, developers have to rely on sites like Indeed, Monster, Glassdoor etc. to find varying postings on each site. Sayworks searches through each of the job sites, looks for relevant jobs and posts them onto sayworks. This would benefit this group of individuals to not rely on so many different job sites as it would allow the user to search all jobs grabbed from each site. Sayworks would also allow the users to create their own personal account on the website, which allows them to save any postings that the user is interested in.
The group focused on developing a vertical search with more modern technologies to develop an experience for the user that was seamless and does not take away from the user experience. The project was based on developing a working prototype before it reached development phase which was to deliver to the user through the sayworks website: sayworks.com
The prototype was developed on technologies such as React, Python, and a MySQL database which would aid the team in creating a seamless connection between getting the job postings from the job site and posting it onto the front-page of a users screen. This also allowed us to use live search functionality so that the user is not stuck waiting on any load times when entering their selected job search. This functionality was rolled onto the development phase of the project which allowed us to test it real time with other developers and users that are connecting to the site.
The challenges we faced with the client would mainly be communication because of the lack of information and clarity from the group to the client.
The team challenges that were faced were the new technologies that were being researched which took a portion of the time to learn and recreate a solution for the project. Another challenge was the face-to-face opportunity was lost which created boundaries in collaboration efforts.
One of the learning opportunities that was achieved from this project was the use of different technologies that were taught outside the classroom environment. Another opportunity was working within a team on a real world project. This helped experience the different types of work behaviors of the team members. The last opportunity was to learn how to manage time, so that the assigned role was worked on to meet a certain deadline.

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Project Description:

Responding to the COVID pandemic was challenging due to the lack of knowledge on many questions. Worldwide, clinicians and scientists rose to the occasion, rapidly initiating and completing a large research volume to address these questions. Comprehensively synthesizing the information in these studies, referred to as a systematic review, is challenging as it requires the assessment of hundreds or thousands of papers. The burden of completing these tasks usually falls on small teams of humans who must evaluate each article at least twice (independently). When completed by small groups, these reviews can take many months or years to complete, an unacceptable time frame when responding to a pandemic. Our client InsightScope created a platform that allows large teams (crowds) to work together to perform these tasks in a matter of weeks instead of months. Nonetheless, human resources are limited. It may be possible to complete more projects and more rapidly with artificial intelligence assistance.
This innovative project addresses the above challenge as follows:
First, we sought to evaluate whether that Machine Learning can achieve similar performance to humans in the identification of eligible studies across a range of systematic review with variable questions
Second, we sought to evaluate the extent to which incorporating a combined machine learning with a human approach to citation review reduces human assessors’ work.
We evaluated six different machine learning models, testing their performance on seven systematic reviews completed using crowdsourcing (large team), including those related to COVID-19. This process required us to review the platform database structure, develop the code, test, perform error analysis, interpret and make the necessary refinements. Through this process, we evaluated the machine learning predictions on over 100,000 human assessments. We used advanced technics such as stemming and lemmatization to improve artificial intelligence’s understanding of the publications. We were able to build an AI model that was able to identify 90% of the eligible articles on over 100,000 publications. This degree of accuracy is similar to what is known about the performance of a single human reviewer. After identifying the model with the best performance characteristics, we evaluated how replacing one of the human assessors with ML impacted study sensitivity and work saved.
When the machine assessment was considered along with the second assessment by a human, the combined retention of eligible papers was 98% combined. Our work demonstrates that it is possible to reduce the second human assessor’s job by at least 70% while retaining a high recall of eligible papers. This approach should make it easier to complete great knowledge synthesis efforts more rapidly while being highly comprehensive when adopted.
It has been a great learning and teaching opportunity. We’ve discovered Agile’s benefits, and using tools like Jira ensured the project moved along. We gained knowledge through communication and constant feedback that made both ourselves and the project better. We acquired the necessary skills through the documentation for AWS, Django, Python, Machine Learning, Git and much more. But above all, we learned that teamwork and collaboration get the job done!

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Project Description:

How the team solved the client’s problems:
1. First of all the team members analyse the website together and find some general issues with the website.
2. The team made a list of each issue with a brief description.
3. After that team have met the client and discuss the issues with the client.
4. The team provided suggestions and solutions regarding those issues.
5. Clients take a note of each and every solution and they also provide some of the suggestions from their sides as well.
6. After taking consideration of each person’s point of view, the team lead divides the task.
7. And here are website solutions:
• Re branding
• Adopt the up-to-date web design practice
• Pages & categories
• Gallery
• Contact us Form

What we learned along the way:

There are many good lessons we learned while working on this project, but
probably the most important is that it is not about technology or creating a good
project plan – it’s about being able to deal with very different people.

Workplace experience will complement our academic studies by providing
another way of learning outside the classroom. It will also provide us with
crucial knowledge, skills and personal attributes that employers look for. We
particularly value skills such as communication, team-working and problem
solving.

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Project Description:

Team Shared Storage Re/Action Showcase Submission
Project: Creating a mobile-first Web App prototype for the client.
As level 4 students in the IMD (Interactive Media Design) Program, our team was tasked for the semester to work with a real client and project in the Applied Projects course.
The client, Daniel Disipio, is an Ottawa entrepreneur. His innovation is driven by a passion for funding clean water initiatives in Latin America. His concept, Shared Storage is a brilliant new niche in the storage industry.
The idea is to have a platform that will provide affordable storage solutions in your neighborhood. Additionally, people with extra space to offer will benefit from monthly revenue. Shared Storage will pair the 2 parties. Think of it as the Airbnb of storage.
Originally the team was asked to develop a native App prototype. After learning more about the project, the team recommended a Web App, as the is goal to increase visibility in the market. Meaning potential customers are much more likely to search “storage, Ottawa” in the browser on their phone, than in the App store.
Weekly status meetings with the client were held to present research/design and gather feedback. This assisted in moving the project forward in a timely manner. The meetings were key to developing the prototype as closely as possible to the clients’ vision.
The UX design process was used to conduct user research to help establish the target market. Based on that, the team created personas, vision board, mood boards, user journey mapping, and user flow diagrams.
The mood boards were a turning point towards the branding guide. We knew the client liked green, he was presented with 3 choices and you will see that the style guide Daniel chose is unique, fresh, and memorable. But not necessarily what you would initially think of as green. This step really reinforced the UX design process for the team and why all the steps are important for a successful end product.
Next, the branding guide, logos, font, and tone of voice were presented. Accessibility recommendations, Lo-fidelity, hi-fidelity, and finally the interactive prototype will be shown in our final review, Dec. 8, 2020. We created the prototype in mobile version, so it is easier for the web developers to make it responsive.
Moving forward, Daniel will present his business idea to Angel Investors to continue expanding on Shared Storage. And has a web app prototype and branding to hand over to web developers.
As a team, we collectively agree that we wish we had more time to develop this for Daniel, as there is tremendous potential. We wish him all the best with his business and will all be proudly putting this in our portfolios.

Full Interactive Prototype live link here: https://xd.adobe.com/view/ce4d2712-64be-4027-a64c-49c1a3cfd9aa-9b1e/

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