Post MGTR blog
Invention Description updates
Police officers in the United States disproportionately pull over, cite, arrest, and even use lethal force against People of Color. Even with the implementation of police body cameras, their effectiveness has proven to be minimal. Our device centers around the most prevalent cause of interactions between police and civilians; a traffic stop. It is a dash mounted integrated system that has three main goals: reduce unnecessary/“targeted” stops, improve interactions between police and civilians during traffic stops, and provide protected, video, motion, and location data about traffic stops that will be uploaded to a private database. The driver will then be given the option to either keep the data private or upload the video data to social media while keeping the other data ,(GPS and accelerometer), private.
After reviewing our user input from the survey results, the main change we have decided to make is to have the device automatically collect all of the data and place it on the cloud however we are not going to have it automatically upload to social media. We will also be adding a secondary contact for each “user” in the event something happens to that individual, their secondary contact can login and upload the safe video/audio data of the interaction.
Progress during the last month
Finances: After the success of our Mid-Grant Tech Review, we had a kickback party via zoom. The Financial leader set a spending goal for food which was around $170(we did not go over). On average, it was about $13 per person. Each member was able to get a choice of their desired item and it was delivered to them. In addition, more orders were placed for items for the hardware team. All of the invoices for these transactions were uploaded to Team Access. Our remaining budget is $3,979.02.
Hardware Team: Last month out team had its Mid Grant Tech Review presenting the progress our team had made up to that point. Most of our time prior to the event was spent preparing for the presentation as well as tying up any loose ends so our presentation would be complete. The Hardwear Team was very happy with how our presentation went seeing as we were able to present our achievements such as having data from our device being uploaded to the web. The Tech Review did stop our progress for most of the month because of prep time as well as a much needed break after the presentation.
Data Team: DuringFebruary the Data team was able to stand up the Ubuntu server that is going to host our web application on AWS. We have now moved to collaborating with the hardware team to get the GPS data to display on the webapp. We are in the infancy stages of researching this.
User Interface Team: On February 22, we had our MidGrant Tech Review. It went well and we had over 120+ participants. Each of our technical teams knew their content area extremely well and were able to answer questions and demonstrate the progress of our device. During the MGTR, the UI team presented a video demonstrating the framework of the web app.
Machine Learning Team: We were able to complete a major breakthrough last week in the machine learning team as we were able to get the trained model to compile a list of objects that were detected during the recording session. This is a function that is going to be used in the final product as it will allow us to automatically detect whether a driver was wearing a seatbelt or not without looking at the recording of the video. Another breakthrough with the trained model was to give it a set amount of time to record which was also completed last week. This is a function that was needed as we were previously unable to stop the camera from recording. It would also greatly benefit the data processing function of the final product as it will only record when needed to.
Goals for the upcoming month
Finances: The upcoming financial goals for next month is to keep up to date with uploading invoices and ordering items for teams. We also want to collaborate with other members to see how much more of our budget will be going towards future items from each team.
Hardware Team: Our upcoming goals are simple, to have integration of all of our peripheral devices including the camera, audio, GPS, and accelerometer. Having all of our separate devices working together off the same device would be our biggest accomplishment yet, but will also be our biggest challenge. The collaboration still is one of the toughest challenges to overcome, but we hope that even being separated, we can still get our device to function as intended.
User Interface Team: This is the video from our MGTR:
Our next goal is to get the web app in the video uploaded on our AWS server and flesh out the pages to make the site more functional.
Machine Learning Team: Our next steps are to upload our files onto AWS servers, feed our image detection model more images of seatbelts and to get the image detection model to identify whether the seatbelt is on or off.
Networking
Our team has met with two engineers in the past month, Taylor Daniels and Ben Onukwube, who visited our class to discuss their career paths with us.
Teamwork
Our entire team meets outside of class weekly for two hour work sessions. In addition, our individual technical teams communicate with one another and meet when neccessary. Our team facilitator also offers one-on-one morning work sessions for troubleshooting.
