Coaching Questions Group 5

To help your group and the teachers prepare for the tutor meetings, we would like you to answer a few questions in between sessions. The following paragraphs list the questions for each of the weeks, please write your answers directly underneath the questions.

After the kick-off - Week 1

• What are you expecting to learn during the Robots course?
  • Ways the knowledge obtained previously can be used in solving a real-world robots problem.
  • Working on a project having less prescription than usual.
  • Professional skills starting from communication and ending with presenting and academic writing.
• What kind of coaching do you expect?
  • Meeting once in a week to answer the questions the team has collected during the last week
  • Following the team's progress in order to give a critical view on the condition of the work
• What kind of coaching would you prefer?
  • Meeting once in a week to answer the questions the team has collected during the last week
  • Following the team's progress in order to give a critical view on the condition of the work
  • Answering crucial questions through the email during the weekdays.
• What will the coaches expect of you?
  • Submitting all the deliverables before the deadline.
  • Each member being present for the meeting and in time
  • If there are any circumstances for a team member not to be present, then the coaches have to be informed as early as possible.
  • Being communicative.
  • Academic writing and talking.

After the first tutor meeting - Week 2

• What is the most interesting thing you learned in the coaching meeting of the previous week and why?

We learned that when a project is presented to either to teacher or employer, all the details, assumptions and specifications must be clearly defined beforehand

• How did you incorporate coaches' feedback of the previous meeting in your project?

After the meeting we defined all the aspects of our project more clearly and set more precise goal.

• What new activities did you undertake during this week? What did you learn from these activities?

We identify the technologies we use for accomplishing our goal and describe in detail the sick behavior of the animals. By doing so we learned how to better find and extract useful information from papers. Additional to that, we had to do a lot of brainstorming, which helped us to develop our ideas and combine our ideas together.

• What did you do to prepare for next week's meeting?

We discussed if we satisfied all the remarks we got from the last meeting. After that we tried to compress all the new information so that we can present it during the meeting more efficiently.

After the second tutor meeting - Week 3

• What is the most interesting thing you learned in the coaching meeting of the previous week and why?

One of the most interesting thing is that for a really good piece of advice it is recommended to get in contact with people in the field of study. That’s why it was recommended for us to contact Ms. Lenny van Erp from Den Bosch.

• How did you incorporate coaches' feedback of the previous meeting in your project?

The feedback was positive on our idea, but we still have to narrow down the scope. To be precise why the cameras have certain angles, why our choices are good. We already met and discussed all technical details and we expect to have a meeting somewhere next week with Ms Lenny van Erp. We already contacted her and she invited us over for a meeting in Den Bosch or via Skype.

• What new activities did you undertake during this week? What did you learn from these activities?

We discussed the requirements and constraints for our project, we will meet with the expert in the field and we started to think about the simulation environment.

• What did you do to prepare for next week's meeting?

We established the work per person for the current week, divided task, talked about the idea and what needed to be in each part such that we can all follow the same flow of the project. Also, we are preparing to talk with Ms van Erp somewhere next week.

After the third tutor meeting - Week 4

• What is the most interesting thing you learned in the coaching meeting of the previous week and why?

In the coaching session from last week we have not made enough progress so far, and that we should really pick up the pace for the project. The teachers were worried that not all teammembers had clear ideas what to do and how to proceed. We learned that there was still much that was unclear and we did not all have the same ideas about the project.

• How did you incorporate coaches' feedback of the previous meeting in your project?

Right after the coaching session we got together to all get on the same line. We also made concrete tasks for each team member. On Thursday we met again to discuss these tasks, and plan the coming weeks. Again, we made concrete tasks for each team member such that everyone knows what to do.

• What new activities did you undertake during this week? What did you learn from these activities?

This week we started with a simulation for detecting cows in video footage. We also looked at the cost of our system compared to others, and looked into ways of uniquely identifying each cow. We also planned a meeting with Ms van Erp next monday, and prepared some question and a talk.

We learned that with the right libraries our system can be implemented, but we will need a lot of training data. Many images of cows are available, but we will need to label them with bounding boxes ourselves. We also learned that our system can potentially be much cheaper than other sensory systems.

• What did you do to prepare for next week's meeting?

We prepared a current version of our simulation, where we can (hopefully) detect cows from the video. We plan on finishing most of our tasks from Thursday, such that we have a clear proposal together with costs and benefits.

After the fourth tutor meeting - Week 5 During the last meeting, we discussed how did we use the YOLO framework and how far we dived into it. We got into the internals of YOLO such that we can adjust the network to do the job, but not to completely understand how it works.

• How did you incorporate coaches' feedback of the previous meeting in your project?

During the regular group meeting on the same week after the coaching meeting, we clearly made sure that every member understands both technical/use/progress aspects of the project and how YOLO works.

• What new activities did you undertake during this week? What did you learn from these activities?

Prepared for the farm visits. Continued working on the simulation - training the neural network, trying different configurations.

• What did you do to prepare for next week's meeting?

We tried to gather a list of different technologies to uniquely identify cows and improved our neural network to classify and track cows on a video, not just images. What is more, a part of our group visited two farms and after that, we were able to reflect on our system after examining the existing technologies currently deployed on real farms, as well as discussed our idea with people from the industry.

After the fifth tutor meeting - Week 6

• What is the most interesting thing you learned in the coaching meeting of the previous week and why?

In the last coaching meeting, we discovered that there are still many things to consider about our project. The main question was: what data will be detected from the system and how will the users use it.

• How did you incorporate coaches' feedback of the previous meeting in your project?

We developed our results and simulation findings.

• What new activities did you undertake during this week? What did you learn from these activities?

In the last week, we perfected as much as possible our neuronal network, divided new topics to work on for the following weeks(like cost, better specification of the software, and the entire system specification). We got a clear vision of our system and how much will it cost.

• What did you do to prepare for next week's meeting?

The following week we will have the final presentation, so, two of us will prepare for the presentation and do the slides. All the others will work to correct and improve the information on the wiki.

After the final presentation - Week 7

• What are the major steps of the project? Please list

One of the first step is to set up the main idea we want to work on. This is one of the most difficult parts since if you start wrong, your project is inclined to fail.

Second, you have to collect state of the art technologies that you want to use as a base for your project. Gathering information from multiple scientific sources and understanding how the technology works is a must in order to establish the path for your project.

Third, it is needed to establish the USE aspects. This is an important step because these aspects will set the way your project will go. Do you want to improve the quality of a service, then you might end up having an expensive technology, if you want to have a cheap product, you might have to make a lot of compromises.

Another crucial step is the actual development of the product which must be based on clear requirements.

Lastly, you must be able to deliver some results. This is the end step to prove that the project was a success and you have used wisely these 8 weeks.

• What is the most important thing you learned in this project? (e.g .about design or working in groups, etc)

The team learned how crucial that it is to make a decision on the actual outcome of the project as early as it is possible.

• What do you wish you had spent more time on or done differently?

The team would structure the planning differently, making it more adaptive, but still specific enough to keep track of which tasks exactly have to be done to achieve the desired outcome. It would also be reasonable to spend more time on the content of the final presentation and preparation for it as well, in order to give more specific and clear insights on the project itself.

• What was the most enjoyable part of this project? Please explain why

The team considers the farm visits to be the most enjoyable part of this project. Not only that it gave a more a better look at our own system and its advantages, but also it was really different from any other project activity everyone has participated so far. Seeing the actual working of a cow farm, interacting and observing the cattle in real life, talking and getting advices from a person who understands this field at such a level to be called an expert. All that together gave the team an unforgettable and really enjoyable experience.

• What was the least enjoyable part of this project? Please explain why

The team agreed that the least enjoyable part of the project was labeling pictures for the system training. That is simply because this task took a significant amount of time and was not as exciting as any other activity which required creativity, brainstorming or any technical knowledge since it was entirely mechanical work.