On April 26, 2016, I had the distinct honor of judging the Georgia Tech Capstone Design Expo.  Capstone Design is an undergraduate class offered at Georgia Tech offering hands-on experience in solving real-world problems.  Students work in teams (some interdisciplinary) and have the choice to work on a corporate sponsored program or a project of their own choosing.  This is more than just your typical senior level design class.  These students must take into account competitive conditions, financial implications, potential to sell, in addition to solving the world’s problems.  The Expo is the “final exam” where students have the opportunity to showcase their projects to over 5,000 attendees and in many cases their corporate project sponsor.

Team Polar Bears team developed a Coca-Cola Cooler Inventory Management System with cameras, proximity sensors, and UV barcodes to remotely notify when there are only 2 cans left in a row to reduce out-of-stock situations.

Optimize Prime team optimized space allocation and picking at the Amazon Prime distribution center in Atlanta.

Team Paths developed a mobile app to provide recommendations based on your location, your preferences and your friend’s preferences. They used a collaborative filter to feed into their recommendation system in the cloud (AWS). Their mobile app runs in the background and collects individual information. They take the information collected and built a recommendation model using the least squares algorithm (similar to Netflix recommendations). This team utilized geofencing on Android and iOS. They found that iOS was more accurate, and Android was significantly less accurate to the point where they used other background services to get meaningful location data.

Macy’s Carton Estimation team optimized inbound carton arrivals and developed an analytics dashboard to track supplier shipments. The team implemented a “First Scheduled, First Out Policy” at the Distribution Center. This model is estimated to save Macy’s over $100K annually in over-scheduled labor. Additionally, the team created a Performance Analysis Tool that provided a dashboard interface to analyze freight arrivals and help identify causes of arrival time variability by carrier.

Ministry of Supply Team developed their own merchandise and procurement planning tool for Georgia Tech fashion entrepreneur, Ministry of Supply

Team Utili – My absolute favorite project was a Smart Home IoT project by team Utili. They developed a real-time home utility monitoring system that measured energy consumed at the appliance level and water consumed per faucet with machine learning.

Watch all of my recap videos from Georgia Tech Capstone Spring 2016 here: