Part A - Observational & Project Ideas Notes

This is my sketch of the Coupa Cafe next to the Cecil H. Green Library. I stayed here to draw for 30 minutes and watched the crowd for another 30 for a total of an hour. It was quite a peaceful spot and I loved the food/drink that I got from the store!

Some problems I found were that:

1. There is always a relatively long que for the store.
2. There seems to be a bottle that was left out on the table (people were losing things).
3. The place seemed well-worn (not maintained very often).

I brainstormed a few project ideas and concluded the following:

1. I am currently building a startup project that aims to resolve the que problem in stores. With ultra wideband technology and beacons, we are actually able to have customers seamlessly que by tracking their movement and alerting them for when it is time to cash out so that they are able to roam around while queuing. Implementation here would be a little different as since the lines are not gigantic, we can implement seamless checkout so that queuing and ordering could be done through a few clicks on the phone instead of talking to a cashier.
2. Lost and Found tracking was a project that I have ideated upon in the past. By utilizing an app with machine learning, we can have the algorithm identify through computer vision the color, texture, brand, size, shape, and type of the object captured in a photo. By creating tags, we can upload this data into the cloud where it used in authentication. On the user’s side, they input their lost item into the app and get quizzed upon specific details in order to ensure one-way authentication before unlocking the lost item’s location.
3. Depreciation is an interesting problem because it is ever-present. My thoughts here was to invent a biodegradable sensor. This sensor would be cheap to manufacture and once its cover is eroded after a period of time in the elements, it would trigger and alert cleaning/maintenance teams to come to the area and tidy it up. The sensor then could just be thrown away and replaced with a new one. This would increase operational efficiency as instead of regular checkups, the checkups would now be custom and location dependent!