On Friday, 29 September, Synthesis visited the school for Computer Science and Information Systems of the Potchefstroom Campus of the North West University (NWU PUK) to assess the projects of the honours graduates. A broad range of projects and topics were on display from energy conservation, financial dashboards for ERP systems, self-restoring software, GPS route finding, truck scheduling, emergency vehicle distribution, image recognition, drone path finding and the physiological impact of technology use on our bodies among others.
We really liked the drone projects which did security patrols and search and rescue, this was done by evaluating the shortest flight path between a set of co-ordinated using a path finding algorithms. The shortest route would then be simulated to the operator before take-off. The team also integrated the OpenCV library to do face detection during flight so that human activity could be detected. We found this project particularly interesting since during our recent hackathon, the Dronecon team (which won the hackathon), put a raspberry pi on a drone with a camera then streamed the video to AWS Rekognition to detect objects and people.
Another project that caught our attention utilized machine learning, AI and neural networks to predict a person’s age based on how they swung a golf club. A Wii remote was attached to a golf stick which then measured the swing, this data was then analysed using mathlab and Weka. The system could predict a person’s age within 2 years.
With climate change being a hot button topic, making people aware of their energy consumption is important. This is what the social energy conservation project aimed to achieve. The project got data from electrical meters and then was analysed and presented to users on a website. Users could see their energy usage breakdown by day, week and month and could get tips on how to save electricity. The website also had a gamification element in it where it could allow members of the community to challenge each other to see who get the save the most energy.
We would like to congratulate Rohan Coreejes (Social Energy), Kabo Mekgwe (Learning self -management),Dirco Liebenberg (Age detection by golf swing), Daniel Malan & Schalk Pretorius (UAV Shortest Path & algorithms) and on their honours projects.
By: Jared Naude, Synthesis Software Technologies
