April 27, 2023
Innovations on display Friday, April 28, at MSU Design Day
How did the staggering COVID-19 Pandemic change lives and language?
A team of Michigan State University engineering students explored that question and created a Build-an-App for Humanities Researchers to help the MSU Linguistics Department save both time and resources in an analysis of the pandemic. The new audio software app is just one of hundreds of projects that will be on display Friday, April 28, during Spring 2023 Design Day in the MSU College of Engineering.
Almost 1,200 Spartan Engineering students will show off their creative projects from 8 a.m. to noon in the MSU Engineering Building, 428 S. Shaw Lane, East Lansing. The event is free and open to the public.
Now in its 29th year, Design Day will include all 10 academic engineering programs.
Executive Director of Design Day and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Wayne Dyksen said a total of 230 student teams will present their ideas to visitors, faculty, and industry experts during the impressive display of ingenuity and innovation. Capstone projects will feature 761 students on 136 teams this spring.
“It gives our students the chance to show that they can think on their feet,” Dyksen said. “You can walk down the halls of the Engineering Building and see how ready our students are to enter the engineering profession,” he noted.
Design Day includes competitions and project presentations from a variety of engineering classes. The 15-week capstone course, which is required for graduation, provides a platform for students to apply the knowledge and experiences gained throughout their engineering education. Working in teams of four or five, seniors put their best efforts into solving real-world problems for big and small companies. At the end of each semester, teams present at Design Day. Eleven top awards will be presented during the Awards Ceremony at 1:15 p.m. in Room 1281 Anthony Hall, which is connected to the Engineering Building.
View the 2023 Design Day projects and teams here.
Read more on some of this semester’s projects.
Build-an-App for Humanities Researchers
The MSU Linguistics Department formed the MI Diaries team in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the MI Diaries app, the team collects and analyzes audio data to understand how people’s lives and language change over time.
An audio recording app is used to collect audio remotely for research studies. This app provides a user-friendly interface that can be used by people of all ages and technical abilities to collect audio data for storage in a database. While the app provides basic statistics for participants, more technical details were needed.
The Build-an-App for Humanities Researchers now provides an easy way to customize the MI Diaries base app without having to touch a line of code. Researchers with minimal technical experience can produce a fully customized long-form audio recording app that is ready to use in their studies. The solution provides an easy way for researchers to create applications tailor-made for their data collection, saving time and resources over building from scratch.
Moii AI – Image Similarity System
A Design Day team is working to advance an Image Similarity System for Moii AI, a multinational MSU-born startup founded in 2019 in Troy, Michigan, and Chennai, India. Moii provides real-time alerts and video feed analysis using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence technologies to increase ergonomic flow and improve home security.
Object detection requires artificial intelligence that is trained for detecting specific objects of interest. Moii currently has a system that can accurately detect a limited number of objects. To expand the usability of this system, Moii is focusing on a robust system to detect many more objects at the same time.
The capstone project makes searching for any type of object within Moii’s expansive image database possible. Users start by uploading images and drawing boxes around the object of interest. The software then uses machine learning to scan through hours of video footage to find images of similar objects, to provide more examples and, in turn, improve Moii’s object recognition. Moii can quickly determine if a person or object appears in their footage with high accuracy and low cost, creating a more secure environment.
Smart App for Induction Cooktop Cooking
Whirlpool Corp., based out of Benton Harbor, Michigan, has been focusing on introducing more smart appliances for the kitchen to assist chefs of all backgrounds. One is the Assist Cooking with Temperature (ACT) Cooktop, a smart induction cooktop that assists in the automation of the cooking process with its precise temperature control and smart recipes alongside a mobile app called SmartCook.
The SmartCook application improves the quality of the user’s cooking experience through automation features such as pan recognition and auto-recipe progression.
The students’ application, Smart App for Induction Cooktop Cooking, helps Whirlpool achieve their vision of making cooking easy and accessible to everyone. The capstone project app simplifies the overall cooking process and makes it less stressful for everybody from amateur to professional chefs.
Spring 2023 Design Day by the numbers
Engineering Student Participation
· All 10 Degree Programs Represented
· 14 Courses
· 232 Teams
· 1,192 Students
Capstone Projects
· 761 Students
· 136 Teams
· 120 Sponsored Projects
· 86 (72%) Michigan-based companied and institutions
Awards
· 11 Awards
· Conferred by corporate and faculty members
Background
· 29th year for Design Day (initiated in 1994 by the Department of Mechanical Engineering)
For more information, contact Professor Wayne Dyksen (dyksen@msu.edu, 517-353-5573) or Courtney Kosloski (marti884@msu.edu, 517-353-8133).
