Introduction

Hey, guys!

As some of you may or may not know, I'm entering my final year as a Software Engineering undergraduate at Universiti Malaya. As the new semester dawns, so too the beginning of my Final Year Project (FYP).

Hence, I decided to take on an initiative to document my progress here on (hopefully) a weekly or bi-weekly basis, depending on how much progress I made. This idea is largely inspired by my senior Afrie Irham (@afrie), who curated several devlogs for his own FYP last semester.

My FYP is also divided into 2 phases: FYP 1 (research) and FYP 2 (development) across two semester. Therefore, for this semester's progress, I will be mostly sharing updates on my research pertaining to my project title.

To kickstart this first post, I'm going to share to you my progress for Week 1. It's going to be slightly lengthy since this first week includes pre-FYP preparation as well. In future posts, I will simplify them and write them in points form instead for ease of reading.

Progress Made

For your information, I planned to do my FYP as a pair, together with my long-time partner-cum-friend, Faidz Hazirah. She's also my teammate for my Dell Hack2Hire hackathon in case you don't remember.

The very first thing we did was to create a Trello board to properly manage and organise our FYP tasks. The two of us had used Trello several times in the past for our group assignments.

One of the hardest parts of FYP is deciding which project title to take. Knowing that everyone will have to compete for the coveted titles, my partner and I took steps to email several lecturers weeks earlier before the semester begins to inquire more about their titles. We also prepared 3 proposals of our own ideas as backup, just in case the lecturers' titles have already been reserved.

In total, we contacted 8 lecturers and to our surprise and relief, almost all of them not only agreed to our own proposals, but also willing to reserve their titles for us and become our supervisor. We also had meetings with some of the lecturers to discuss further on the prospect of their titles.

In order to ensure that we breakdown each project title properly, we decided to create a simple spreadsheet that contains the details of all the project titles to be considered as well as their pros and cons.

After one week of sleepless nights full of late-night meetings, we finally managed to shortlist one out of 12 project titles of interest. The title is Arduino-based Smart Watch for Early Warning System for Mental Health, supervised by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Siti Hafizah Ab Hamid. It involves machine learning (sentiment analysis) and IoT (Arduino); a challenge considering I'm a novice in both. Nevertheless, I'm excited to venture outside of my comfort zone and do my best for my FYP.

After securing the title, we had our first official meeting with our supervisor on the 9th of March. We discussed further in detail about the project, such as its use case breakdown and work delegation. We agreed that I will be in charge of the ML modules while Faidz will be handling the IoT/Arduino modules. The web-app development will be shared by us, and we will be using Python/Django framework for seamless integration between the ML and the web-app modules.

Our supervisor also requested that we drafted the table of contents for the FYP1 report, specifically the literature review part as well as drafting all relevant diagrams related to the project to be submitted for checking on Friday and Monday respectively. Hence, Faidz and I had 5 meetings in total this week alone, just to work with the diagrams together.

What I did well?

• Emailed lecturers early regarding their project titles (gave good overall impressions)
• Secured project title early (got a head start)
• Finished first draft of use case and HTA diagram
• Researched on papers/related works on Detecting Mental Health on Bilingual Twitter Posts
• Drafted list of potential stakeholder/collaborators
• Set up Azure DevOps for Agile development framework

What I'm stuck at?

• Machine learning part (extracting Tweets using Twitter API)
• Problem in visualising ML modules in class diagram

How will next week be?

• Work on remaining diagrams (class, activity, architecture, block)
• Finalise Arduino catalogue with Faidz
• Finalise and submit list of potential stakeholder/collaborators to supervisor