An interview with the Smart Camera App team of ACM Projects.

Meet the Team

Luke Castro, Alya Abu Assaf, Alan Liu, Palak Sharma, and Rahul Singh are the members of ACM Project’s Smart Camera team. Wasim Abdalla, the experience coordinator of ACM Projects, is their mentor through this process. I sat down with the team this build night to ask them a few questions.

Why did you decide to join ACM Projects?

Luke: I wanted to work on a project with a team in order to improve my team-building skills, and I thought the experience would be good for me.

Alan: I decided to apply for ACM Projects so I could get development experience outside of class. I’m building skills here that I’ll be able o take into an internship.

Palak: I applied for ACM Projects because I wanted to gain practical experience by working on a project. I also wanted to learn new skills and develop my current skillset.

Alya: I wanted to get hands on experience with a project. I wanted an outlet to apply the theory I learned in my courses.

Rahul: To learn something new and to create something with the skills I aquire.

What’s been your biggest challenge so far?

Luke: We need to use a web server for our project, but we had to go through quite a few different ones before we finally settled on Flask. The process of researching a server, trying it out, and realizing it’s not what we were looking for took a long time.

Alan: My biggest challenge was setting up and programming on the Raspberry Pi.

Palak: My bigges challenge so far was learning a new programming language and developing an algorithm for image detection on the Smart Cam.

Alya: Adjusting to using new technology. I’ve never used Amazon Web Service before, so I had to learn that to get our website up and running.

Rahul: Getting myself organized and figuring out the best way to work as a team.

What excites you most about your project?

Luke: I’m excited that we get to actually build a functional smart camera. After presentation night, I’m sure I’ll still tinker with it and try and build one on my own.

Alan: I’m excited to show my friends the product we end up making.

Palak: I’m excited to see the applications of our Smart Cam and to see it working with the rest of my team.

Alya: Learning about web hosting with AWS has been really fun.

Rahul: I’m with Palak. Getting to see all our hard work come to fruition with this project has been really exciting.

What’s your favorite snack food?

Luke: I really like fruit snacks. Real fruit is pretty great too.

Alan: White Cheddar Cheeto Puffs

Palak: Doritos

Alya: Chocolate Chip Cookies

Rahul: Oreos