Terra

Terra is a multi platform solution for the Humber Office of Sustainability and Public visitors of the Humber Arboretum. The provided mobile app (built on React Native with TypeScript), allows users to take pictures of plants or trees and have them identified by an AI Convolutional Neural Network which then gets uploaded to a shared database between the webapp and the mobile app. The entry gets validated by another AI Isolation Forest Model, based on location, species, species genus and environment. The webapp (built on React with TypeScript) allows the Humber Office of Sustainability to manage the data and use it for reports about both the health of the arboretum and for reporting on their progress to their Net Zero commitments.

Main Takeaways

Since Terra was a group project during the Minor Global Acting in IT, I learned not just a lot of technical skills, but also a lot of skills that benefit my future in the professional world. I learned how to navigate not just the cultures from the 3 different countries I visited, but also the vastly different cultures of the team I was working with, relating them to the Hofstede Cultural Dimensions to figure out our differences and how to work best together. Technically there was also a lot to learn, I learned about UI and UX design, where I dissected the teams different stakeholders to figure out what they truly needed and not what they thought they needed. I learned about React with TypeScript and React Native (with TypeScript) as I had not used React Native before it was quite a struggle at first, but over time I familiarized myself with it and was succesfully able to create large parts of the mobile app. Another big learning opportunity was our AI Module, I learned about how Neural Networks actually work rather than just applying them and I learned how to work with unsupervised learning. I used this later to make the Isolation Forest Model for the project, which was a very interesting and fun experience.