Professional Interview

I interviewed an entrepreneur that started a cyber security business. As a means of privacy, I am withholding her name.

Main Topics Covered:

  • Starting the Business
  • Non-Competes
  • Work Ethics
  • Planning
  • Finding a Good Team
  • Startup Capital
  • Conversion from Beginning Stages to Management
  • Managing the company
  • Exit Strategies

 

Main Lessons Learned:

  • Make sure that you know you want to follow through with your business before starting. Too many businesses go under for you to afford a business lose for something you don’t want to do.
  • Plan far in advance, and make sure you communicate your expectations for your business and future with your family, so they are prepared for your business venture.
    • Along with this recommended to not use your house as a bargain chip with the bank for deals, because if your business fail you don’t want to lose your family’s home.
  • Your name is very important when doing business, make sure you establish a good reputation.
    • Make sure you live up to non-compete agreements.
    • Make sure you have a good face to face relationship with the bank, and make sure you are not just a name on a computer screen.
  • Make sure you have a group of people to compliment you in your business ventures. You don’t want some one that is the same because then there will be power struggles, and you will not know
  • Make sure what you do evolves with your company
    • Goes along with making sure employees are in the right positions for their skill set.
  • Recommends using a line of credit instead of loans (this is a personal opinion).
    • “Allows the company to be its own guarantee”.
  • Number one rule should be to “take care of your people”.
    • Whether this is employees or customers, if you show them utmost respect and loyalty they will return the same.

 

Takeaways:

One thing that really stuck with me was the golden rule: “Take care of your people”. She placed such a strong emphasis on how if you treat your colleagues, employees, customers, and suppliers with respect, they will return not only respect, but loyalty to your company. She believed that ethics and morals are a very strong part of what makes her and her company successful. Many people that signed non-compete agreements with her original employer ignored their contracts, and cut corners in making their business. She made sure to stick to the high ground, and by the way I have heard one of her employees talk about her, it is extremely effective. Another thing that stuck with me was she entrepreneurial habits that she displayed very early on in her life. By the age of 7 or 8 she had already made her own newspaper, and was selling it for profit. I think this was strongly influenced by her father, a very successful entrepreneur himself. It appears that the entrepreneurship characteristics had been instilled in her family, since all her siblings have shown signs of success in their own business involvements. She also gave many helpful tips that she used to help herself keep her business successful, and with out the possibility of turning around and cutting into her families living expenses/home/marriage. Over all I would say it was very worth while investing my time in finding an entrepreneur that is working in the field of my major (computer science and engineering)

Year in Review: Fall 2018 – Spring 2019

The past two years has been a great collegiate experience that has let me grow both in my career and as a person. I started my freshman year in a new state, 6 hours from home. I started out by meeting new people, and eventually some of my best friends through STEM EE scholars. I took my first set of classes and enjoyed them way more than the courses I took in high school. I progressed through the first-year engineering courses, and finally started to learn how to have a strong work ethic and learned to study for the first time in my life. I joined the underwater robotics team where I have gained invaluable skills that have helped me develop my resume and give me experience that put me above my peers in my classes. I started my STEM EE Capstone project in Fall of 2018. I worked on a project through the underwater called Robo Thoughts, which took information that the team’s robot was processing and displayed it to a webpage to allow non-software members understand the robots “thinking”. Also, in Fall of 2018 I joined the Longboarding club, and I have found that I have met good friends, and took an activity that I enjoyed doing to get around campus, and turned it into a supportive community that I can not wait to see every Thursday. I also got into climbing at the OAC on west campus at the start of my sophomore year, and I got consistently with some of my friends that I met in STEM EE. I have started participating in OSU climbing competitions, and even won the beginners category at gravity check spring 2019. I am now looking to train up over the summer so I can have the strength and technique to be able to try my hand at outdoor climbing. Just recently I have come to appreciate attending office hours both to help further my understanding of complex topics in classes, but also as a way to connect with and get to know my professors.

My involvement in the Underwater Robotics team, my persistence in classes, and the help of my peers I was able to successfully land an internship summer 2019 at Oceaneering in Hanover, Maryland. While I have learned a lot in my first two years here at OSU through classes, Underwater Robotics, and many STEM EE events, I know I still have a lot to learn and look forward to. The internship experience over the summer will help me determine whether my interest in underwater applications of computer science is a realistic career for me in the long term and will hopefully add to my ability to help support OSU’s Underwater Robotics team next academic year when I return from summer break. I also plan to take several computer science technical electives such as machine learning, computer vision, and neural nets to help develop my professional worth in my desired field of applied computer science in underwater settings.

Conclusion

Overall, while the project was incomplete, several of the goals for the project were completed. The three group members of the project team were able to build up a foundation for how the OSU UWRT Riptide Software is laid out, and how the parts interact with each other. Knowledge on ROS was also developed, and the foundation code for the website was written and proven to be effective. Moving forward, the website portion of the project will be completed in the next academic year.

Update 2 (10/24/19 – 11/28/18)

Began to work on the ROS subscribers to put into the website. The subscribers were written, tested, and found to be successful. Work on web page research began.

Oct 24 2hr hr basic java script learning

Oct 31 2hr laid out and assigned java script subscribers to write

Nov 4 4hr worked on status subscribers

Nov 11 4hr refined status subscribers. compiled with other subscribers

Nov 18 4hr checked subscriber functionality and looked into hosting web page on Apache

Nov 28 2 hr worked on documentation and looked into xml coding for web page.

Update 1 (9/9/18 – 10/21/18)

So far learning ROS has been a slow, steady, but successful process. I have developed enough information about it to the point that we have recently outlined the project specifications.

Sept 9 4hr reviewed competition footage and went over riptide software layout

Sept 16 4hrs began ROS learning. Basic subscriber

sept 23 4hrs ROS learning publishers

sept 26 2hrs combined ROS subscriber and publishers for a demo

Oct 7 4hr robothoughts project outlined by software team lead.

oct 21 4hr background research on js

 

Planning/Methodology

This capstone project was the culmination of copious hours of research in to the complex topic of Robotics Operating System (ROS), eXtensible Markup Language (XML), and the Ohio State University’s Underwater Robotics Team’s (UWRT) Riptide Software. Since the Ohio State University’s Underwater Robotics Team’s Riptide Software is built on a very strong fundamental use of ROS, this capstone project began with learning what ROS is and how to operate it.

To answer this question, ROS is an open source framework that gives access to a lot of features that are found on traditional operating systems for the use of expanding the field of robotics. Some of these features include hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management (Open Source Robotics Association, 2019). The main feature used in the Robo Thoughts project was the ability to pass messages between processes. ROS is at a fundamental level made up of things called nodes. Each node is assigned a duty of the programmers choosing based on the code that they write. To make up a large and complex system, these nodes must communicate with each other. This requires the transfer of data between nodes. To perform this movement of data, nodes can communicate through topics. Topics are a form of transportation between nodes that operates on a publisher-subscriber type of system. To send data out of a node, that node publishes a message, a structure of data types, to a topic name. If another node needs to receive the data from a publishing node, it subscribes to the desired topic name, and receives the message through the topic.

The UWRT Riptide software uses these principles to take data from various sensors such as depth sensors, pings, and cameras, and publishes that data to various nodes that process that data and publish refined data or instructions to parts like thrusters or torpedo launchers to accomplish tasks. The Riptide state machine has well over 20 nodes that handle various parts of the robot. At its lowest level the robot has a switch plate, a forward-facing camera, a downward-facing camera, an inertial measurement unit for heading, a depth sensor, thrusters, and a pneumatics system. This robot has many sensors, and the team has several people that work on various parts of the robot since the project is too big for one person to be involved in all the parts. Many of the processes that take place in the decision-making part of the robot rely on these various sensors to determine the best course of action. The Robo Thoughts project will allow the inner workings of the robot to be displayed on a webpage so that the people that are working on different parts of the robot, and not necessarily software components can look at data to help explain why the robot is behaving the way that it is with both visual (camera footage) and statistical (data values for sensors) information.

Introduction

The Ohio State University’s Underwater Robotics Team competes in an autonomous underwater vehicle competition every year in San Diego. The robot that has been developed over the course of several years runs Robot Operating System (ROS) to help manage the large number of states and data processing required to have a functioning autonomous robot. A problem that the leadership on the team found is that beginning members and members not focused on the software side of the robot were confused on what the robot was “thinking” at any given moment in a competition or test. From this problem the Robo Thoughts project was born.

The goal of the project was to allow two new members and a more experienced member to team up and build a foundation for how the OSU UWRT Riptide Software is laid out, how the parts interact with each other, and build knowledge and understanding on how to effectively use ROS. The Robo Thoughts project is a web page that allows the inner workings of the robot to be displayed on a web page so that new members and members that are not familiar with software can look at a single web page during the robots operation that will give all relevant data to help explain why the robot is behaving the way that it is with both visual and numerical data.

About Me

Aaron Luther is a rising third year undergraduate student from Ellicott City, Maryland. He is pushing forward for a degree in Computer Science and Engineering with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence. Aaron has always been fascinated by the water and is both lifeguard and SCUBA certified. He is involved in the Underwater Robotics Team here at The Ohio State University where he has worked on Software projects such as stereo vision and a small remotely operated vehicle (ROV) used for STEM outreach. When not attending class or working on an underwater project, Aaron enjoys attending long-board club’s weekly meetings and climbing at the OAC.

G.O.A.L.S.

The  G.O.A.L.S. are the pillars on which honors and scholars program is based. The two that speak most to me are Academic enrichment and Original inquiry. Academic enrichment is the pursuit of knowledge both in and out of classes. However, Original inquiry is understanding the research process, and engaging in research through independent studies, OSU’s facilities, and even advanced coursework in classes.

Academic enrichment is very important to me, because in high school, I never really saw where I was going in my future. Then I was exposed to a small amount of coding, and that’s when I knew I wanted to do something in the computer science field. Now that I am here at The Ohio State University, I have learned C++, and I am even applying the knowledge I’ve gained from that course in an extracurricular: Underwater Robotics. All my life I have been fascinated with water, and through the club I have reaffirmed my interest in a path related to Autonomous Guided Vehicles (AGVs). The opportunities offered through one of Ohio State’s basic courses has given me the access to work on a project I am interested in, one that directly affects the field I want to work in when I am employed. As a freshman in the first semester I have access to these opportunities, and as I progress through more advanced courses, I feel that OSU will provide me with the knowledge and competitive edge to easily find employment in the field of my choosing.

Original inquiry is equally important to me as a student. My Stem Exploration and Engagement scholars class had an interview assignment to interview an upperclassmen, graduate student, and a professor about their experiences and research. Just from talking to the professor alone, I was able to learn about which classes I should take, to have the skills and knowledge to do research in AGVs at the Center for Automotive Research here at OSU. The courses the professor recommended are also useful for underwater robotics, and will allow me to learn more about my field. They will even help me delve into the unknown and provide original research for my field.