Every year, Team Tech has the opportunity to work with corporate advisors to develop a high-utility engineering project from the ground up. This year, we have the privilege of being mentored by two amazing women at Cisco Systems: Senior Technical Leader, Harini Venkateswaran and Technical Leader, Dr. Nazanin Magharei. Throughout the year, we have grown so much as individuals and as engineers with their guidance.

When our advisors proposed that we do a project focused on anomaly detection in mobile phone usage, we didn’t know where to start. Most of us had little to no experience with machine learning, and very few of us had actually developed software to be deployed for public use. However after countless hours spent completing online courses, reading papers, working through tutorials, and helping each other along the way we are now on track to finish building a web application that will help individuals better understand trends in their phone usage. Our product consists of a front-end interface that will allow a user to view how much time they spend on different types of apps and a back-end algorithm which detects instances of abnormal behavior.

This project is a useful tool for anyone trying to gauge their productivity or better understand how their screen time is being spent across various apps. The anomalies we detect allow the user to protect the security of their device,, by preemptively checking instances of suspicious behavior. Here’s a quick look at what’s been happening behind the scenes:

This graph shows the results of one of the anomaly detection algorithms we have been experimenting with.

Here is a draft of how our front-end visualization will look, using d3js.

We’re excited to present our work at WE20 and we’re so grateful to the SWE community as well as our advisors for all the support they have given us!