Project Plan & Major Updates

Work plan and milestones for our classroom occupancy prediction project

This schedule begins on April 1, 2026, with the demo deadline on April 24, 2026 and the final report deadline on May 3, 2026.

Week 1 (April 5–April 11, 2026): Sensor Bring-Up and Data Pipeline Foundation

  • Integrate and calibrate the thermal sensor to reliably capture human movement and occupancy counts.
  • Build an initial occupancy tracking pipeline, including timestamping, count extraction, and basic quality checks.
  • Validate sensor placement and field of view in selected classrooms.
  • Define a data schema for merging occupancy counts with class schedules, class sizes, weather, and FCE signals.
  • Milestone: Produce the first end-to-end day of synchronized occupancy data.

Week 2 (April 12–April 18, 2026): Baseline Modeling and Early Prototype for Demo

  • Clean and preprocess collected data, including missing-interval handling, outlier checks, and feature generation.
  • Train and evaluate the linear regression baseline for day-ahead occupancy forecasting.
  • Train the proposed model on the same feature set and create initial comparison plots and tables using metrics such as MAE and RMSE.
  • Milestone: Generate preliminary baseline-versus-proposed model results.

Week 3 (April 19–April 24, 2026): Demo Hardening and Artifact Finalization

  • Perform targeted error analysis by time of day, room type, and scheduled versus unscheduled usage.
  • Improve model robustness and finalize the model version used for demo-day artifacts.
  • Produce a poster draft with the problem statement, method diagram, sensor setup, and key preliminary results.
  • Milestone (April 24, 2026): Present our findings during the demo.

Week 4 (April 25–May 1, 2026): Report Completion and Final Experiments

  • Run final experiments with locked train, validation, and test splits and finalize all results tables and figures.
  • Expand the Method, Experiment, and Results sections with reproducible settings and clear metric definitions.
  • Add discussion of limitations, deployment considerations, and future work.
  • Milestone: Complete a near-final report draft.

Week 5 (May 2–May 3, 2026): Final Edits and Submission

  • Perform final proofreading, formatting, and consistency checks across the text, captions, and references.
  • Verify that all reported numbers match the latest experiment outputs.
  • Finalize the abstract and conclusion to reflect the final empirical findings.
  • Milestone (May 3, 2026): Submit the final report.