It’s finally Spring!
It was around this time last year when we all started going into quarantine and looking back at last year I’ve seen how much I’ve grown since March of 2020. Let’s dive into what I’ve been up to this March!
Building A Personal Assistant/Chatbot Using Deep Learning 🤖
As mentioned in my previous newsletter, I have been working on a personal chatbot, and in March, I finished the first version of my chatbot, named Nova. Nova uses deep learning in order to help me with everyday tasks, plus some other cool things. The most recent changes I made include having it be able to do search queries using the Wikipedia API, as well as writing down important things I need to remember so that she can let me know later. Make sure to check out the full demo video if you’re interested!
Submitting a Recommendation to The UN on Increasing Girl’s Access to Digital Devices 🌎
This past month I had the opportunity to work on a challenge involving empowering women and girls in developing countries to thrive in the digital economy. My team specifically worked on using mobile trucks to provide digital infrastructure to women in Rural Ghana. This was a really informative experience as we needed to go very deep into our target geography before even beginning to think about potential solutions. In addition, there were many factors we needed to be well informed on including geography, societal norms, government policies, and existing digital infrastructure(or lack thereof). We were also recently named finalists! I’d like to give a shoutout to Imran, Kai, and Henry for being amazing teammates and friends. Working on this challenge with you guys was a blast! Make sure to check out our stand-alone deck!
The Great Mental Models Vol. ll 📚
As you may know from my January + February Newsletter, recently I have been reading The Great Mental Models Volume 2: Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, by Rhiannon Beaubien and Shane Parrish. The following are the 2 most useful mental models I’ve learned from the book so far:
Velocity
“Pay attention to where you are going and not how fast you are moving … While speed ensures movement, velocity produces results.“
This mental model encourages us to value direction over speed. If you’re going very fast in the wrong direction, it’s useless because you will never reach your destination no matter how fast you’re going. On the other hand, smaller steps in the right direction are far more valuable since you will still reach your destination, even if you are going a bit slower.
Activation Energy
“It’s the ingredient that starts a reaction, breaking apart the current state of affairs and transforming them into something new.“
The reason why so many revolutions fail, is because even though they have enough activation energy to get them started, they don’t have enough to finish them by creating bonds so strong, that its almost impossible to revert things back to the way they were.