Arkwright Awards, Savoy Place

 

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Yesterday (25th of October, 2018) I attended the annual Arkwright Awards Ceremony at Savoy Place, London. As a quick recap, Arkwright is a scholarships program for students interested in engineering. The application process is tough- there’s a written application, followed by a test, and finally an interview stage. After all that, applicants still need to be chosen by a sponsor in order to become an Arkwright Scholar.

My Arkwright sponsor is Stannah Lifts Holdings Ltd who manufacture lifts. stair lifts and escalators. I met Mike Newman the Group Learning and Development Manager. We got to talk before the actual ceremony began, and we discussed about Stannah (how may engineers does it employ, how many interns they have etc) and its future (what kind of projects are coming up).

S for Stannah is pretty far down the alphabetical queue, so during the awards ceremony I got to watch a lot of people in front of me collect their certificates. More importantly, I got to listen to everyone’s short bio/most important thing they have achieved to date that was read out as they walked across the stage. The students were really impressive!

I’m grateful to Arkwright for the scholarship and of course Stannah for sponsoring me!

 

 

UKLA Training Day, Chesham

As part of the Arkwright Scholarship, we get invited to attend events in engineering around the country where we can get to learn more about various aspects of the areas we might be interested in in more detail.

As Chemical Engineering is one the three types of engineering I included on my Arkwright application, I was keen to take up a place offered on a day course run by the UK Lubricants Association (UKLA).  I know, all the jokes have already been done!

After introductions, we learnt all about the work done by this body as well as the various intricacies of lubricant manufacture and uses. I have to confess, I didn’t think I would get as much out of it as I eventually did.  Some of the more interesting things we got to hear about included:

• the uses of ‘Drilling Mud’
• grading and testing of oils
• the history of oils

I have come to realise that the field of Chemical Engineering is quite wide and there are lots of options for me if I decide I want to move into this area. I am hoping to find a way to combine my love of Chemistry with my love of Computing, so I am keeping all doors open at the moment.

Update: Forbes Article

Elena Sinel, founder of Acorn Aspirations, recently forwarded an article to me. It was written by Tabitha Goldstaub- co-founder of CognitionX (which focuses on AI- I spoke at the CognitionX conference in London earlier this year) and British Tech Entrepreneur- and published in Forbes. The article is mostly about how schools need reform in order to keep up with technology and how (and why) Acorn Aspirations was founded , but there is a small part about my team from the 2 week accelerator back in August. The article asks us about SKai (our idea) and about us as a team- are we undermined because of our age? Why did we choose to work on skin conditions? What are we most excited about in the future? It’s a nice article and features a pretty cringy photo of me and the team which is always a plus.

The article can be found here.

NASA Space Apps Challenge

Over the past weekend (20th to the 21st of October) I participated in the NASA Space Apps Challenge, an international 48 hours hackathon in which participants can used open-data to solve problems given by NASA. It is an adult-only event, however Acorn Aspirations petitioned and allowed thirty or so teens to compete- the only teen participants in the world. All across the world people worked either on their own or on teams to create a projects which they would  then upload to the Space Apps Website to be judged. The teen hack took place at the Microsoft Reactor, London.

Girls In AI hackathon in San Francisco

Previously on LicenceToCode:

Quick recap, I won the 2 weeks accelerator course run by Acorn Aspirations back in the end of August and because of that, my team and I got to San Francisco from the 11th to the 16th of October. Our trip was sponsored by Mastercard and a company specializing in artificial intelligence they bought called Brighterion. 

The next day, we were given a tour around the Brighterion offices and the area where the hack (run over Saturday and Sunday) would be held. After, we got lunch (paid for by Mastercard) with Akli Adjaoute, the CEO of Brighterion.

After our tour, we wanted to get some sightseeing in before the hack over the weekend, so we walked to Pier 39 (a popular tourist attraction for its shops and sea lions), then went to see the Golden Gate Bridge at night.

The GirlsInAI hack was a girls only event and sold out, with over 50 girls from a range of ages attending. Girls were split into teams of around 4 and were challenged to come up with a solution (to pitch on Sunday) to one of the problems proposed to them. On the first day, as well as mentoring, I also ran a python workshop for beginners, which taught me how to approach teaching large groups.

World AI Summit 2018

I was invited to speak at the World AI Summit 2018 as part of Inspiring Juniors celebrating International Day of the Girl. This year it ran from the 10th to the 11th of October at the Gashouder in Amsterdam. The conference was over two days, but I was only able to attend for the first day as I had a flight the next day.

Sara and I at the airport

The World AI Summit is the world’s leading artificial intelligence summit. World Summit AI was founded and is run by Sarah Porter, who also founded InspiredMinds and several other companies. She is an amazing role model for women and such a nice person! I would recommend anyone to check out her LinkedIn so see all the cool stuff she is also involved with.

I was really nervous to speak as a) we were on the main stage and b) World Summit AI had 6000+ attendees this year.

As part of our performance on the main stage, all of the Inspiring Juniors were to finish the sentence ‘In my future AI will…’ with their own personal thoughts and beliefs. Mine went as follows:

“In my future AI will change the landscape of the modern working world. Aspects of all jobs will be changed, shaped, influenced by the rise of artificial intelligence in the workforce. The disappearance of the jobs we know and the creation of new and exciting jobs not yet even thought of will be distinctive changes for my future ahead- and this is why I believe that the future of work is with AI.”

Poetic, I know.

Update:AI Summit & San Francisco

At the time of writing , I am just off to the World AI Summit In Amsterdam, where I will be speaking on stage with some of the other winners of the Inspiring Juniors Competition.  Right after that, I am heading off to San Francisco with the rest of the SKai team, where we will be mentoring 60 girls at the MasterCard Hackathon to celebrate the UN Day of the Girl. Exciting times!!

I’ll be updating my blog right after that.

Here is a promo vid for Amsterdam!