Target Jobs Undergraduate of the Year Awards

A few weeks back I decided to apply for the Target Jobs Female Undergraduate of the Year awards. This is an annual award that enables girls to apply to win a range of fantastic prizes including a summer internship at Rolls Royce. As part of the application process we had to provide written responses to a number of questions demonstrating leadership. This was followed up by a series of online tests. The top 20 applicants were then invited to a two day networking and interview event to meet people at Rolls Royce, learn about the company, the work environment and the kinds of work they do. I was excited but nervous about the interview day!

The interviews were a short technical presentation requiring us to explain a technical concept in just over 5 minutes. I decided to talk about neural networks as I had built one for the Google AIY competition with Electromaker. The second interview was more of a business one, where I had to talk about my character, demonstrate various leadership qualities etc. This was a useful experience but tough and although I think it went badly, I learned a lot about the types of questions to expect in any future interview. After this process I got shortlisted to the top ten and have received a confirmed place on the Rolls Royce summer internship.

The award ceremony is on 30th April, which is very exciting. I will be working in the data labs at Rolls Royce over the summer and that is even more exciting and I will be updating this blog with what I do there, providing I can talk about it!

Women of The Future Awards 2020

The Women of the Future Awards was founded by Pinky Lilani CBE DL in 2006 and is designed to recognise female talent in the UK across a range of sectors. There is a wide range of categories of award ranging from arts & culture, to business, sport, technology and finance. One of the special awards is the Young Star, for girls aged 16 to 21.

I was thrilled to be nominated and shortlisted for this award for 2020. The award ceremony featured so many inspiring women and it was wonderful to be a part of this and to see how much inspiring work is being done by women each and every day in every part of life.

Open UK Awards 2020

Open UK is an organisation that promotes the interest of those involved in open source data, software and hardware, primarily through collaboration between business, the public sector and community. They aim to provide a voice for the open source community, create the right legal and policy environment for it to thrive in the UK and promote education, learning and skills.

In October, they launched the first Open UK Awards with eight categories including sustainability, financial services, data, open hard and software, belonging, individual and young person. I was excited to learn that I had been shortlisted from for the Young Person Award. I got to attend the online ceremony in October and was the proud recipient of a goody box packed full of amazing stuff, as well as a very nice trophy!

Electromaker AIY Vision Kit competition results!

Result were revealed today and I am absolutely delighted to announce I won third prize!

The other winners can be found here. I watched the conference this morning (https://emea.info.mouser.com/ai-digitalconference) and was thrilled when I saw my own project up there!

Read the project notes here!

Electromaker AIY google vision

I recently submitted an entry for the Electromaker AIY vision contest and this post today is dedicated to giving an overview of my project, what challenges I faced and how I overcame them.

Isaac Physics Boot camp at Cambridge

I recently attended the Isaac Physics Senior Physics Challenge Bootcamp at Churchill College, Cambridge. I got this opportunity as I was one the top 50 students taking part in the Senior Physics Challenge where I got a diamond award!

The boot camp was from Monday to Thursday and involved lectures on quantum mechanics and two practicals (investigating a conical pendulum and Young’s double split experiment). Throughout the week the other students and I (41 of us in total) worked through the Cavendish Quantum Mechanics primer, learning about Schrodinger’s equations infinite and finite square well potentials, quantisation and localisation, and much more. It was a full-on experience, but I enjoyed the opportunity stretch myself amongst other students who were equally enthusiastic!

If you would like to read more about my week (including a more technical and in detail look at the quantum mechanics I studied) I have written a separate post on my more science-orientated blog.

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Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed reading, check out some of my other posts:

• Rolls-Royce Internship
• Open UK Internship and Creative Director Position
• Target Jobs Undergraduate of the Year Awards
• Raspberry Jam Online
• Essex STEAM Speech

SatelLife Competition 2019

The SatelLife competition was a nationwide competition to come up with a use for satellite data to improve life on earth. Kids from ages 11 to 22 can submit proposals about their ideas. Recently, I won the overall individual prize!

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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.

Teens In AI 2018 with BBC and Mastercard – Team SKai Wins!

After a hectic 2 weeks at the Teens In AI 2018 accelerator, with loads of fantastic speakers, a trip to visit RoboRace at Oxford and getting to work in some amazing locations, including BBC Broadcasting House, Microsoft Reactor and WAYRA, we finally got to pitch in front of judges from Mastercard, BBC and Microsoft. I’ll be updating the blog with a lot more detail on the programme as well as a fantastic day at BBC broadcasting house at the AI Conference very soon.

Unbelievably, our team Skai won! Our idea was an app that uses machine learning to identify skin conditions and we will be working on this idea for the rest of the year. Winning this competition means that after getting to pitch at the BBC AI Conference we will be flying off to San Francisco in October to work with teens there. This has been such an exciting and amazing year so far, I can’t wait to see what comes up next!!

Click here or the image below to view a cool vid of the 2018 Teens In AI Accelerator programme run by Acorn Aspirations.

 

 

TeensInAI Summer Accelerator 2018 (20-31 August)

Week 1 of the TeensInAI Accelerator programme kicked off at BBC, White City on Monday 20th August. I was lucky enough to be one of the 22 teens selected from 120 applicants, to attend this two week event looking at AI.

The programme brought together industry experts and inspiring mentors to work with teens to develop ideas on the theme of AI. I had attended an Accelerator programme back in 2016 with Acorn Aspirations and was interested to see how things might have changed. If you would like to read about the brilliant time I had on the 2016 Accelerator programme then click here.

The Accelerator this year was sponsored and backed by some pretty big organisations, such as BBC, Mastercard and Microsoft.

The sponsors