Rolls-Royce Internship

I finished my 10 week internship in the Rolls-Royce R² Data Labs at the beginning of September and I’m very grateful for the opportunity to work with AI to detect cracks in turbine engine parts.

My 10 weeks was full of training, research and putting AI theory into practise to use GANs to generate some synthetic data. I am very impressed by the work the team and I did and I hope that what we managed to produce is going to help the company.

Thank you very much to our amazing line manager Mohammad Tanweer, as well as many other members of the team- Manisha Mistry, James Arney, Maria Ivanciu and many more- who supported me throughout my time working for Rolls-Royce.

I would also like to announce my acceptance onto the #CodeFirstGirls Nanodegree. I am very much looking forwards to the opportunity to develop my programming skills further throughout this 12-week course and I am grateful to Rolls-Royce for sponsoring me!

Open UK Internship and Creative Director Position

For the last couple of months I have been working with Open UK and you can read more about who they are here. I was initially approached by Amanda Brock who saw my video entry for the Open UK awards asking if I wanted to join the team as an intern, to make the courses and learning more kid friendly. This would involve the use of the MiniMu Glove kit and you can read all about that here.

I was enjoying working as part of the team to develop the new courses and was surprised but pleased to be invited to take on the position of Creative Director. This was quite a challenge as the project was behind a few months and it required working really hard to get things back on track in a very short period of time. The role required me having to come up with ten very simple projects featuring the glove kit and using the minimum in extra resources. The idea is that anyone can pick it up and they don’t need lots of other expensive things to get the project to work. The courses are designed to develop kids programming skills within the KS3 level and tie in with the ten open source definitions and the UN sustainability development goals.

Ten Open Source Definitions

It was great to hear that the Open UK Digital Camp was runner up in the first GNOME Community Challenge and I am very happy to be part of the amazing team.

Balancing all this with my studies has been a major challenge but time management has been a skill I have developed over the last few years and I know this is yet another fantastic experience to add to my CV. Thanks to the rest of the team!

OpenUK MiniMU Glove

Sometime last month, OpenUk announced they were giving away 3000 free MiniMU glove kits to kids across the UK. The Essex Steamettes, who I volunteer with, have recently been working on project with these gloves, so (still falling into the kids bracket!) I applied for one of these free kits.

Excited my @openuk_uk MiniMu Kit has arrived! Can’t wait to get started 😄 pic.twitter.com/cFZugLjBlA

— Lowena Hull (@LowenaHull) August 11, 2020

The trickiest part actually happened to be the making of the glove- I had to enlist my dad’s help for all the measuring and sewing of the felt to create the completed orange glove.

There are 10 weeks of activities (one per week) that can be found on the OpenUK website. I’ve been working through them and will detail them below!

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.

My visit to Sainsbury’s

Earlier today, I took a train up to Holborn, London, to visit to Sainsbury’s (one of the UK’s largest supermarkets) headquarters. While there, I was able to discuss my SatelLife winning entry (TrolleyTracker) to better assess the demand for such a product and obtain more information which I could use to refine my design.

While there, I was lucky enough to be given a tour around the 5 story (and 3 basement floors) building. It amazed me how many people have to come together to ensure the company operates smoothly- I asked and was told there were roughly 2-3 thousand people working in the building.

One thing I particularly appreciated was the way different tables around the office had signs above the desks with a particular food title. For example, there was a “milk” table and a “kiwi” table and even a “chicken” table. I also very much enjoyed seeing the two black cats- aptly names Fortnum and Mason- who primarily serve as the building mice catchers. They were very sweet, and I wished all offices had such dedicated employees!

I am very grateful to Sainsbury’s for taking the time to meet with me! I think it’s very important for companies to invest time into outreach. I have seen lately a trend in company run competitions designed to interest school-aged children into various STEM based careers- one I came across being the PA Consulting Raspberry Pi Competition. I think it is a clever way for companies to favourably introduce themselves to younger generations (who likely have never heard of them and, if they have, do not have a very comprehensive grasp on what the company actually does). On perhaps a lighter note, it is a fun way to introduce kids to potential careers they may have sometime in the future.

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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New SKai website update

As part of the 2018 TeensInAI accelerator, my team and I created SKai, a tool to help self-diagnosis of skin conditions using image processing and machine learning. We now have a site! (Well, we’ve had one for a while but now it’s user friendly)

To visit the site click here– keep in mind it’s still a work in progress!

The main outline to the website was created by Kiran, but I worked over the weekend on making it more user friendly, changing the design, adding features such as allowing users to subscribe to a mailing list and moving our demo to a separate location of the website, etc.

The old website design

The new website design