Yo! Another week passed by so quickly, it’s hard to believe that we’ve already been here for around 2 months. The experience here has been all good so far, and hopefully these last month will be kind and have the chance to make many more good memories before we return 🙂 but anyway for this week, I took a break from the travelling and spent most of the time back here in ZJU, spending time as a regular student, focusing more on the theme project, trying to learn new things all in a short amount of time.
On Monday, we had our final assignment given to us for the Design Fiction course, it was to make a video with our Origami Robots as the focus and the theme being future robots once again. Our plan was to mix the old with the new, using those old school infomercials as a template for our video, but showing off these “robots” as a revolutionary new product that could do everything for its user. It was really fun coming up with different ways to present the information to the consumer, which I felt was the goal of the course; to try and introduce information regarding your product in a fun and engaging manner such that someone who doesn’t truly understand the theoretical nature will still feel engaged with it. Thus far, I felt like the course although it presented some cool ways to present information, I think that we were limited mainly by the time we had to learn some of the technical skills before the submission date, but overall, it was an valuable experience.
On Tuesday, we had the chance to visit Tong Dun, 同盾科技, a data security firm organized by our theme mentors. They are a data security firm that play a key role in terms of protecting users online in many different online platforms. From, Banking to Social Network Platforms, and even Gaming, they provide the necessary back end that goes into privacy protection as well as fraud detection. We had a chance to tour the history of the company, take a look at some of the solutions that they have in their repertoire and catch a glimpse of some of their future plans. Something for us to strive for in the (near) future.
The rest of the week we spent meeting up as a team and working on the machine learning models that we were all assigned. Even though, it was something we probably haven’t touched before, I felt like as a team we all learnt pretty quickly some of the basic theory behind how most of the system worked, and planning out what to do was really part of the fun learning process. Both the teams were able to construct a very basic form of different machine learning models to try, and we plan to do so in the coming weeks.
Overall this week was more chill compared to the rest (with all the travelling around). We spent more time working on our theme projects. That isn’t to say we didn’t have fun. We went out to sing K, had fun meals together and played some sports as well, overall I felt it better reflected school life here, combining both rest and work together.
