Sick Week - 1/20-31/20

       This past week I was hit by a cold that knocked me out for nearly a week. I missed two and a half days of school because of it. I believe I caught it from Matthew Lee after he showed up to robotics practice after his episode of the flu. I suspect this because the day after I felt absolutely horrible. Catching a cold/flu at this time was especially not good because of recent news about the Coronavirus spreading to the U.S. I got worried but my symptoms weren't matching up so I was in the clear. I spent the next few days quarantining myself in my room to not get my peers and family sick. Below is a video detailing what the Coronavirus is in case you haven't seen the news:


       Also during this week, I learned about the legal strife between Caltech and Apple which resulted in a total victory for the educational institution. The bout was regarding Apple infringing on Caltech's Wifi chip that can correctly perform tasks on encrypted data. Apple's lawyers stated that the invention was one, obvious enough for it not to be a patent, and two, not infringed by the company. Due to the technicality of the whole situation, Dr. Hassibi and other professionals were required for the judge to understand everything, explaining Dr. Hassibi's absence. The trials were constantly pushed back as a result but finally resulted in Apple and Broadcom paying 1.1 Billion dollars. Below is a video with more info on the lawsuit:


       The AMC 12A was this past Thursday. It's a math competition with 25 questions and must be completed under an hour and a half. I was not trying to qualify for AIME because I knew I would not get in but I still did my best to learn. Each problem was vague and left a blank canvas for people to solve. I had to guess some problems due to their complexity and the sheer number of them. I hope I did fine without sacrificing my pride. Here's a video touching upon the math event:


       This Sunday was the Super Bowl game of NFL's 100th season. It was between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs hosted at the Hard Rock Cafe Stadium in Miami. Ironically I was stuck deciding who should I root for. The 49ers' quarterback is the previously Patriot's backup quarterback but the Chiefs haven't been to a Super Bowl in 50 years. I stayed in my living room to watch the first half of the game but left after the Half-Time Show to finish up some homework. The end score was 20-31 with the Chiefs being the 2019 Super Bowl Champs. Here's a recap video from the NFL:


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Technical Journal - Research Papers

Image
On the Efficiency of Data Collection for Crowdsourced Classification :        The paper aims to explain the accuracy gaps between popular collection policies (state-action mapping) on crowdsourced data. The quality of crowdsourced data is often highly variable so it is suspected that it is the cause. However, studies show that the policies used to collect such data have a strong impact on the accuracy of the system. The first theoretical explanation of the accuracy gaps is that the non-adaptive uniform allocation, and the adaptive uncertainty sampling and information gain maximization. Done with the representation of the collection process in terms of random walks in the log-odds (log of odds of guessing correctly/incorrectly) domain, the author derives lower and upper bounds on the accuracy of the policies. The bounds accurately tell us by how much do two adaptive policies trump a non-adaptive one. It is believed that techniques used by them are applicable to addi...
Read more

Journal

Image
On Tuesday, March 24th, we had a meeting with Professor Hassibi over Zoom. Prior to our talk, we had issues with our code regarding the fact that it didn't produce the results expected. He told us to find and graph the eigenvalues of the graph Laplacian, as that would indicate the number of clusters found and value you can refer other datapoints to. He noted that graphing the corresponding eigenvector would indicate whether a cluster had been isolated or not. On that note, it was up to us to tinker with values for a bit and try different algorithms like K-means. Below is a video of the meeting with Professor Hassibi: This week has been very interesting, to say the least. As you may know, COVID-19 has just taken the U.S. for a turn and has put a pause on daily life, forcing businesses to adapt, overcome, or fail in some cases. For us high schoolers, classes have migrated to the Zoom platform. With it followed teachers with bad internet service, leading to indecipherable dialect...
Read more

First Month

Image
The first four weeks of this Caltech Stem class have been interesting, to say the least. Much of the material we went into have been all over the place with various objectives. We started off with teamwork exercises, watching college students present their research, replicating one for ourselves, writing a concept map, and going to Caltech to meet Dr. Hassibi. We had two, teamwork workshops for the first two weeks. One of which was the dominoes problem where each student was given two dominoes and we were instructed to get three dominoes per person by exchanging dominoes for chips and chips for dominoes. Instructions were very vague other than that everyone must have a domino to "survive" a round. We struggled in the first few attempts but through several days of discussion and trial & error, we were able to find a way to accomplish our goal. Some key underlying goals of this exercise were the importance of leadership, communication, and open-mindedness...
Read more