Mid Trimester 1 Check In

---

I Am Tired Boss!

This trimester has been a very busy period in my life. After 2 weeks I was offered a part time position at Barossa Eye Clinic as an Ophthalmic Technician. Truly an offer I could refuse at this point. So, I am now working with Dr Deric De Witt, doing all sorts of biomedical research and bioanalytical work, all to do with the human eye. It has been nice to exercise the more bio life sciences part of my mind, it almost felt like I was blowing dust off of my brain. 😷👀

On top of this I have been enjoying my time at AICamp, teaching 8-12 year old children all about AI and coding. Funnily enough, I had trouble grasping Scratch so that I could teach it to the children. I now think it is a great tool for kids and a nice way to introduce ideas like flow control at an early age. It also translates okay into Python, for hen the kids want to learn more, later. 😺

The Academic Integrity Ambassadorship has been engaging! I gave some speeches over two weeks to engineering, veterinarian, and science students. It was nice being able to bring that material at a peer and casual level for them. While I hope they contact me for help and find me approachable, I also don’t because then it means they understood my rambling. 😅

Cybersecurity has been difficult for me! I have had trouble navigating and understanding the tools and many many acronyms. It has been good though as a subject to give me context for how I have seen corporations engage with devices and arrange their IT department. We have been using RangeForce and that has been a useful and well compartmentalised tool. I hate setting up VMs for experiments and its nice not having to worry about the security of my own device when playing with ‘attenuated’ viruses. 🪲

Human and Ethical Factors in Computer Science has been good. There has been some universal design concepts that I haven’t really thought about before so it’s nice to see how that plays. It also turns out I just really like philosophy! So, talking about things like Utilitarianism, Deontology, and Virtue Based Ethics has all been fun for me. Especially when applied to AI tooling and machinery. I learned all about Whisper and Nabla which also ended up cross applying to my work at Barossa Eye Clinic, so that was an unexpected benefit. 🎓

The Internship with AIML has been hard yakka. I have been able to contribute some good work and now they want to turn my work into a paper!!! This was a surprise but a welcomed one none the less. So now I’m working with a team to rework my concepts into an academic profile then write a paper and publish. We are also at this point trying to extend the internship for more credits so that I can complete the paper. There is even talk of having me as first author which is even more exciting. So hopefully I will be able to talk more about it in future and even eventually a link to the final product. 🐀

Happy week 7 everyone, from your tired scientist/engineer/teacher/technician/ambassador friend! 😴😪😴

📌 Also Monster Hunter Wilds has been fun, get onto it if you’re a Monster Hunter fan

---

Back