#coffeemonday

Coffee Monday #4

Good morning everyone! Time for our fourth coffee Monday. Today I started my day a bit different. I woke up at 4:45, drove to a watchtower in the nature and watched the sunrise. You can imagine that my coffee was black and very strong. Even though it was early and cold, it was an amazing way to start my day. As a big nature enthusiast it was fantastic to see the nature wake up as soon as the rays of sunshine touched upon the ground. 

So how about our project? The data collection is still in a work in progress, which we hope to finish this week. After that, data analysis can start! Furthermore, we as a team are going to focus more on the fun aspect that PREMIUM brings along as well. Due to COVID-19 this aspect of PREMIUM faded to the background. Thanks to the team dynamics meeting the fun, and with that a new portion of enthusiasm, was brought back into the group. 

That’s all for today, Happy Kingsday!

Meanwhile ... 

There we are, our third coffee Monday. We are in the middle of collecting data and we will be meeting our client tomorrow. What else is going on? As we are progressing in working from home, we are getting used to Zoom, Skype, and communicating at a distance. Next to premium, most of us are busy with one or more courses, our thesis and trying to remain some social life albeit the lockdown and social distancing. 

I too, drink my coffee black. 

That's all for this week! 

Meanwhile, 

… Sabine is trying to work from home while her house is under construction. 

… Sunny is going crazy over a letter of motivation. 

… Dora had a sudden rush of inspiration and is writing a zombie apocalypse story. 

Hello everyone! I’m the first to start this week in introducing ourselves. 

I’m Alexander but go by the nickname of Sunny (okay - this is awkward. Tumblr does the emojis automatically. My nickname is S_unny but I guess you can also call me sunny if you want to). While in my master of European Studies at FASoS I do not focus on technology related topics (I’m rather foreign policy oriented), joining the Premium team for Arcadis gave me the chance to come back to childhood passion and be a bit nerdy! Recently I had to explain a fellow student (by coincidence she is in the Premium team for Accenture) why I don’t think that video games are a waste of time and I enjoyed this nostalgic moment.

Back to the reality of working, I find myself struggling to find nice words to describe artificial intelligence and neural networks. Sometimes youtube videos help in our understanding but that’s not too academic, hm?

Anyways, even though it may be sometimes difficult to get our heads around, I believe that trying to understand how technology works and not only using it is fascinating.

As a funny take-away for you on AI; Microsoft learned an important lesson how important input data is from a failed AI project they introduced in 2016. If you’re interested in learning how a chatbot that “loves humans” turned into a holocaust denying racist, take a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr4yi9onykg

And so we arrive at our second coffee Monday in an exciting new week. Our project is progressing well and we have done 2 pilots tests of which we will present our results during the video Pitch. So keep an eye out for that.

Besides Premium study life for me carries on besides all turbulence. This period’s theme, and probably for the rest of the year is all about writing. We have a research paper and skill paper of a total 9000 words due in 3 weeks, and afterwards one more paper and of course my thesis of 15000 words at the end of June. So this self-isolation is pretty much required if I want to hand in anything of worth. However, it is not all doom and gloom. The topics I am writing about are interesting, especially my thesis on AI ethics in the EU is exciting to work on. And of course, I have a big french press of coffee (now empty) to keep me going. I drink my coffee black. 

That's all for this week!

Meanwhile…

…Sabine is currently staying at home, getting work done that's been lying around for a while

…Sunny is browsing amazon for a bidet conversion kit for sinks

…Dora is currently working on a paper and reading about the origins of the biotech industry