1st Place: National Security Innovation Network H4D Starts
I had a great time representing the University of Southern California at the Starts H4D Conference. This conference brings together some of the brightest graduate students from top universities and major problems faced by the Defense and Intelligence Communities.
List of Schools Competing
Georgetown University
University of Southern California
The Ohio State University
Duke University
University of Texas at Austin
Stanford University
University of Colorado Boulder
University of Pittsburgh
The University of Southern Mississippi
Johns Hopkins University
The University of Virginia
Columbia University
The University of California San Diego
Colorado School of Mines
James Madison University
Rochester Institute of Technology
Boise State University
The University of West Florida
National Defense University
Defense Acquisition University
United States Air Force Academy
United States Military Academy at West Point
In the finals last week we were narrowed down to 6 top teams out of more than 100+ plus graduate teams. The Department of Defense flew all of us out to San Francisco where we presented in front of a panel of Venture Capitalists. After a really really intense pitch competition our team came out on top. But it was extremely close.
Hosting @ IBM BlockChain Developer Conference
I had an amazing time working with the SF city team today getting to help host the IBM BlockChain Developer Conference. One of the perks of hosting the conference was that I was able to meet a lot of the really cool speakers.
Of the many amazing people I met today I really want to highlight 2 of the really really really amazing speakers I met.
The first was Sandy Khaund. Sandy was founder and CEO of Upgraded which really took the Block Chain to heart and turned traditional event tickets into secure digital assets through smart contracts. What really impressed me about Sandy wasn’t just how technologically complex his startup was, but how he found an actual use case where there was an extremely compelling business case for the technology. This was made clear when TicketMaster ended up acquiring his startup and bringing him in as their VP of Block Chain Products.
The next really amazing person I met was Porter Stowell, the head of Block Chain strategy here at IBM. Porter had flown across the country to attend the conference and it was amazing hearing him tell me about some of the really amazing projects in the space. One thing that is amazing about IBM being a huge company is the fact that they have a lot of resources they can put toward pilots. Whether that be in shipping or healthcare, IBM is working with a lot of partners who want to explore Block Chain, and it was great to meet the person leading the charge.
Elevator Talk with SVP of Cognitive Applications: Bob Lord
I had an amazing time getting to talk to Bob Lord the Senior Vice President of Cognitive Applications, the group in IBM that I’m interning in this summer. For those of you outside of IBM, Bob Lord is literally a legend among IBMers. In my first week I heard chants of his name among the other interns.
So when I found out he was coming to my office in SF I decided to introduce myself as an intern and get a photo with him. It just so happened that we were heading out from the office at the same time and got into the same elevator. It gave me the once in a life time opportunity to ask the head of my division questions about IBM.
My first one was what tips he had for a new IBMer. His advice was to really take advantage of all the events and summits happening in SF, not only within IBM but throughout the city. To him being one of only 4 undergraduate interns in the SF office meant that I had a very rare opportunity to soak up as much as I could from the highly technical and dynamic staff in my building.
The second one was what he thought was the coolest technologies at IBM. This was a bit longer of a conversation. And I’m really thankful that we left right as every other person on different floors were leaving, because it meant that our elevator stopped on each of the 8 floors we were going down from. To him, he saw IBM’s Block Chain as the coolest technology and one that was vastly underestimated. “Too many people confuse Block Chain with the value of cryptocurrencies like BitCoin.” We ended up having a conversation about the future of cryptocurrencies and the need for stable-coins in the future. After we got down to the lobby I thanked him for his time and we parted ways. Overall though it was an amazing experience getting to talk to him.
Scouting out @ Amazon Go Store
Since Amazon competes against IBM in the cloud, I’m gonna consider this walk across the street a work trip
Hosting @ Galvanize: An introduction to IBM Blockchain Platform 2.0
I think the biggest takeaway I’ve learned in my first week at IBM is that many times its not the superior technology that ends up being successful in the market, its a combination of a lot of other things. Technology is definitely a major factor, but if you aren’t listening to your customers - you aren’t going out of your way to talk to them and get their thoughts.
As part of this approach IBM has created developer advocacy teams. Developer Advocates aren’t selling things to people — their job is to host meetups and events to build a community. This allows developers to come in and just learn without any pressure to buy. Over time these same Developer Advocates are able to hear the compliments and criticisms of IBM's technology and are able to pass those on to program managers (offering managers at IBM) to fuel future changes.
As part of this process, this week I had the amazing experience of working with Lisa Jung to host a Lunch and Learn meetup on BlockChain led by IBM’s Lennart Frantzell. Besides the amazing food (the best bahn mi sandwiches like ever), I had a great time helping some new developers get set up with the prerequisite software (node, docker, etc). As I was helping out I was able to strike up conversations with many of the developers who were in attendance. Their skill and experience ranged from first time coders, to CTO’s looking for a blockchain platform for their next product.
I think overall it was a great way to bring developers in and just talk to them. I interacted and had some pretty deep and meaningful conversations with about a dozen different developers. I even spent an extra hour after the event listening to the concerns of a frustrated developer who was comparing IBM’s Blockchain offerings to that of Microsoft.
Overall here are the top 3 complaints that I passed onto my higher ups:
Problems with the free trial system for Block Chain in specific - some deployment features that would be nice to test run are not free
Specific issues with the UI/UX ex: some developers weren’t sure if they were actually interacting with the smart contract or not in VSCode
Issue with the accessibility of tutorials: IBM has the documentation and tutorials for BlockChain split between 3 different locations which made it hard for some first timers
But overall after just asking what the developers thought of the platform most of them admitted that it was pretty amazing that IBM’s BlockChain framework was agnostic on the deployment. Meaning that, according to Lennart Frantzell, on the updated 2.0 Block Chain IBM was releasing even if you don’t choose to host the Block Chain with IBM’s cloud, you can still use their extensive developer resources.
Backpacking 300+ Miles on the Camino de Santiago
In between my Summer internship and Sophomore year finals I had the once in a life time experience to walk the Portugese Route of the Camino de Santiago. It was such an amazing experience, not only backing through Portugal and Spain but also striking up conversations (or at least trying to) with people from all over the world who don’t speak the same language as me.
1st: New Venture Seed Competition + 30k in Prize Money
My team from left to right with the prize money: Kaushal Saraf M.S. Computer Science ‘20, Joel Joseph B.S. Computer Science ‘21, Varsha Varadarajan M.S. Computer Science ‘20
Mentoring @ Engineering Diversity Panel
I had a great time this week being on a panel of engineers answering questions about life here at USC for a special group of socioeconomically disadvantaged high school sophomores who want to learn what life as an engineering student.
All of them laughed at me when I told them of my experience of taking a ballroom dance class with some of my friends last semester and how due to my horrible dancing skills I accidentally dropped my partner. But honestly it was a pretty good analogy for studying engineering, when you start your going to be really bad. Probably not as bad as me as a dancer, but still there’s gonna be times where you stumble. But overtime you keep working at it and through a lot of practice at hackathons and with homework assignments.
Lessons Learned Presenting to General Patreus
My team with General Patreus after our presentation
I had the once in a life opportunity this year to present my team’s work in front of General David Patreus. While I’m super excited about what I’ve been working on for the last couple months and the presentation my team worked on for the General, given some of the operational data that was military specific to our project I can’t share our entire presentation.
So instead I was asked by the university to write about the lessons I learned as the outlier in the room. As a 19 year old it was amazing having this opportunity. Even more humbling was the fact I was the only undergraduate and student under 25 who was in the room, let alone in front of the general presenting.
Don’t Take the Criticisms Personally - Patreus is probably one of the most knowledgable men in the world when it comes to new and emerging technologies. When he thinks a team is not working on something useful he’s very blunt and straight forward about it, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. An example of this happened to the team presenting right before us. As soon as the deck was loaded onto the projector and even before the team could say a word, Patreus was very straight to the point. He told the team, which was working on detecting drones near AirCraft Carriers and creating a ML model to determine the certainty the drone was armed or had explosives, that he had just invested in a company that not only did the same thing better but also had a novel way of taking the drone down. I think the quote Patreus used to wrap the presentation up was pretty telling toward his approach which was “A good leader doesn’t keep the staff guessing when he knows the answer.” The meaning behind it was that General Patreus doesn’t have people reinvent the wheel to find out there is already a major problem with their approach.
Be Prepared and Confident - I think this is probably the biggest thing a lot of the teams really struggled with. One of the other team members after presenting literally told me that he felt the General smelling his nervousness before he even got out of his chair to present. After the first presenter on the first team who presented had his nerves get to him and forgot his presentation, all the presenters in the room definitely got a little bit more concerned. More importantly For me personally I was definitely the least qualified person in the room. All the other teams presenting had teams of 5 comprised of a mix of graduate and PHD students. Meanwhile team which was presenting only had 3 students including me, where I was an undergrad. But to be honest being under-qualified has really never stopped me from doing anything, and this was no different.
Stories are Helpful When You Have Data To Back up the Experience - I think the reason General Patreus really resonated with my team’s presentation was that not only were we able to share the stories of specific Marines who were facing the issue we were tackling, but because we were able to interweave the statistics and business intelligence that a lot more Marines were facing the exact same issue. One thing I really admired about the General was the fact he really prided himself about knowing the operational aspects and small details of the jobs the men he commanded. The second team that presented was working with the Air Force and State Department on Pattern of Life Data Analytics to help drone strike planners minimize civilian casualties. Patreus was able to bring up a lot of personal experiences of how small a lot of the screens were for the drone pilots, and how many times because there is not preset data on a drone strike location especially when the location is “hot.,” there needs to be multiple drones on station looking at multiple angles to best avoid civilian casualties. This kind of really spoke to the fact that even though General Patreus was really high up in the military, at heart he is still a soldier who identifies with the problems that normal soldiers face when doing their responsibilities.
Don’t be Afraid to Ask - One of the things I added to my bucket list after finding out I would have the opportunity to present in front of General Patreus was getting a photo with him to prove to my mom it actually happened. After Patreus was finished asking questions to my team and I (which was the last team presenting) I kind of saw my 5 second window to get around his entourage of suits who follow him and ask for a quick photo. To which he replied of course he would take a photo with my team. That’s actually how I got the photo for this blog entry, and how all the other teams presenting got their photos with Patreus. After the presentation a lot of other teams actually came up to me and thanked me for being brave enough to ask for the photo first, because that allowed them to come in after and get a quick photo. A little bit more on focus however was the fact my team was having trouble getting connected to a specific branch of the Pentagon which was helpful in our project. After Patreus was done asking a question on a related note, our team was very honest in where we were struggling getting connections to which he responded “speak to person X and tell him that David Patreus sent you.” That connection actually ended up being really helpful to our team.
In the end it was a really amazing experience. Our team got some amazing feedback which we are incorporating into our project for the US Marine Corps. The general’s comments for our group in specific was that he wanted us to expand our project focus from just a specific subsegment of the Marine Corps to all the different branches, and that kind of feedback from someone as experienced as General Patreus is the vote of confidence we need in order to think bigger.