Day 2 and 3

Photo te be added

NetApps

Today, we had the privilege of visiting the NetApps company, where we firstly was kindly hosted by Rama, with a very generous buffet of tacos and fajitas.

Out first speaker was Dona Munsch, who spoke to us about the ‘Downward Infection’ , where women’s voice has the tendency to get higher as we feel more passionate. This directly affects the tone of our voice and therefore the impact on the audience.

We then discussed the High Tech profession, for example, why we want to do High Tech, the different areas in High Tech and skills we need in this profession.

We firstly discussed why we may be interested in High Tech and we came up with the following ideas:

• It is just generally interesting

• It has a big impact on everyday life

• To explore the background behind general activities; such as, swiping a bank card.

• The speed of change – technology is changing fast so everything around it will change as a consequence which will affect us

• It is challenging and we like to challenge ourselves

• Flexibility within this field – allows innovation and creativity

• The skills we obtain in this field will allow us to develop in to other fields – HR, Finance, Marketing, etc.

• It is WELL-PAID!

The creativity in High Tech is significant in:

• Virtual Reality

• 3D Printing

• Nano Technology

• Artificial Intelligence

When thinking about these professions we will take into consideration regarding the social responsibility, for example, Microsoft and Bill Gate Foundation which helps more needy places in economically and environmentally.

We then discussed the skills we could possibly need:

• Communication – it is commonly believed that guys are less good at communication

• Collaboration – Women can work both independently and collaboratively

• Bravery – To have a voice, be able to stick with our morals and influence others in the right way, including our bosses and not get pushed around.

• Embrace our ‘inner dude’ – Being fine with failure, learn from our mistakes and then let it go. Also try to genuinely have an interest in what guys are saying and try to develop common interests so more connections with them.

• Able to build network connections for more opportunities while developing more hobbies and interests to have an edge

High Tech is the foundation of our knowledge and can be adapted to do different roles and jobs so we are not restricted, instead we can try different jobs and gain more experience from it.

Next we had a talk from Stan, the manager of all data centres for NetApps, who explained to us what the Cloud is, what a data centre is and gave us a tour of their data centre and the techniques to run it.

The Cloud is a useful way sharing resources to places which is not in our data source. Also most companies store all our information on the Cloud so regardless of us, for example, deleting a photo or post on social media, a backup file is always stored on the Cloud and can be used by the police or the company, if we agreed to the contract for using their company, such as Gmail.

We learnt that Stan and his team used a eco-friendly and cheap way to maintain coolness of the computers and hardware in the datacentre through sheets of plastics, as seen in meat stores. This separates the hot and cold air so hot air can be cooled down more efficiently and cool air can remain cool for a longer period of time.

Berkley

At Berkley we were given a presentation on the different methods of teaching AI (artificial intelligence skills), for example Deep Reinforcement Learning, where the robots takes actions and observes the environment to adapt its performance. Deep Learning is where the robot is given a vast amount of data and it will analyse the data to find patterns and learn from these.

We then had a demonstration from a robot, Bret. The students at Berkley demonstrates how the robot was able to tie a knot on a rope due to a demonstration of the action by one of the students. The robot then proceeded to pot a block through the matching shape in a box. The robot did this by trail and error, it was clearly improving and getting nearer to the shape in the box as it experimented with different positions until finalising and getting to the matching shape. The students aims for the robots are to improve or assist people in their everyday live, for example, cooking , cleaning, etc.

Exploratorium

We then went to the Exploratorium, an interactive museum with many displays which allows us to physically try things. This was very fun, especially trying different activities there, including a Cow Eye dissection where we learnt about the Iris of the cow’s eye and the different reasons why it needs night vision, which is mainly to graze at night. I enjoyed activities where is required multiple people, for example the ‘Describing the shapes’ where one person had to create a random shape using the different block and describe it to the other person completely verbally, testing our communication skills and the ability to describe and understanding of each other. I was also very fascinated in the activity where we could track our excitement levels, purely by placing two fingers on the panel and a graph of your excitement will be produced. There were many more activities which were just as fun but there are way too many to explain but this was truly a really fun experience and I would love to go there again!