Music
I wanted to practice the following to pieces:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaqM7p4sgx4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E6b3swbnWg
And I did! By far, they are not perfect, but at least I have a guess now of how many hours I will need to invest for satisfying result. I declare this as a milestone, but we are still far away from a success. As University ends in May and I hardly will be able to get hold of a piano over the summer at least weakly, this one will be deferred to quarter 4.
Open source
I mentioned this new project in the last report. Things are in progress. Stay tuned.
Cooking
I did passively avoid meat, that is if there was not a free BBQ somewhere or if it was not inconvenient I choose not to eat meat. Being in China right now makes this considerably harder, but I found a fruit shop of which the food is so much better than the food they serve in the canteen!
Sports
It probably will only be a half-marathon for this year as a full marathon is too risky/time-consuming/cost-intensive.
Writing
I had two essays dues, but due to their technicality and because they are really boring they are not worth publishing here.
Books
I must have read a lot of books over the last quarter. Just over the last week I read two books, one by Guy Spier and one titled “The Big Short”. So we are on track by far.
“Artificial Intelligence”
So, having explored this topic for the last 6 months from all kind of different perspective I am confident to say that AI is really not more exciting than it has been the last 30 years, at least in the common sense. Yes, some things are changing and yes there is incremental progress, but so there is in other areas.
I completed the Machine Learning course at coursera.org which was very much application centred, so I chose to sit in a course called “Learning from Data” this term as I only had 3 modules. It was a way better experience as it focused on the actual theoretical constructs.
Web-Crawler
Check. 200%.
Statistics
Check. But still exploring. I started an online course on probability theory at MIT which is really, really good and it will conclude on statistical inference, so stay tuned.
Mathematics
I will venture into the filed of probability theory for now, see above.
University
I had corrected my prediction to a first, but then I took a hit in economics (partially my fault), so probably a high 2.1 for second year.
Things I will pick up this quarter
Chinese
Yes. I will start learning Chinese. I am currently on this 4 week trip in China which includes language classes and I like it a lot. Knowing Chinese at any level is worth so much now and especially in the future. Watch this.