BYU- City tech undergraduate data science collaboration workshop, the visit, the reflections

Last week, on Thursday, March 14th, and Friday, March 15th, we had the pleasure of receiving Professor Mark Hughes from Brigham Young University (BYU) and the six students who are participating in the undergraduate data science seminar that we are running together. This was the first time that the students from BYU and our three City Tech students would meet up in person. On Thursday, Professor Hughes gave an excellent talk on how AI has been used to aid in proving mathematical propositions. We had more than 40 people attending his talk, sponsored by the Math Club on Pi Day! Most of the audience were students, and they asked very intriguing questions about neural networks and other machine learning topics. Following that, we continued with our workshop where students engaged in a neural net tutorial conducted by Professor Hughes. Students were very engaged in trying different things on the Python notebook and interacting with their peers. The next day, I gave an intro to autoencoders and showed them the general parts of a notebook I acquired for LiDAR data exploration and how to apply PCA and autoencoders to LiDAR. My student, Charlotte, presented a great summary of her NLP team project from last year, which opened very exciting discussions on Topic analysis and depression in college students. We had lunch and then brainstormed about data and topics in order to define three different teams and the passions and interests of each. I was in charge of the NLP group where many possible topics were discussed, from US elections to depression in university professors, and lastly took the direction of working on social media comments to analyze how social media affects young women's self-esteem. I was excited to see the passion of the team members since they seemed to be really concerned about the mental health issues online interactions are producing in women. The overall experience was very satisfying. I had the opportunity to hear how one of the students expressed great concern about how online communication is affecting relationships and the emotional distress of these interactions. I had an insightful conversation with one of the students while walking back from our outing in DUMBO. He mentioned that he would like to have more in-person experiences like this, where he can learn very concrete things while discussing ideas with his peers and having breaks to enjoy the social interactions. He says most of his week is about going to college and from college to work back and forth. I was happy to see that we were able to create such a positive learning experience. On my side, coming from another generation, I personally observe a dehumanization in online interactions, including emails, text messages, and apps of all kinds. This is a personal opinion, but I wonder if many people are substituting building relationships based on personal interactions with online interactions. It seems that the pandemic played an important role in this, but I wonder if the foundations of meaningful relationships can be built on these very shaky grounds. The final part of the workshop will take place in May when City Tech students and I will be visiting BYU. I am so looking forward to seeing their final presentations and enjoying Utah!