DSC WOW Workshop Experience

DSC WoW (Developer Student Clubs — Week of wonders ) #letsWoW conducted a 7 Day technological celebration, hosted by more than 120 DSc chapters across India which consisted of 4 days workshops/sessions and a 48 hours hackathon named CodeOffDuty.

So recently I attended extremely insightful sessions on various domains in the past 4 days like Blockchain, Design thinking, AI/ML and augmented reality from Googlers and experts all over the world and I’ve tried my best to soak all the information and wring it into words.

Day 1 (7 Dec 2020 )

Your first ML project :

So day 1 speaker for the event was Sayak Paul ( Deep learning Associate — PyImage Search )

All the answers mentioned below are given by the expert and the speaker of the event.

Main Agenda of Event:

• How much should I know before I start my ML project?
• How much should I know before I start my ML project?
• What problem statement do I choose for the project?
• Lots of moving parts in the project. Where do I start?

So one should know basic concepts to start off and have command over basics. And one cannot be master of everything at any given time. Mainly focus on basics and the things relevant for executing the project which is still missing.

For the problem selection, one should keep an eye on the surroundings and decide if the problem is machine learning-friendly or not. The thing which I loved about the speaker was don’t chase the leader board and always think of the bigger picture. And we can integrate ML models well with other systems also like web applications or mobile applications.

After that. the further event was taken by Worlds first 2x Women Kaggle Grandmaster ( Usha Rengaraju )

She mainly guided us about the very useful platform which everyone should explore for development purposes is ‘Kaggle’. And in this whole session, all speakers focused on to improve our basics and explore them and do collaboration and open source.

Day 2 (8 Dec 2020 )

Introduction to Blockchain

So What is Blockchain?

A block is a record of new transactions. When a block is completed, it’s added to the chain.

I have heard about this many times but always had doubts. How does it really work?

So the thing which I got to know from the speaker was that Blockchain can process transactions faster because it doesn’t use a centralized infrastructure.

The distributed nature of blockchain provides a huge level of trust. The unchangeable property of blockchain and its public availability among its users, whether in a public ledger or a private one, provides transparency.

Any user of the system can query transactions on a real-time basis. And Blockchain technology can be used in Payments: Cross-Border Payments, Blockchain Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Smart Appliances.

Blockchain is the revolutionary tech of the future, for future security aspirants, it will be the best for them to understand the working of blockchain.

The further event was taken by Nikhil Raichur (Program Manager at Google | Former CEO @JellyCone )

Basically, he guided about how to work efficiently on Machine Learning with Crowdsource, he also guided the views with some interesting life lessons.

Then at last Miri Rodriguez ( Author: Brand Storytelling | Storyteller + Global Head of Internships at Microsoft ) guided and told about the key elements of the brand.

• Mission
• Attributes
• Character
• Story
• SEO

After which she shared her inspiring success story and how she developed the brand.

So here’s one quote she quoted during the session which literally stuck to mind i.e.

“ Your brand is not who you say you are, it’s how you make people FEEL”

Day 3 (9 Dec 2020 )

Introduction to Flutter

So day 3 first speaker was Mrinal Jain ( Tech Speaker | Community Lead — Facebook Developer Circles | Frontend Engineer -Witty Feed | Tech Evangelist- Mozilla ) .

What is flutter?

It is an open-source native mobile app development platform developed by Google. The native development means you can develop android as well as IOS applications using the same code.

Flutter provides a lot of widgets for making almost any type of application and it also provides animation support which you can use for your application. Moreover, Flutter is powered by Dart — a programming language that Flutter uses to make android and IOS apps.

It enables the application to directly interact with the native platform instead of going through JavaScript like in React Native and that makes Flutter fast and efficient.

Then the event was taken by Vrijraj Singh ( Organizer, GDG Jalandhar | Google Developers Expert for Firebase & Web Technologies )

So he basically told me about web development and how to grow in it. The session was wonderful.

At last, the most interesting the event was handled by Sanskar Tiwari ( GitHub Campus Expert | Educator at YouTube | Blog at flutternerd.com )

In this, we made a messaging application in a flutter framework from scratch. The session was so insightful and amazing. By this, I did the hands-on practice of this domain and explored it really well.

Day 4 (10 Dec 2020 )

Augmented reality and Virtual Reality

Finally the last day of the workshop, the one I enjoyed the most. In the starting, the Googlers Siddhant Aggarwal ( Developer Relations at Google India ) and Nikita Gandhi ( Community Manager at Google Developers ) gave very insightful information about the development and the work-life at Google India and they shared their experience and how they balance work efficiency. They also talked about time management and one should do mediation in this hectic time.

Then the main event begins so it was conducted by Ada Rose Cannon ( Advocate/Staff Engineer at Samsung & Co-chair of the W3C Immersive Group ) So in this, we did hands-on with AR/VR. Firstly she made all of us familiar with the technology, how it works and all. After that, we did a small project which I loved the humidity to perform.

The thing which I got to know after the event is :

Augmented reality (in short, AR) is a technology that expands our physical world by adding various digital layers to it. Unlike virtual reality (in short, VR) it does not create an entirely virtual environment and, above all, it does not replace the real environment with a completely virtual one. Augmented reality is introduced directly onto the existing environment, adding various sounds, videos, 3D models, graphics and more.

How can this technology be implemented?

To answer correctly we must premise that, unlike VR, we must also refer to some principles of computer vision , given that we are in a real environment. It is clear that the levels that we will add can be enhanced with well-defined data types such as images, animations, videos, 3D models and localized audio.

This is possible with the support of these hardware/software components:

• Camera and sensors
• Performing CPU and GPU
• Holographic projection

At last the event was taken by Koren Grinshpoon ( Founder & COO at echoAR (Techstars ’19) ) in this he guided us by making an application by implementing AR and VR technology.

The major thing I loved about the workshop was the in-between quizzes and the prizes they organized to keep the viewers motivated.

So all the workshops were really fun and insightful. I learned a lot from this and explored many domains. Got to know how to follow the right track in Development. The domain which I loved the most and in which I can work is AR/VR. Thanks, DSC WOW for this amazing workshop. Looking forward to the Hackathon.