Reflections | Projections 2018 Recap
A quick run through of what Reflections Projections 2018 had to offer!
From halls filled with leading technologists inspiring students to rooms buzzing with the excitement of building terrariums, R|P 2018 had it all. Our 12 speakers, 40 sponsors, 60 staff, and over 2000 participants all came together to make this iteration better than ever so let’s dig a little deeper to each part of RP!
Speakers
Year after year, Reflections Projections brings in passionate technologists working on the cutting edge of tech and R|P 2018 was no exception. From deep learning to quantum computing to blockchain, our unique speakers guided us through the industries that they have grown to love.
We reached out to one of these great speakers, Romain Paulus, for a quick Q&A!
Q: Tell us about yourself. What is your background and what do you work on nowadays?
A: I got my master’s in computer science from ISEP Paris in 2014, with an exchange semester at the Stanford artificial intelligence lab. Shortly after I graduated, I joined the Palo Alto-based AI startup MetaMind, which got acquired by Salesforce in 2016. Since then, I’ve been a researcher working on deep learning for natural language processing, more particularly deep abstractive summarization.
Q: What was your most memorable moment speaking at Reflections | Projections?
A: Answering peoples questions after my talk made me realize how much students were interested in these AI-related topics and are eager to pursue a career in it. Being able to help them find their own path made me very happy and humbled.
Q: If you had the chance to come back, what would you make sure to share with students at UIUC?
A: I would try to keep sharing with them the latest exciting developments in AI and the unsolved problems that carry the most potential for the future, in order to make them interested in solving them if they make AI a part of their career.
Keynote
Our keynote speaker, Marianna Tessel, inspired us all with her unique story starting from her experience in the Israeli Military to becoming the CTO of Intuit.
Mechmania
As the largest student-run AI hackathon in the nation, MechMania 24 reached new heights last year. It showed the largest turnout of any MechMania before with forty teams of three or four students all competing for the top prize.
The game revolved around “the ancient kung fu art of RPS, consisting of the three sacred stances: Rock, Paper, and Scissors.” Teams trained their bots to be the last one on the island and their AI clients were given full map awareness with the exception of enemy bot destinations. MechMania was also streamed to Twitch and reached the top spot in the programming category of the popular stream site. With the coming year, MechMania 25 is set to be bigger and better than before!
ACM Symposium
This year, we tried something new. We asked SIGs from other schools to join us in presenting cutting edge projects, and we could not have been more happy with the result. Examples included reinforcement learning for Atari and professors, faculty, and the CS@Illinois community were in the audience. The symposium allowed students to practice speaking about their work as a “trial run” before presenting at larger conferences. If you’re interested, we’d love to hear from you early at contact@reflectionsprojections.org!
Corporate Week and Events
With over forty companies at the career fair as well as an exciting startup fair, R|P brought the tech industry into the doors of the Siebel Center. Excited students lined up to talk to recruiters in a casual setting and create meaningful connections. But the career fair wasn’t the only venue for companies to present themselves, many interesting tech talks and socials were scattered throughout the week.
Food, PuzzleBang, and the Escape Room
Meals were provided for free throughout the weekend, from the classic pizza meal to spicy Indian food, R|P made sure that every taste pallet was satisfied!
As tradition, PuzzleBang kept R|P attendees on their toes! Ben Juang and Dan Tan (two amazing UIUC alums) rolled out puzzle after puzzle throughout the week with the theme “Another Universe:”
Things aren’t good, you’ve fallen into an alternate dimension after someone decided to try overclocking one of our university quantum computing clusters to mine dogecoin (why did they want dogecoin anyways!).
Anyways, because of some weird quantum problems, you’ve been trapped in this alternate universe. Can you solve all the puzzles by the end of the week and return to your actual universe?
But, the puzzling didn’t end there. PuzzleBang partnered with CU Adventures to bring us not one but two great escape rooms set up in our very own Siebel Center. The games where about twenty minutes long and participants solved a variety of logic puzzles so that they could “get out” of the room in time.
Thanks for walking through R|P 2018 with me! Keep a lookout for more blog posts for sneak peeks into R|P 2019.
