Why Do People Think Enter X Challenge Innovation Competition is a Good Idea?

Except some IT competitions, I also enter X Challenge Innovation Competition in university.

X Challenge is a competition that gives every AUT student the opportunity and guidance to develop an idea for a business, cause or project. 

Each student can experience how to launch and run a business, which starts from an innovative idea. 

It consists of two stages: The Idea and The Accelerator.

You can enter either one or both, as an individual or as a team. When entering as a team at least one member must be a current AUT student.

I enter The Idea.

Next is my milestones for X Challenge:

01/04/2019: Gather my team.

Choosing a partner who matches the marketing and business ability that I lack will shape the future of the business more than any other.

In this stage, I choose Mia Lu.

She is a marketing and multi-media specialist who holds a double major in Marketing and Economics, with 4+ years of experience in digital marketing and communications. Except the marketing professional ability, design is also her passion and speciality, i.e., graphic design and UX design.

More important, she is an amazing women with high execution and communication skills.

07/04/2019: Decide what we want to build. Brainstorming something the world needs and all the members agreed on the idea.

Finally, our idea is Named Entity Recognition as a Service.

Here is the rationale of our idea. This tool can prevent privacy information leakage for individual Online Social Networks users.

It mainly involves in Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing techniques.

17/04/2019: Demonstrate that people want your product and figure out how to scale. We celebrate once 300 people who are not our friends and family tell us that using our product was useful.

25/04/2019: Submit the Google form to AUT. The form consists of one-page idea, including the problem we solve, our product advantages, markets and customers, direct or indirect competitors and team member description.

01/05/2019: Our team is chosen as a winner of The Idea.

My feelings:

Through the innovation competition, I realise how to change a technical idea to a business product.

And I realise how to act as a leader, especially collaborating with other team member.

Team support is the key to success!

If you are interested in or have any problems with business plan or competitions, feel free to contact me .

Or you can connect with me through my LinkedIn.

How I Join Business Intelligence / Data Analysis Career(Academia)

Before February 2018: My Bachelor Degree

After I completed my bachelor degree of Information Security in Xidian University and experience in Huawei, I start to look for a new challenge.

Then I came to New Zealand to study the Master of Computer and Information Sciences in AUT.

February 2018 – July 2018: Selected Courses

In the first semester of my master degree, I enrolled in two papers: Data Mining and Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing.

The two courses have assisted me in broadening my knowledge while showing me the diverse research side of Computer Sciences, especially Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

July 2018 – December 2018: Master Thesis

Then I enrolled in the 120 points thesis in the second semester.

The thesis research of my Master degree is totally a different challenge to me.

It differs from previous teaching courses because its requirements of the abilities of critical thinking and problem-solving are much stricter.

Moreover, research is also an iterative procedure, so patience and persistence are also essential when it comes with persistent failure.

Luckily, I met my primary supervisor and second supervisor, who guided and helped me a lot.

In 14th November (my birthday day) last year, my primary supervisor suggested me to apply for the Summer Research Award at AUT, which can further augment to my capabilities.

Summer Research Award is awarded to students who have got satisfactory results in the three-month project in AUT. The evaluation is based on the final data analysis report. Only 10 students in the Faculty of Computer Sciences can get the award.

December 2018 – February 2019: Summer Research Award

Then I applied for it and my proposal got approved.

Through three months, I successfully classified and achieved a 92% accuracy result by building a neural network model in this project.

In the last week of February this year, I developed creative contents as academic reports with online LaTeX Editor (Overleaf) to get my final payment.

I recommend the Summer Research Award in AUT, because not only it can bring you some extra gains and honour, but also it can offer you an opportunity to gain some practical skills.

The most important thing is that I start to realise I am more interested in practical industry rather than academia!

Attachment is the Summer Research Award I gained.

February 2019 – July 2019: Two Publications

I also developed my research and analytical skills while publishing two papers

• “An automated privacy information detection approach for protecting individual online social network users” to the Japanese Society of Artificial Intelligence (JSAI) journal
• “Privacy Information Classification: A Hybrid Approach” to The 4th International Workshop on Smart Simulation and Modelling for Complex Systems (SSMCS 2019)

Maybe some people think I should take a PhD degree to enhance my research skills. However, I am not interested in academia any more.

New Journey:

It is time for me to continue my journey and gain more experience in the industry of Business Intelligence and Data Science industry!

If you are interested about New Zealand University, selecting papers, Summer Research Award, or how to publish papers on journals or international conferences, feel free to contact me and I can give you some suggestions.

Or you can connect with me through my LinkedIn.

Three Importance Of Life-long Learning In Programming

A person with a life-long learning ability will become more competitive.

There are two factors contributing to the summary sentence above: human life expectancy and the high changing speed of the world

Human Life Expectancy

Here is a figure about life expectancy in China from 1960 to 2016.

From the figure, it is an indisputable fact that the average life expectancy is still prolonged. Unlike the previous generation, it seems the current millennial generation will need to face a hundred-year-old life.

Such a long life will cause the working years be longer too.

The High Changing Speed Of The World

Here comes another factor: this is a world that is changing at a high speed. 

What would it look like when a world that is changing at a high speed?

The most obvious fact is that some skills suddenly became something worthless, e.g., handwriting. A person who can handwrite beautifully may get a good job in the past, but now he/she can’t because of the cheap price of a printer. 

Another strong evidence is the rise of the Human Development Index(HDI). The HDI figure from 1980 to 2014 in China is demonstrated below.

From the curve, there is a tendency to be on an exponential rise.

Thus, from the facts we show above, this world is actually more and more cruel to many people. 

Too many peers have stopped early, and they have been left behind by the times, so they are at a loss early. 

The only way you can survive on the long life road that is not the same as your guess is to keep learning.

Keep learning is a significant skill. 

Whereas, massive people are exploded to a phenomenon called ‘Information Anxiety‘, which means some of them may suffer from the feeling of anxiety because of the excessive quantity of daily information[1].

Thus, many actions have been dedicated to alleviating anxious feelings by people, e.g., purchasing expensive online courses.

Here comes an interesting and awkward truth: They may spend more money but get little knowledge.

However, people with strong self-learning skills are not anxious, at least they will not be anxious because of the learning process – this is a major difference.

I. Forward Declaration:

The forward declaration is a declaration of an identifier in the area of computer programming (denoting an entity such as a type, a variable, a constant, or a function) for which the programmer has not yet given a complete definition[2].

In schools, we can find the textbooks are very rigorous. It means any term is forbidden to use without a statement. 

So, after completing a chapter, you can learn the next chapter. If you encounter unfamiliar terms, you can find them in a previous chapter.

However, people who are accustomed to this kind of knowledge system in schools will face undesirable consequences in the society. 

Because most of the social knowledge structure is ‘Forward declaration’.  There are some examples:

1. Why do some people always start to understand what their parents have said after many years? 
2. Why do some people always think that their managers are just fooling them before they become managers? 
3. Why do some people understand that investors’ reminders or suggestions are correct after his/her company goes bankrupt?

The reason is that many things are “Forward declaration” and it is very difficult to understand at that time.

The advantage of self-learning programming in this aspect is that in the process of self-learning, your learning experience is actually equivalent to a life cycle. 

So, when facing the same “Forward declaration”, you will not feel so inexplicable.

II. The programming is practical, actionable and achievable.

III. The self-learners in programming area are the most.

Trust me, you are not alone.

If you are interested in some high income skills or have any problems about self-learning and programming, feel free to contact me .

Or you can connect with me through my LinkedIn.

Reference:

[1] Wurman, R. S. (2017). Information Anxiety: Towards Understanding. Scenario Journal, 6.

[2]http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~fischer/cs536.s07/lectures/Lecture25.4up.pdf

An Introduction To Microsoft Learn

In the beginning, I want to state some reasons why I want to keep writing as a blogger.

Because:

1. I want to become a better writer.
2. I feel like I have some professional things to talk about.
3. I want a new challenge.

I want to improve my communication skills by making professional knowledge easier for readers to understand.

Because the most important thing in communication is not speaking, it is how other people can understand your words.

To achieve this goal, sometimes maybe I will need to sacrifice the accuracy of some information.

However, if the audience can accept some basic terms in the first place, I can express more precise concepts to them.

As a nearly graduate IT student, I feel that there is still a gap between what is learned in universities and the practical skills used in real world. 

Luckily, the Internet is convenient enough for us to find what we want to learn nowadays.

Practitioners in the IT industry are supposed to maintain the ability to life-long learning.

I have accumulated some self-learning experience, and I want to share some of the learning resources with you.

The official documents are highly recommended: They will provide the latest tutorials, then we can write a few demos to get started. 

Consequently, this blog I want to talk about is Microsoft Learn, a learning platform which provides me with the best experience. 

Microsoft Learn is a new learning platform created by Microsoft and it focuses on Azure.

Azure is not free.

Although we can sign up for a free trial account, we have to re-apply it after expiring, which is more troublesome. 

But Azure is widely used in New Zealand.

If you want to find an IT job in New Zealand, understanding and mastering Azure skills should be considered as the basic requirements in most cases.

However, an Azure subscription is indispensable. That’s why I highly recommend Microsoft Learn.

Because it provides free Azure subscriptions and an online Azure Lab in addition to general teaching tutorials.

It means that we can use Azure subscriptions for free, create resources, and use them during the course.

The subscription will be automatically released after a while, probably several hours.

If you haven’t finished, you can continue to learn by recreating another one, which is very convenient.

Once the sandbox is activated, we can use the Azure subscription, and the Azure Cloud Shell interface will appear on the right side of the browser. We can enter commands directly into the browser to operate Azure.

Every time I complete a course, I will get the corresponding badges and scores. I have already reached the 8th level !!

This learning experience seems to play games, and I can’t stop it!

If you are interested in or have any problems about Microsoft Azure, feel free to contact me .

Or you can connect with me through my LinkedIn.