November Newsletter
Student Council, $5 Dollar Challenge, Hackathons, The Knowledge Society (TKS)
Salutations! Welcome back to readers of my last newsletter and simply welcome to those of you that are reading my newsletter for the first time! My name is Opemipo Oduntan (Grade 10).
I am a simple guy who seeks to make the most of my life by discovering my passion and pursuing the full manifestation of my potential and the potential of those around me!
November was an eventful month, and I can only anticipate more to come as Christmas and the new year approaches. But as usual, I'll start with some insightful philosophy...
Insightful Philosophy:
Thoughts: Money has never been a thing I’ve particularly prioritized, most likely because of how blessed I am to have the privilege of enjoying a comfortable life in Canada. Throughout November, I’ve been trying to consciously appreciate the things I have right in front of me by respecting and thinking about nature (even in -20°C weather), taking long walks, paying attention to little details, and pushing my curiosity even further by trying to notice things and explore new areas (both physically and mentally). This has been a large part of my growth this month, and this video, I believe, was part of what inspired that.
Progress Report
The Knowledge Society - Artificial Intelligence & Brain-Computer Interfaces
The Knowledge Society (TKS) is a global innovation program I was admitted into in early September. I’ve been researching new topics, networking with fascinating (sometimes weird) people, and learning from coaches and mentors to help reshape my mindset and prepare me for the real world of STEM, business, and innovation.
Focus:
In October, with help from my TKS director, I chose my focus topic—the topic I would research to gain a deeper understanding of a specific field of study. After speaking with Aatik Chopra, he opened my eyes to the potential of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) in artificial intelligence (AI). Essentially, the entire idea was surrounding our inner thoughts (the ones we don’t even consciously think about) being, possibly, the most significant data source for an AI model. He believed that by using this information to optimize (provide advice on enhancing brain activity), we could provide industry professionals with the brain capacity to solve some of the world’s most complex problems with much greater ease. It could inspire thoughts that were never thought of before, patterns of thinking that had never been used before.
To be completely honest, I haven’t seen as much progress as I would have liked to. I did some digging, found some articles, and suddenly, it seemed I didn’t do anything. I don’t want to hide behind excuses. Still, I think the main reason has been the introduction of other events inside of TKS and the massive increase in homework and tests throughout November. What’s worse is that I had gotten hyped up about halfway through November, and then all that hype got drowned by the mass amount of work and my poor time management. I’ve been exercising the 20:80 rule because I’m trying to maximize productivity with the best efficiency. I know I can’t work myself into the ground this early in the year. Anyway, the first thing I chose to do to reorient myself was to organize my thoughts into this newsletter that you’re reading right now. I think this is a solid first step, and I’ll continue to take it one step at a time while getting the people around me and this newsletter to hold me accountable.
TKS Hackathon:
In November, I participated in a hackathon across all the cohorts in TKS. The hackathon's theme was to pitch an idea that used a technology invented or popularized within the past 3 years. Naturally, I gravitated to a group of people I generally worked well with, and we began ideation.
This took quite some time as we went from blockchain-powered drone delivery to blockchain bees and many more wacky ideas. At one point, we were strongly considering putting together an AI agent to aid psychedelic therapists in treating their patients by generating information on the dosage of the administered drug and other things for a given patient.
Finally, as if it was a divine revelation, an idea popped into my head to pitch an app that was built using a combination of AI and web scraping to gather content from the web and organize it into one area where it can be accessed in the form of a feed. This is similar to what YouTube provides as recommendations but from a much larger variety of content tailored to the specific passions/interests of the user. This app would be focused on helping people feed their areas of interest productively with relevant content or discover them. We named the app MyFeed.
Highlights:
Ideation: I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly creative person; rather, I generally consider myself someone that isn’t creative at all. Now, after the hackathon, I know that is not true. It’s not that I’m not creative. I just haven’t taken the time to push my brain to think of new things in the right areas. Instead of forcing myself to be creative in arts and other things, I’ll continue to tailor my creativity to areas that I can productively apply it.
Team members: My team is what made the hackathon experience so great. I’ve done a few hackathons in the past, but never with a team as great as the one that I was a part of during the course of the hackathon. I had the pleasure of working with Preston Davis, In-Woo Park, and Kohsuke Suzuki. They both had great ideas to contribute and were possibly the most dependable people I’d ever worked with. I couldn’t have asked for better teammates over the course of the hackathon.
Prototyping: I’m not going to lie; putting together a prototype was challenging. I couldn’t figure out how web scraping worked for a week or so, and then a friend of mine offered a quick and easy solution that allowed me to use a python library that was specifically tailored to my needs. I was undoubtedly pretty annoyed after finding out how simple the solution was, but I did learn some things about using Beautiful Soup and Selenium while I was puzzling over ways to scrape videos off the web.
Long story short, we made it to the finals and won the title of the best presentation; however, we’re still working to improve the quality of our work in the upcoming events in TKS so that we can win the best overall.
Steps we’ve taken to achieve that:
Creating a clear development timeline
Making clear distinctions on roles
Doing more showing, not telling
School
Student Council:
Interestingly enough, some fascinating things happened at school, which, admittedly, doesn’t happen much. In September, I ran for class representative, and after being voted into the position, suddenly, the responsibilities that I had as a student council became truly apparent to me when November started, and the student council committee was planning and organizing all sorts of events for students because of the approaching holidays.
This year, we organized a pep rally for our school volleyball teams because they were heading to provincials to play against teams across Manitoba. They didn’t win, but the pep rally was a success. There were halftime games, people were entertained, and most importantly, there weren’t any major accidents that came as a result of the overcrowded gym (aside from a kid in grade 9 puking some chocolate milk in a chugging contest). Throughout this, I mostly helped organize the pizza that was supposed to be distributed before the event, as well as validating ideas and offering feedback.
Another interesting thing that the student council committee organized was a time for the entirety of the high school to watch the world cup with Canada playing against Belgium. Our hopes were high, and there was much excitement, but unfortunately, our vibes alone could not win us a game against Belgium—one of the top teams in Europe.
Throughout all of these things, I loved the chance to exercise my leadership skills and coordinate people while taking on responsibility and enjoying the fruit of my work and of those around me.
I like to think of leadership as, not a position or title, but as an action or example led by people. It inspires action in others and sort of acts like sowing a seed.
This is brought up a lot in the Amazon Shareholder Newsletter, where Jeff Bezos covered the importance of high standards and setting them. This concept of leadership is something that I strive to apply to myself everywhere I’m given an opportunity to assume the role of leadership.
$5 ⇒ $50 Challenge:
In my last newsletter, I briefly mentioned an assignment that my business teacher had assigned to my class to complete around the end of October. This challenge was to turn $5 into $50 by the end of November. I was going to use this project as a chance to develop my financial literacy/investment skills, and this project did quite a bit of that. Not in the way I expected, though…
I chose to partner with two other people at the beginning of the assignment so that we could pool our money together to make 15 dollars. We made a drafted agreement, signed it, and we were on our way.
The first idea that came to mind was reselling carbonated drinks (ex. Coke, Pepsi, Ginger Ale, etc.). It wasn’t a bad idea since the nearest grocery store was within walking distance of our school, so every so often, my group members and I would walk there during our spares and purchase collections of drinks at ridiculously low prices and sell them to make a profit on $2 margins. This business model lasted us a week and a half. It very quickly became apparent that we couldn’t consistently sell sodas since our target demographic—high schoolers in our school—was too small. After that realization, the main problem became expanding our market and, even more so, finding the time to consult with people outside of school. Unfortunately, that wasn’t feasible for most of my team, and one of them fell ill for about a week or two and then went to a volleyball tournament. The projected turnout was somewhat pathetic, but at the last moment, we came up with a new idea.
It was a bit of a long shot, but we were considering starting a sudo-pyramid scheme where we would give people a free beverage in exchange for selling two. We didn’t have enough time to carry out our final plans to their full extent and ended with about $30 on our hands and $80 in calculated liquid assets.
Aside from the fact that I learned how difficult it actually is to make money off of broke high schoolers, I also learned the importance of having a solid plan when trying to do things relating to money.
Personal Growth (Mindset):
I’ve been busy with all sorts of things (and still am), and the constant looming overhead workload can sometimes be stressful. There have also been times when I partially wished I didn’t have as many things to do and that I didn’t have as many worries or things I was pursuing all at once.
I often think back to when I was in grade 9. Within a span of two months—transitioning from school and regular workload and extracurriculars to TKS and activity on side projects—my life turned around. Now I feel more like I have a special purpose, and I’m actively pursuing my dreams and goals instead of just hoping things spontaneously happen in my future.
I made an active decision that I can’t go back to how things were because, yes, I would have a lot fewer things to do, but I’d lose my dreams and the passion that drives me to pursue things that once seemed out of reach. I’d lose the sense of purpose and duty that drives me to think hard, work hard, and strive to improve myself constantly. With so much at stake, I’ve decided to look past the short-term struggles to reap the long-term benefits. It’s a decision that’s partially driven by fear of the unknown and my excitement for having a special place in the world to contribute to the innovations that are taking place across the globe. It’s something bigger than I am, but it’s something that I’m willing to pursue with God helping me.
Opportunities:
For high school seniors, there’s an opportunity to apply for an Amazon Future Engineer Scholarship opportunity. Some information about the opportunity:
$40, 000 Scholarship over 4 years
Paid programming internship at Amazon
[Link] to learn more and apply.
Book Recommendations:
Smile, My Beloved Country (Emeka Onwusorom, 2018)
The Paper Menagerie (Ken Liu, 2011)
Animal Farm (George Orwell, 1945)
Puzzle/Paradox:
Is art made with DALL-E real art?
This is a question that has been debated for quite some time. DALL-E is a deep learning model developed by Open AI to generate digital images from natural language descriptions called prompts (Wikipedia Page). In an art competition where a piece was generated using DALL-E’s AI, the concept of whether or not art made with stable diffusion could be considered art at all was brought into question.
My thoughts on this are that it is wrong to compare AI-generated art with hand-drawn digital art, or other art forms. Just as one wouldn’t compare pottery or sculpting to painting, one shouldn’t compare stable diffusion art with other art forms and use that as a basis for whether or not one or the other is really art. Instead, I believe that it would be more important to separate stable diffusion art from other art forms and compare them among themselves. AI-generated art does not come without artistic understanding. It takes a real understanding of art, visuals, and immense creativity to make anything interesting and unique out of stable diffusion.
If any of you have thoughts about it, feel free to bring it up in the comments for open discussion.
Where do we go from here?
I plan on taking further steps to develop my learn article for my focus topic. In my next newsletter, a link to the article will be posted. The next skill that I’m going to develop for the month of December is writing skills. I plan on achieving this through my learn article and by receiving feedback from my English teacher and others around me when I write things.
Very interesting, as for the concept of A.I. generated art, I would agree with you. I don't think it should be considered or compared to real art, as it is completely different, and does not take anywhere near the amount of time and effort real artists take to create an artwork. However, it is a still great tool for real artists to use as inspiration for their artworks. Great stuff!