• Question: what is something cool you think you can do that everyone else thinks isn't

    Asked by on 15 Jun 2020. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Sreejita Ghosh

      Sreejita Ghosh answered on 15 Jun 2020: last edited 15 Jun 2020 4:37 pm

      Academic: Communicating my research with people from other domain who do not necessarily have the background knowledge of my field of expertise

      Research-wise: What I do research-wise doesn’t really fall into this category since my collaborators and supervisors find my findings and visualisations I create cool.

      Non-academic: 1) refurbishing old/second-hand furniture by doing acrylic painting on them. 2) create dark humour from most of the accidents/ adverse events in my life

    • Photo: Jane Kennedy

      Jane Kennedy answered on 15 Jun 2020:

      One of my courses at university was on computer hardware, for our assessment we had to write a program in low-level computer instructions called assembler. We had a row of 8 LEDs that we had to program to switch on and off again on a loop, and when the user pressed a button, they would light up in the opposite direction.

      It was by far the hardest thing I had to do at university, because programming at this sort of hardware-level is not something you have to do very often. The instructions in assembler are so basic compared to languages like python, it’s very easy to introduce errors so it took me ages and I was so proud of myself when I completed the task. However when I showed my family what I had done, they weren’t sure what was so impressive about a few blinky lights…

    • Photo: Andy Smith

      Andy Smith answered on 15 Jun 2020:

      We have so much amazing technology today and I think we take it for granted. There’s a huge amount of complexity that is hidden from view. I think it’s absolutely magical that the entirety of the internet and our digital lifestyles is all made possible by tiny switches & circuits turning on-and-off.

      So I’m 100% with Jane on this one. I think it’s really cool to be able to write code in it’s most basic form, running on a device without the need for an operating system. It provides direct access to hardware and is an excellent way to understand how computers are really operating. That does mean that sometimes the end result looks a bit, well, boring. One project I worked on recently involved programming some tiny microcontrollers with code that would let them communicate with eachother over a long-range radio link. Like Jane’s example, there was lots of awesome stuff going on, but the end result was a little light appearing on one microcontroller when I pressed a button on a microcontroller in a different room!

    • Photo: Anar Yusifov

      Anar Yusifov answered on 16 Jun 2020:

      I can speak with anyone (even total strangers) for hours and eventually not only learn from them something new, but also helping them with few things 🙂 Obviously, many people think that it ether normal or just waste of my time, so not so cool. But I think that it’s a great skill and really helped me in my work with people on the conferences and etc.

    • Photo: Fabian Grosse

      Fabian Grosse answered on 16 Jun 2020:

      I can write and work with computer programmes that represent (parts of) the ocean and that help me and others to better understand what’s happening in the ocean. I think that’s a pretty cool thing!

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 16 Jun 2020:

      In terms of coding, two things stand out for me, both I’m afraid from a long time ago. The first was the first time I was able to write a program to draw a diagonal line on the computer screen. It wasn’t much as a thing to see, but in order to be able to make it work I felt I’d had to learn a HUGE amount, and now it had worked successfully I knew I could do ANYTHING on that machine. I felt in control of it and that a whole new world had opened up.

      The second s very similar to others’ answers: this was when I was able to write code to eject a chip card from a card reader. There was something about writing a piece of software which had a physical result, an impact on the real world. It still gives me that thrill when I work with industrial control systems (the stuff that automates industrial and manufacturing processes like in chemicals factories and car plants). I’m not allowed anywhere near them personally these days, but I work with people who use them and that same delight is there about software and real world impacting on one another.

      I get the same thrill watching birds like ospreys and gannets catch fish – seeing animals adapted to two very distinct environments (air and water) overlapping and interacting with one another. Not coding, but so cool!

    • Photo: Freya Addison

      Freya Addison answered on 16 Jun 2020:

      A few years ago, I got into web design. I taught myself html and css and was able to build a dynamic website which worked across web browsers and from phones to computers. I used this blueprint to build my wedding website which was great having so much control. However my friends prefer prebuilt platforms. Definitely something I want to revisit at some point though.

    • Photo: Steve Williams

      Steve Williams answered on 16 Jun 2020:

      I think designing and writing software is about the coolest thing anyone can do. However, most people think that isn’t at all cool and that it’s rather nerdy. I am an Embedded software engineer which means I write code that goes straight on the hardware. This means you can really see the effects of the code you write. Without the software the hardware is just a piece of electronics that does nothing. Once it has the code running on it that hardware becomes alive and response to external events, it does things. (Ideal does the things you want it to do.) Now why would anyone think that isn’t cool. Beats me.

    • Photo: Emma Wilson

      Emma Wilson answered on 16 Jun 2020:

      I do a specific type of research called systematic review, which means I identify and review all of the published scientific studies in a particular area of research. This could be specific to a certain drug or a specific disease.

      In order to do this, scientists must have to be able to search databases like PubMed for terms related to the area of research they are interested in, then read the titles and abstracts of all the papers to decide if they are actually relevant. This is a lot more complicated than it sounds, and scientists generally have to manually screen thousands or tens of thousands of titles and abstracts.

      One problem is that studies which perform experiments in both animals and cells typically don’t say they did cell experiments in their abstracts. This means they would get missed in the title and abstract screening.

      To solve this problem, I read the full texts of over 2,000 scientific studies and recorded if they mentioned cell experiments or not. I then trained a machine learning algorithm to identify if any scientific study contains cell experiments, even if the cell experiments aren’t mentioned in the title or abstract.

      What I think is really cool is that the machine only requires the titles and abstracts of studies but can identify if the full study likely contains cell experiments even if the title or abstract doesn’t explicitly mention them.

      This means that scientists can use my tool (hopefully for free sometime in the near future – once I’m done improving its accuracy slightly more) to narrow down the number of studies they have to manually screen, saving them a lot of time and resources.

      Whilst I think this is really cool, a lot of people who don’t do systematic review tend to have no idea what I’m on about or why identifying research in this way is so important. I hope I was able to explain well enough in this answer.

    • Photo: Martin Coath

      Martin Coath answered on 16 Jun 2020:

      I relax by playing Bach on the violin. That was *never* cool but is actually one of the most important things in my life 🙂

    • Photo: Hannah Im

      Hannah Im answered on 18 Jun 2020:

      I’m going to depart from the other answers people have put in here and write about something personal – I can sing and dance with full abandon, without any fear or shame. The problem is that everyone else thinks I’m awful at it!

Comments

  • Photo: Martin

    Martin commented on :

    Emma – that is in fact pretty cool. I have a bit of a background in ML and although I am mostly unimpressed there are clearly a thousand-and-one possible uses for such a system. Were you the first person to use ML for this type of application – because that would be **super** cool!