👋 hey, it’s aayush…
I always struggle to make intros that are not cliché or boring, starting with “it’s been a crazy month” but it genuinely has been. Quick preview for what’s to come: I participated in an incredible hackathon, dived deep into the blockchain, and am now working alongside Ikea for a potential change in the business model to increase market share within the future market.
Before going into what I’ve done this month, I want to take a second to address some things that have been going on this month in terms of momentum, both with gaining it and losing it.
📉 losing my momentum.
This month has been nothing but crazy, right from the start to the end. However, the first half of the month looked very different from the second.
In the first two weeks, I experienced productivity higher than anything I’ve ever experienced before. I woke up at 4 am every single day (don’t worry I slept early… ish), worked crazy hours, and was insanely productive along the way. I’ll talk more about what I did during these two weeks later on.
However, the last two weeks were honestly pretty bad. The issue wasn’t just that I was super unproductive. It was the feeling of guilt for being unproductive immediately after having this “high” of productivity.
This was the first time that I was able to put a name to this phenomenon… “MOMENTUM”
To elaborate on what I mean by this, I’m referring to the idea that your productivity is propelled by previous productivity. Think of working out as an example. “I want to work out every single day…” A good way to remain consistent is to use yesterday’s workout to propel you to do today’s one. The only issue with that is a single skipped day can collapse the whole system. That’s what happened to me.
Momentum is such a powerful tool, but also somewhat dangerous. Despite momentum not implying innate inconsistency, it did for me. The more and more momentum I gained, the more inconsistent my habits became, and the more problematic it became as I transitioned into the second part of the month.
What’s truly intriguing about all of this isn’t actually the productivity gain/loss from momentum. It’s the toxic relationship we develop with work and guilt.
It honestly begs the question, “are inconsistent bursts of productivity stronger than consistent phases of average productivity?”
🧠 artificial intelligence update.
I love to go back to my old newsletters to see how much I progress each month and… wow! Seems like it’s been forever since I’ve been working on AI. Although, I did make a pivot from Artificial Intelligence as I talked about in my last newsletter which I’ll go into later.
Before pivoting, I finished a project on Synthetic Medical Data Generation using GANs. The second I learned about the ability to generate images using AI, I became absolutely obsessed with the concept. Within the medical industry, we always have this pressing issue of lack of medical data to train AI algorithms accurately. To solve this, I experimented with creating synthetic medical data which can be used to train other AI models to increase their accuracy.
Check out my Article and Video on this project!
😎 participating in a tks hackathon.
This month, I had the incredible opportunity to participate in a hackathon at this program I’m currently in (The Knowledge Society - TKS). The prompt was simply to take a problem within the world and solve it using the technologies that we were focusing on at the time.
For our team, we used an intersection between Artificial Intelligence and T-Cells to progress the development of cancer vaccines.
💉 developing a cancer vaccine… kind of.
Quick disclaimer: if you’re not super interested in the science behind cancer and immunotherapies, feel free to skip this section.
Within our body, we have these little receptors known as T-cell receptors (TCRs). These receptors are able to kill different things that may be harming our bodies and are a part of our immune systems.
When it comes to cancer, this becomes much harder. Cancerous parts of our body create these microenvironments that prevent these T-cell receptors from doing their jobs.
Our solution is to use Artificial T-cell Receptors to essentially bypass this microenvironment. There’s this little thing in our bodies known as neoepitopes which the TCRs bind to. Think of the TCR as a missile launching to a target while the neoepitopes are the actual targets.
If we’re essentially able to inject Artificial TCRs into our body that binds to specific neoepitopes, we can essentially fight cancer regardless of their microenvironments. The only issue is that we don’t actually know many neoepitope sequences and discovering them in the lab takes an incredible amount of time. This means that there’s a very limited amount of cancers that we can combat as neoepitopes can also vary on a case-by-case basis.
Our team worked on an AI algorithm that could essentially discover neoepitopes more than 10x faster and make the idea of a cancer vaccine much more plausible using T-cell receptors and immunotherapy.
Check out our 2-minute elevator pitch on this project:
⛓ a deep dive into the blockchain.
This month, I dived headfirst into the world of web3, and blockchain. It definitely wasn’t easy but it was 100% one of the major highlights of the month. The challenge I had set for myself was to finish an entire TKS Focus within 1-week!
I’m sure you might be a little confused with what a TKS Focus is. Essentially, we take any given technology (blockchain in this case) and complete certain requirements. There are 4-stages to a technical focus:
Learn
Replicate #1
Replicate #2
Create
The “learn” stage is essentially where we write an in-depth article regarding the technology to get a general understanding of how the technology works, applications, potential landscape, etc.
The “replicate #1” stage is where we take a project and… well…. replicate it. Pretty self-explanatory. However, we also create 1 article and 1 video alongside the project, allowing for focus on the communication of the project while also developing a strong understanding of it. The “replicate #2” stage is identical to the “replicate #1 stage”, once again used to progress our understanding of various hands-on applications of the technology.
The “create” stage is the most crucial, and fundamental stage during this process. Here, you essentially use your current knowledge to develop a project on a new, high-impact application.
During my dive into blockchain, my project was to create a database that I call “Univeral, Standardized, and Decentralized Electronic Medical Records,” also known as USDEMR. This project essentially decentralizes medical data, uniting it across hospitals around the country. Check out my article and video on it to figure out why this is an absolutely necessary change within the industry.
You can check out the complete focus at this link. You can also check out my Artificial Intelligence focus here.
Overall, I ended up spending 8 days on this focus instead of 7 unfortunately but I had an incredible experience nonetheless. Going back to the section on momentum, working on this focus was when I had the most momentum. I spent a total of around 70-80 hours learning Blockchain and am still learning, but I definitely had a BLAST along the way.
However, in the future, I plan to take a little bit of a pivot from blockchain as WELL and shift my attention to quantum computing 👀 Definitely come back in future months to see my progress with that!
🏬 working alongside ikea.
When I said this month got CRAZY, I meant it. I’ve been working alongside Ikea to create a recommendation deck in order to increase their market in an ever-changing market. To elaborate on what this means, Ikea’s current business model caters to consumers with vehicles. The overall Ikea experience is what creates so much traction and the items themselves require vehicles to take back home. Alongside this, Ikea has MASSIVE infrastructure, which means they don’t tend to be in massive and highly-populated parts of the city, making the overall commute high.
Within the next decade, it’s expected that the number of consumers who have vehicles is going to decrease drastically, putting the Ikea business model at risk. Our job was to essentially focus on mobility-based consumer acquisition to increase Ikeas overall market share without sacrificing experience, affordability, or customer satisfaction.
I’ve had an absolute BLAST working on this project with my time, and am continually working on it until mid-March. Come back to next month’s newsletter to get an update on how this turned out in the end!
🤯 setting the bar high.
This month definitely set a bar for the stuff that I’m capable of doing in a single month. I continued working on AI projects, delved deep into a technology I barely knew about beforehand, worked on the development of cancer immunology research in a hackathon, and am now working alongside Ikea.
That being said, March has GOT to be just as sick to keep up haha. However, I do have some things planned for the month of March such as a dive into Quantum Computing, and an AI internship - so maybe it’ll live up to these expectations.
Stay safe, and I’ll see you in March!
✨all of this✨