Working with one of the biggest companies in the world... | February 2022
Restoring vision through a 24-hour hackathon, generating music with my brianwaves and more 🚀
Hey I’m Bagavan Marakathalingasivam 👋
A 15 y/o ML enthusiast, currently diving into the field of brain-computer interfaces and how we can use them to help detect neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's faster than conventional methods.
But enough about me, let’s get on with what I was up to this month!
Finding the Sweet Spot to Productivity
This month was chaotic! I finished one of my projects in the BCI space, participated in a 24-hour hackathon, worked alongside one of the biggest companies, etc. it was hard to handle everything. That's why I started to focus a lot more on developing ideal and productive days → if you had to live one day the same way for the rest of your life, what would that look like? How much work would you want to get done? How much time are you spending sleeping, relaxing or eating? Are you also taking care of your health?
Ultimately, I want to be as productive as possible, but that doesn't mean I'm spending 8+ hours just doing work (like in the diagram below). There are a lot of other factors that are taken into consideration when coming up with these ideal days, and I still haven't found that "sweet spot" yet.
I’ve been talking to a couple of others about this too and we’ve all been trying to keep each other accountable (but it hasn’t been working out too well honestly).
Even I didn’t end up seting up ideal days, like I mentioned, a lot of cool stuff did happen - so let’s talk about that!
👓 Restoring Vision to the Blind with Neural Implants
Participating in a 24-hour hackathon
Starting off the first week of February, I got the chance to participate in a 24-hour hackathon at The Knowledge Society with a couple of other people. We focused on using brain-computer interfaces to solve a specific problem. With the help of Chandhana Sathishkumar, Milind Kumar, Surya Sure and Ziya Bhayani, we came up with an idea that uses neural implants to restore vision to people who suffer from glaucoma (an eye condition that causes damage to the optic nerve).
You know how when you rub your eyes you see these random colourful circles? Well, that’s known as phosphene, and medically it’s known as a phenomenon of seeing light... without light! We took advantage of phosphenes by converting visual information from a camera into different patterns of electricity to stimulate the visual cortex wirelessly to a neural implant. Which essentially allows blind people to see the images of figures from the phosphene. If you're interested in the more technical aspects of this idea, then don't worry because I'm planning on writing a more in-depth article explaining the science behind how it works!
🔑 Key Takeaways:
Go deep into your research and show it - for our group, we went deep into this topic, from neuroscience to electrical engineering → but we didn’t end up showing that level of depth in the actual pitch, and so the judges didn't think we went that in-depth.
Your sleep is important - since we only had 24-hours, some of our group members were running off of 4-6 hours of sleep which isn’t a lot. We found that it was a bit harder to get work done because you were tired and so getting the extra couple hours of sleep is worth it (especially in the longer run of not messing up your sleep schedule)
🧠 Presenting my Brainwave Generated Music Project over at The Knowledge Society
As you probably know form my last newsletter, I started working on a project in the brain-computer interface field that lets people create music from their brainwaves. After a bit of procrastination and staying up late trying to fix bugs, I finally finished the project! The hardest part about this, was tweaking the code to make the music sound good 😅
I decided the tweet about this project and show a demo and it surprisingly got a fair share of likes! This was mainly to get back on the #buildinpublic trend and providing more transparency to my audience.
Shortly after, I ended up giving a presentation at The Knowledge Society about this proejct! Check it out here 👇
The presentation isn’t perfect, but I got some great feedback from my directors + friends to help practice for future presentations (which you should be on the look out for 👀)
I’m also almost done a more in-depth article going over how the code works and stuff like that, so be sure to follow my medium to stay updated when I publish it.
Reinventing the Retail Stores of the Future with Walmart
TKS Global Challenge
If you’ve been subscribed to my newsletter preiovusly, you would know that at TKS we have these things called Challenges. Essentially, we are given 4 eweks to propose a recommendation to a problem a company provides. Last year, we worked along side both Instacart and the United Nations! This year I’m currently working alongside Walmart! Here’s the problem statement 👇
Walmart is reinventing the retail store of the future for 2030. How do we recreate the physical store environment to be exciting and engaging for customers, by offering new services and experiences?
We’re just over 2 weeks in and there’s been a lot of ups and downs already stayed tuned for next month's newsletter to get more insights on the project!
🚀 What to expect for next month
1. Finishing the Global Challenge 💪
Building a high quality recommendation deck (deliverable) with my team
Also making sure I don’t burnout (i.e., no more 3am grind sessions 😔)
2. More content 👀
Publishing at least 2 articles in the brain-computer interface space → one focused on the BrainMusic project and the other on emotion classification from EEG data.
More Twitter threads → publishing threads on cool/random things I learn about throughout the month.
3. Reading + Insights 📕
I got Deep Work by Cal Newport a while ago but still haven’t even opened the first page yet… my goal is to finish that book by the end of the month.
Time block at least 20-30 minutes a day reading → will probably increase this as the days go along, but this is a good start for now.