It's weekend! And next week is mid-term week. I have exams for accounting and econ.
Some of the things I did over the last couple of days.
- Guest speaker: faculty speaker series
- One of the things I want to achieve while I'm at MBA is to expand my horizon. I am going to attend many speaking sessions from a wide spectrum of areas.
- This week, I attended two speaking sessions of which guest speakers were from faculty. One was about "how media affected behavior of people in light of COVID". The other was about "how to get insight from reading financial news papers from a banker's perspective".
- I did not have any background knowledge for the first one. The way I understood was that how media broadcasted their perspective on social distancing was more than "having correlation with human behavior" but went beyond and had causal effect on the behavior.
- I was more familiar with the second one. Professor covered several important topics such as IPO and SPAC with reference to current news. One comment caught my attention. "Low interest is good for bankers. Stock price goes up and management gain more confidence. And that's when they decide to acquisitions and mergers. Also, cheaper finance cost for acquisition."
- Guest speaker: AI reseacher from Microsoft
- Discussed: his career path, his researches in Microsoft, how AI makes an impact
- Very interesting topic. He spent a lot of time discussing his recent project: Farm Beets(?).
- Data-driven agriculture. Model the farming activity and create "Precision Agriculture"
- Productive, cost-efficient solution
- AI gets as good as the data you can get - more data, better
- AI still not cheap - see challenges in hitting production
- Cutomer validation is key (as in marketing and entrepreneurship class!)
- Other application he mentioned:
- Super local weather forecast
- Optimizing the placement of sensors in farm
- Cameras in barns
- Space Eye - satellite image
- Prediction - when to sow the seed, commodity trading suggestion