Today, I stumbled upon an interesting article from Stanford Engineering that reflects strongly upon my views, and that I urge you all to read. It has been the inspiration of my post today. I’ve been a supporter of open. Open source is the way I believe that the world should progress towards. Arduino, RepRap and Python are just some examples of free, open source hardware and software that are available to everyone.

Most recently, there has been a shift in education also, going towards an open community. I believe it started with Wikipedia, and then Khan Academy. Sal Khan, from Khan Academy got the ball rolling on free education by offering video lectures and classes online, for free, available through his Youtube account. Then in 2011, the first major event occurred, with the offering of three online courses: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (www.ai-class.com), Introduction to Machine Learning (www.ml-class.com) and Introduction to Databases (www.db-class.com). Luckily for me, I was on a co-op term, and thus had spare time during the weeknights and weekends to dedicate in completing the Intro to AI class, which I finished with high distinction. It was an interesting class, which led me to taking more classes in AI and Robotics, such as CS373 Artificial Intelligence for Robotics when I heard Professor Sebastian Thrun was teaching it. These massive online open courses, known as MOOC, have drastically changed my career goals when I realised how cool it was. This led me to take SYDE556 this term, which I am loving so far. Here is just a short example of what it can do. Hopefully by the end of this course I will have also developed my own smart machine that is able to achieve similar results!

The second point mentioned in the article is on 3D printing. More on that later! :)

On a personal note, I finished the puzzle! That was much faster than I anticipated. Today I went and got a 4000 piece puzzle. Hopefully it takes my longer to solve then the last one!