Senior Seminar Blog

 There’s a lot to take away from this class, but the three most important things to me are: Understanding privacy policies. This does not mean that you should be reading through every single one each time you sign up for a new service, but it’s important to know in general how companies collect and use your data. The privacy policy for some companies even states that you can request to see what information they have collected about you and request it to be deleted. Owning a small business in the software industry brings with it more challenges than one may expect. In the case of learning about HiveTracks, I learned a great deal about how startups are formed, how they grow, and the array of legal and technical challenge they face along the way. How to be more comfortable with public speaking. Senior seminar is not a public speaking course per se, but giving presentations in front of an audience is something that is required throughout the semester. I learned to make sure I was alway...

There are two final topics that stood out to me. The first is the environmental impact of blockchain and cryptocurrency. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, this is mostly what fuels my skepticism about cryptocurrencies in general. I know that Ethereum recently moved to a different protocol that makes it much more energy efficient, and I’m looking forward to learning more about it. The second topic that interests me is the topic of artificial intelligence in aviation. This is a topic that I do not know much about but would love to learn more. What little I do know is mostly surrounding how much commercial airliners rely on software to fly and how the military uses autonomous drones. I’m interested to see what other aspects of aviation are currently undergoing drastic changes due to the development of AI.

I learned some new things about blockchain technology and its potential use cases, although some of its biggest promoters, such as Don Tapscott from the TED talk we watched in class, seem to view it as the next big technology that will revolutionize many economic sectors. I believe some of these areas have a lot of potential in utilizing blockchain technology but many of them, especially the financial sector, do not. Focusing on cryptocurrency, the one thing I learned more about through research for class and also from one of my peer’s final presentation, is that cryptocurrencies, and in particular Bitcoin, use massive amounts of energy. And that energy is used to solve pointless puzzles. In a world that faces challenges such as climate change, it does not make sense to waste so much energy on something that provides such little value.

The “What Did You Find” in class assignment where we were tasked with finding out as much as we could about one of our peers was interesting. My partner had almost no online presence so it was hard to find anything about him. I used a website called truepeoplesearch.com to find a bit of information. I have more of a presence online, but even finding my GitHub through google proved to be a challenge. Other groups had much more success finding information about each other. I think its up to the individual on what information they are willing to share to anyone online, but websites such as truepeoplesearch.com are a bit more concerning, as the information they provide about people, such as age, addresses, and relatives, is fairly extensive.

I found the documentary Citezenfour to be informative not only on what was revealed by Snowden but how the events unfolded. It was such a courageous move by Snowden to give up a comfortable life in the US and stand up for what he believed was a wrongdoing by the government he worked for. It does not really change my perception of the US government and how they could invade their citizens privacy in the name of national security. What does concern me is the telecom companies that complied with the government searches rather than protect their users’ privacy, but perhaps this discussion is more complicated than what was portrayed in the film. One positive takeaway I had, and something that is so simple but overlooked by myself, is how important it is that journalists are protected by the first amendment when releasing this type of information.  

I was a part of the group that looked into intellectual property as it relates to ethical issues with HiveTracks and Bee Informed Partnership. Here are my three biggest takeaways from our group discussion and the presentation: Intellectual property in software is much more complicated than it seems. There a some things that can be patented or protected by copyright law but many things that can’t. Also the software that is written for a company is owned by the company.  Before forming a partnership on a project that could possibly grow into a business, sign an agreement so that the software is owned by the business and not the individual who wrote it. Software ownership can get very complicated. In the case of the Bee Informed Partnership, multiple universities were involved and the USDA had given the universities a grant to fund the project. This is something I will keep in mind if I ever decide to form a startup of my own and is one of the most important things I will remember for...

When we were given the assignment of giving a short presentation on our personal ethics, I had to spend a good bit of time learning exactly what that meant and self reflecting. It seemed like most of my peers talked more broadly about how they treat other people and who they were influenced by. I approached the topic a bit differently and mainly focused on two core ethics while trying to relate how different experiences have shaped or tested those ethics. Overall I found this to be a great exercise in getting in front of an audience and talking about something meaningful.