The revealed secrets of the Computer Laboratory

The reason is I am doing my master's year now. That means most of my old classmates are gone (the industry lured them off) and only those wishing to learn more or those who want to pursue academic careers stayed. Moreover, about 20 new students from other universities joined the master's course. Therefore there is about 30 of us now – 20 new students and 10 old classmates. This is significantly less compared to the first three years where it was about 80 of us.

The next difference is that we have much more choice concerning the courses we take this year. This implies that classes are much smaller, there is more room for discussion and people are less shy to ask questions compared to the years before when there was 80 of us in almost all lectures. I decided to take Machine Learning in Language Processing, Principles of Data Science and Computer Vision and Robotics this term.

However, the most significant difference was quite fittingly described by one of the PhD students I talked to last year: “While the first three years are about raw intelligence, the fourth year is more about perseverance.” I definitely have to agree. We have significantly less courses (5 compared to something like 16 last year) to take this year and a project worth 4/9 of the final mark. Since there are less courses there is time to go into more depth and to play around with the stuff we are taught. And also the courses are closer to the research front now – we read quite a lot of state-of-the-art research papers in the courses and discuss them in order to get ourselves ready to enter the academia.

Another great aspect of the fourth year is that I got my university card upgraded and I can now enter all parts of the Computer Laboratory. Previously, I was able to enter only a part of the Computer Laboratory but not those parts where researchers' offices and research rooms are. Now I can and it is exciting! The thing is, there are excellently equipped workshops there. Soldering irons, thousands of electrical components, wires, tools, etc. which we can use free of charge to conduct our little experiments (i.e. to play with). And most importantly, we have access to a laser cutter and a 3D printer.

The laser cutter is rather simple in its principle: You put there are an acrylic or plywood board, draw a shape in the drawing program on the attached computer and then click “Print”. The laser cutter then cuts out the shape you designed out of the board. Not only that, it can also engrave pictures or letters into the board. It is extremely precise (tenth of a millimeter) and the uses are numerous. You can make beautiful cases for you electrical boards, you can cut out wooden jigsaw puzzle, you can engrave pictures into wood and much more, with almost no effort and precision a human would never be able to achieve. So far I spent there only a half of a Sunday to master the laser cutter, but I hope more will follow. Details about the other things in the blogs to come.