We spent Monday at UNIC attending meetings and listening to lectures. Our first meeting was with Fleet Management Limited (FML). They are a ship management company that manages over 35 ships in Cyprus and over 600 worldwide. FML does not own these ships; they provide crew, maintenance, and help with operation. They have put effort into digitalization by using the PARIS system, which allows those on and off the ships to see locations, crew members, fuel usage, etc. of any ship. Their management contracts last at least two years, and they keep up to date with industry standards for the services that they provide. Shipping is an essential part of the supply chain; maritime transport accounts for 90% of global trade. Products go from the producer to a ship, which is made up of the owner, manager, charterer, and crew. The products are then delivered to the consumer. FML and other ship management companies keep shipping efficient and reduce the time, cost, and distance needed to transport products.

In the afternoon, we attended a lecture with the CEO of UNIC, Mr. Antonis Polemitis, who spoke about Cryptocurrency and Blockchain. These are subjects that I barely understood, but now I can say that I have a solid, if broad, understanding of these topics. Mr. Polemitis described Cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, as “a form of data architecture.” It has no data administrator, which allows the network of users to make decisions regarding its value. There are three uses of Cryptocurrency: you can assign value to it by buying it, you can use it as you would cash to make irreversible transactions, and you can use its programmability to allow for machine-to-machine transactions. Mr. Polemitis also taught us about Blockchain using the example of Ethereum; this is essentially the programming language of Blockchain. He also talked about Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). Fungible means interchangeable or exchangeable with something of equal value. Because NFTs are not fungible, they are tokens assigned a unique number that people purchase. They are spending money to own the token, and this ownership cannot be stolen. Mr. Polemitis also described the difference between Web 1 and Web 2. Web 1 is made up of email, html websites, and similar applications. These have no administrators and can be used by anyone and are often accessed through Web 2, though it is not required. Web 2 is made up of private companies with administrators, such as social media platforms like Twitter. This means that the owner of the company can decide who has access to the website without needing a reason. I enjoyed this lecture from Mr. Polemitis, but I do not think that the negative environmental impact of Cryptocurrency and Blockchain outweigh the positives.

We also heard a lecture from Dr. Spyros Makridakis, the Director of UNIC’s Institute for the Future, on Data Forecasting. Data forecasting is used to estimate future events as accurately and objectively as possible, as well as assess the uncertainty of these estimates. The M (Makridakis) forecasting competitions are held to give evidence about forecasting methods and their uncertainties. M competitions function as laboratory experimentation would; they show how to improve forecasting with the findings available to everyone. In the M competitions that have been held so far (M1-M5 with M6 currently in progress), there have been several significant findings: sophisticated/complicated methods are not necessarily more accurate than simple methods, the accuracy of multiple methods combined is higher than the accuracy of a single method, the uncertainty of multiple methods combined is lower that the uncertainty of a single method, the accuracy of human forecasters is lower than simple forecasting methods, all methods underestimate uncertainty considerably, machine learning is the most accurate way to make estimates with low uncertainties. Companies can use the very accurate estimates made by machine learning to predict the demands of the supply chain and adjust accordingly in order to maximize profit.