We spent the day at the University of Nicosia today, hearing from Fleet Management Limited and listening to two wonderful lectures from UNIC faculty. The director of FML Ship Management in Cyprus, Mr. Sunil Kapoor, started by giving us a nice overview of the company overall. This is the only ship management company in Cyprus and is one of the branches of a company that is headquartered in Hong Kong and with offices all throughout the globe. The director heavily emphasized the very advantageous location of Cyprus for ship management due to it being at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. It manages more than 600 ships and is the 2nd largest in the world. Its work consists of providing provisions and day-to-day operations of the ship, as well as commercial operations at times. It does not actually own the ships and therefore serves as a service provider in the supply chain. I thought that the most interesting thing about the country is how there were a diverse group of seafarers that they hired to work on the ships together. It’s interesting to consider the cultural and potential language barriers that may exist as people from different nations, like India and the Philippines, work together for months on end. I had never specifically considered the impacts that covid could have had on ships and all involved enterprises. It was an interesting perspective to hear about how covid caused a supply chain crisis because there were isolation barriers between the crew members on the ship and the people working on the shore. I was also interested by the fact that having a revenue cycle, where depressions were regular was interesting because it reminded me of how the overall economy in most countries works, especially the U.S. Then, we took part in an interactive workshop with another member of FML from whom we learned a lot of interesting facts about the maritime industry overall. My favorite was the Panama Canal, which is the only man-made canal in the world. It was pioneered by the U.S. and saves 8,900 miles which in turn ensures lower prices on basic goods that we might take for granted.
After lunch, we returned to the amphitheaters to hear from two very special guest lecturers. The first lecture was given by Mr. Antonis Polemitis who is the CEO of UNIC. He spoke about Cryptocurrency and its implications so far as well as projections for the future. He said that UNIC was the first university to accept bitcoin for tuition which is very uncommon in the U.S. right now. I had very little knowledge about cryptocurrency prior to this lecture, but it has always been something I’ve been meaning to learn about. Cryptocurrency creates a database where transactional records are held without one person being in charge and where consensus exists at a network level. This makes it possible to send currency fast and irreversibly. This started a quite interesting discussion about decentralization overall, where the power that private companies had to essentially stop anyone from using their services was questioned. I had never really thought about how handing over the power to utilize a service, such as calling a taxi, to private companies like Uber could also have its downfalls regardless of the convenience it brings. Something that kind of freaked me out from this lecture was his confidence in the fact that an extremely digitalized near future is inevitable. Limiting social interactions by having everything, from business meetings to classes, in augmented reality is a future that I do not want to see. It got me thinking about how this might’ve been something that people in the past questioned about cell phones or self-driving cars that all exist now.
Our final lecture was from the highly-esteemed Dr. Spyros Makridakis (fun fact, he’s a former Olympian!) He is the Director of UNIC’s Institute for the Future and he spoke about Data Forecasting. I like the anecdote he started with about Walmart, making me realize that the fact that I rarely have trouble finding what I need is not just pure luck but rather the hard work of data forecasting. I was also very unfamiliar with data forecasting before this lecture which provided me with a nice overview, even if some of the technical things the professor spoke about went over my head. I think that his M competitions, a series of open competitions to evaluate and compare the accuracy of different time series forecasting methods, are an incredibly smart way to pioneer and make advancements in the forecasting sector. Using competition has inspired ingenious advancements, especially with machine learning as he mentioned. I also thought that it was interesting that the accuracy of forecasting decreases as we go down the hierarchy of corporations and get down to the individual stores. This was definitely an intriguing topic that I would like to learn more about and potentially even pursue somehow in the future.
