Today, we did not start off our day with a bus ride, which I was shockingly disappointed by. Instead, we headed over to the University of Nicosia.
First up in our presentations was Fleet Management Limited. This is a cooperation that manages 625 vessels and the 20,000 people that work on them. They provide service to these ships throughout the entire delivery process. I was interested to learn about their PARIS system, which stores position, speed, master, and fuel consumption of the ship among other things. The second part of this presentation was more interactive, which was a really nice change of pace. The presenter asked us to guess the answers to his questions, and these questions gave me a much better idea as to the scale of these operations. For instance, there are about 20 million containers being transported currently, the average ship will travel about 360,000 miles each year, and each container holds approximately 8,000 shoes boxes.
After this, we had lunch again at the University’s dining hall. Once again, I was amazed at the quality of the food.
We then went to a lecture from Mr. Antonis Polemitis on blockchain and cryptocurrency. I was super glad that we were learning more about this, as I have been hearing people discuss it for years, and I have very little understanding of it. As he explained, cryptocurrency is similar to a bank except that it is not under the supervision and authority of a person or organization. Instead, it holds records without any one person being in charge. The network is able to keep track of the location and worth of these digital items. I also was interested in how he said the value of this cryptocurrency comes from its perception by other people. This was an interesting concept of me, and I think that I would have trouble investing in this without certainty of its value, but I will be interested to see how blockchain is integrated into our networks in the coming years.
We then attended a lecture from Dr. Spyros Makridokis on data forecasting. I have always been aware that stores need to be able to predict the demand for their goods, but I had never learned about the process behind it before. It sounded like a lot of statistics were needed to try to determine accuracy and uncertainty, though he did explain that a lot of this is possible to do through machine learning now. I was also interested to hear of the competitions that he holds and how these people are able to make improvements in the current data forecasting strategies. He said that even a one percent increase in the change in accuracy of the forecasting could lead to companies saving millions of dollars.
After this, we headed back to the hotel. A group of us went out to go shopping in the new part of Nicosia, but we were not able to find much and ultimately decided to head back to the old city to find some dinner. We ended up finding a small restaurant, managed by the sweetest woman. She was so welcoming and warm with us, the food was delicious, and the cost was very reasonable. I am not sure why we had not eaten there sooner. Tomorrow, we are traveling to the Turkish occupied part of the island, which I am super excited for. The trip is coming to an end though. We only have three more days here, which I find hard to believe.
