Today we headed back to the University of Nicosia as we were going to hear multiple lectures on blockchain, data science, and forecasting.
Our first lecture was from Anthonis Polemitis, about blockchain technology. I was excited to learn about this as UNIC was one of the first educational institutions to add a program about blockchain and cryptocurrency. He started off his lecture talking about the difference in decentralized entities and centralized entities. One example he used was Twitter, he explained the effects of censorship on Twitter whether it was centralized or decentralized. He then started talking about cryptocurrency and how he thought that it wasn’t being utilized right saying things like “the business model is incorrect”. He then related this by talking about the internet and how its more regulated today than it was in the past, however, it would still come out relatively the same today as it came out previously.
Our second lecture of the day was given by Prof. Spyros Makrydakis about data forecasting. He spoke about how data forecasting was important and how it gave insight into future demand allowingus to make decisions about what may happen. He also showed us some of the methods where people forecast and explained the better ways to do it. This lecture was probably my favorite of the day as the professor was funny and super interesting.
Our final lecture of the day was given by Dr. Demetrius Trihinas and was based on data science. We were told about the importance of data collection and how almost everything in life was being taken from a database, analyzed and then interpreted in the real world to help make decisions about certain things. This lecture was particularly interesting as the world is getting really involved in data analytics and predictive analytics, so it was cool to hear about this technology.
Our last stop of the day was the pharmaceutical lab. Here we learned about the processes of making drugs and how peptides were being created from proteins. One of the cooler things we talked about here were how they were extracting venoms from certain animals.