Our last day at UNIC began with a lecture on cryptocurrency and blockchain. I have very little knowledge in both of these subjects (I honestly didn’t know what blockchain and crypto were before today) so I was interested in learning at least a little bit about this side of the business world. The first thing I learned was that a blockchain is a database. Databases are fundamental to modern society. Blockchains have SPOF (single point of failure) and TTP (trusted third parties). Both of these entities can change at any point in the database.
Blockchains can be useful when multiple parties are involved, especially when not a singular party is in charge. This is exemplified in the supply chain where there can be both competitors and partners, as well as neutral players like distributors. One future application of blockchain I was interested to hear about was the healthcare industry. Patients can choose to release their personal patient data to certain third parties, in this case, different doctors. This would make patient data much more accessible for all healthcare organizations and easier for patients as well.
The next portion of our lecture was focused on cryptocurrency. Our professor told us that Bitcoin is just like digital cash. Unlike credit card or banking transactions, you can’t get Bitcoin back, just like you cannot take cash back from someone.
After a quick coffee break, Professor Spyros Makridakis spoke to us about forecasting. The key component of forecasting is identifying established patterns in order to predict their continuation. Forecasting must also take into account uncertainty and judgemental overrides. One thing that surprised me to learn was that statistical and machine-learning method are much better at forecasting than human judgment. This also means that overrides are shown to make accuracy worse.
Once we finished our last lecture at UNIC 🙁 , we headed over to their Pharmacy and Research building where we heard about current research into peptides, saw what goes into making and quality-checking drugs, and saw some scorpions!
