Today was our final day spent at the University of Nicosia. We started off the day with a series of business lectures that introduced us to various topics important to the subject of supply chain management. Our first lecture of the day was about blockchain and crypto currencies. Before going into the lecture, I was quite hesitant about it, as I am not a fan of crypto currencies in the slightest, and I was worried it would be an hour of someone extolling that blockchain should be used for everything. Instead, what we got was an incredibly balanced and nuanced take on what crypto currencies and blockchains are and when they are useful. When discussing crypto currencies, the lecturer was honest and said that they rarely act as currency and instead act more as an investment. He did, however, give an interesting example of a potential use for them when he went over a story he had about struggling to transfer money to another country. I also asked him about crypto exchanges and the problems with them, and he was honest and said that they are underregulated and expose their users to a lot of risks. While I did find this lecture extremely interesting and enjoyed his take on it, I did not walk away with my mind changed about crypto currencies. I still view them as impractical, terrible for the environment due to the energy cost of minding, and unable to act as true currencies.
Our second lecture of the day was about forecasting in SCM, which I found incredibly interesting and important. Forecasting in SCM means forecasting future demand in order to have the right amount of product where you want it. This is incredibly important as it allows companies to reduce overhead costs, minimize the risk of being left with undesirable products, and rapidly adjust to consumer demand. What I found fascinating about this concept is that it is a very simple idea; however, actually executing this idea is very difficult due to the sheer number of data points you need to integrate. Despite or because of the difficulty of this, I’m now actually very interested in studying SCM and want to take the intro class soon so I can see if I want to switch one of my majors to it. What was equally interesting to me about this lecture was our professor, Prof. Spyros Makrydakis. He has been studying SCM forecasting since it started as a concept. As a result, he has been there for every era of SCM forecasting and was able to explain in depth the changes that have happened to the field. I absolutely love being able to talk to people who have lived through history such as this, and his in-depth knowledge really shined through for me. What was also fascinating to me was the fact that SCM forecasting is not improved through the use of complex statistical models, but rather simpler ones have tended to work better.
Our final morning lecture was by Dr. Trihinas and covered machine learning and data mining. I did not know what data mining was before today, and it blew my mind how important it really is. Data mining is the process of finding hidden patterns in data that are not easy to detect for humans. This is incredibly important to portfolio management, as an investment fund that is able to find hidden patterns will be able to exploit it. As a result of this, I am planning on working with the data team at Panther Equity, a student-run investment fund I’m part of, to see where we can incorporate data mining into our fund! Machine learning was also fascinating to me, as it again came back to pattern recognition. What was interesting to me about machine learning was the fact that you can use sample data too many times in a program. If a programmer uses a single sample too much, the machine can start identifying patterns that are nonsensical in the general population and, as a result, become less accurate when used. I was unaware of this and never would have thought of it as possible before today. It makes me think that fully autonomous cars are even further away, as programmers have to remain vigilant that their data sets are not being overused. Overall, I walked away from the morning’s lectures realizing my knowledge only scratches the surface of SCM and that I want to be able to learn more to gain a deeper appreciation of it.
The afternoon was spent touring the pharmacological labs at UNIC. I honestly did not get too much from this tour. This was largely because my chemistry knowledge is very lacking, and so I didn’t really understand what was going on for a lot of it. The main thing I found interesting about the tour was the sheer amount of work needed to change the medicine that a pill-making machine is producing. This is because any cross-contamination between the two different medicines a machine is making could be extremely deadly, and as a result, the cleaning of the machines needs to be incredibly thorough. This got me thinking about the logistics needed for switching production lines at pharamasutical factories due to the sheer amount of precise and accurate work needed. Today was a full day of learning, which I was grateful to have, though I was sad to leave UNIC for the last time!