Recently I spent some time looking for summer research internships and thought that it might be useful to share some of my experiences from the process. I will talk about how to choose where to apply, how to apply, and what to do if you get rejected. So, if you’re thinking of applying for a summer research internship but don’t know how to go about it, or if you had a bad experience last time you applied, this post is for you!
IC Hack 2018 (Imperial College London’s 2018 hackathon) has just finished and in this post I’d like to share my experiences from the event and what our team has built. In the period of 24 hours me and 4 of my friends from Imperial have made an application which uses a camera to track users’ consumption of soft drinks and shows them various real-time health-related data such as sugar or energy consumption over time. To do this, we have used technologies including YOLO, Microsoft Cognitive API, Flask, Chart.js and Bootstrap. Read on to find out more!
This summer I spent 9 weeks doing a research internship at Imperial College London’s Data Science Institute. Supervised by a finishing PhD student Axel and his postdoc colleague Miguel, I was working on a project which aims to identify fake news tweets based on their metadata. My work included data analysis, feature engineering, and tuning and evaluation of different machine learning models to obtain the best possible classifier to distinguish fake news from other types of news. I have mostly worked with Python and the Scikit-Learn machine learning library, but I have also briefly used parallel processing, the R language, and the TensorFlow library. I found the work really exciting and also a great learning experience. To learn more about the project and how to find an internship, read on!
Are some of your friends on FB Messenger taking way too long to reply to you? Do you want to know if your friendship improves or deteriorates over time? Or do you want to know how long it takes them to reply on average? If you answered yes to any of these questions, this post is for you! Here, I’ll show you how I made a program in Python which parses data from FB Messenger website to get response times in a conversation, and then used it to plot a graph of response times over time in Excel which you can analyse.
IC HealthHack is a hackathon organized by Imperial College London combining bioengineering and computing to produce “serious games in the public health sector taking advantage of biomedical technologies”. This was the first year this kind of hackathon was organised by Imperial and it was great fun! Teams got together to build cool stuff such as a program giving the user alerts when they’re slouching in front of a computer, various games utilising Microsoft Fizzyo device to help make physiotherapy of cystic fibrosis patients more enjoyable, and analysis of large samples of data to see how likely patients are to turn up late to appointments. Read on to see what our team built and skip to the end to see the project links!
This summer I spent around 2 months traveling and studying in Hong Kong (I took Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese summer courses at the University of Hong Kong), a week of traveling in Taiwan, and another week of traveling in Singapore. To document my experiences I have produced a few videos about my trips to those places and put them onto my YouTube channel, where I show the places, food and performances in different parts of Asia.
In this post I’m going to tell you the story of how I got accepted to study Physics at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. I will explain all the required parts of the process and tell you how I did in each part: grades, application, personal statement, academic reference, PAT test, interviews. This may help you with your own university applications, especially if you’re considering applying to Oxford.
As my year of studying at Imperial College London is drawing to a close, I have decided to make a memory of my time here by doing a short video tour of famous places in London during the night. Places include Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, Downing Street, Big Ben, Westminster Palace, London Eye.
In this post I’ll show you how you can make a program which will automatically collect data from some website and then further process it. More specifically, I’ll show you how I made myself a PHP script to periodically download half-hourly METAR reports from the website of the Slovak Hydrometeorological Institute and then processed them to show a plot of how temperature and pressure changes over time. You can easily adapt this for any kind of data collection you might wish to do, for example logging of exchange rates over time. So, let’s start!
In this post, I’ll show you how to make digital gates just out of transistors, as opposed to just using ready-made integrated circuits. We’ll make an AND, OR and NOT gate, and you can make other gates based on these. Knowing how to make digital gates is very useful in all kinds of applications, for example if you’d like to build a simple adding machine, or even an 8-bit computer! So, let’s get started.
In this post I’ll show you how to measure a website’s responsiveness if there are multiple users requesting the site at the same time. We’ll make a simple shell script to simulate those users and make it to display how long it takes.
In this post we’re going to use our knowledge of timers and our LCD setup to make a digital clock. The clock would operate by displaying current time as HH:MM:SS on an LCD display, and the timer would refresh it every second. This setup can then be easily adapted to work as a stopwatch or a timer.
In this post I’ll explain how to operate timers with the PIC microcontroller and give you some examples how they may be used. In general, timers come very useful for all kinds of applications where precise timing is important, such as digital clocks, stopwatches, alarm clocks or PWM. As an example, we’ll make an LED blink in exactly 1/2Hz intervals, (unlike when just using the imprecise system __delay() function).
In this post I’ll show you how to interface an LCD display with a PIC microcontroller from scratch, using no external library. This means we’ll make our own functions for displaying characters, strings and numbers and functions for clearing the display, turning it on/off and so on. You’ll also be able to download my LCD library containing all the functions described in the post and many more which you can use in your own projects.
In this post, we’ll set up analog to digital conversion (ADC) on a PIC18F452, which is a way of converting analog to digital values and can be useful for all kinds of sensors. First, we’re going to test it on a potentiometer — depending on the pot’s rotation, a number from 0 to 9 will be displayed on a 7-segment display from the previous post. Second, we’re going to make an IR sensor which will detect how close an object is to it or if the object is white or black. This can be useful for example for a line follower robot when trying to detect if an object is in front of it or when trying to follow a black line on a white background.
In this post we’re going to connect a 7-segment LED display to a PIC18F452 and set it up so that it will show numbers from 0 to 9 in regular intervals, like a stopwatch. This will be useful for calibration of an IR sensor and generally for displaying any number output when debugging.
In this post, we’ll design and build a circuit which will blink an LED controlled by a PIC18F452 microcontroller. We’ll use a power supply, 5V voltage regulator, some safety elements, signalization LED and the microcontroller with an LED we’re going to blink. After building the circuit, we’re going to program the PIC to blink the LED in regular intervals. I’ll be using the programming environment MPLABX and the PICkit3 programmer.