About Me
I am Samina Rahman Purba, and I am currently in my 6th semester at Seneca College in the Computer Programming and Analysis program. Prior to Fall 2020, I had absolutely no programming knowledge. I vividly remember that Fall 2020 was the first time I wrote my first “hello world’’ program in C and it felt amazing watching that being displayed on my terminal. So, why want to dive into the complicated world of programming when I have a background in business and economics? Why dive into this abyss of uncertainty where some days I question my sanity? Well, the simple answer would be that I am a risk-taker and I love challenging myself to learn new things. However, the motivation behind wanting to learn programming emerged from my deeply rooted desire to do something meaningful in my life that would have a wide impact in my community and beyond. This aspiration led me to explore the world of technologies and how I can use them to build something valuable for people. Amazing innovations and countless new inventions are happening in the technology space, and I really want to be a part of this ecosystem.
Seneca Life
One time, while writing a grant proposal for a small nonprofit in Papua New Guinea, I realized that they lacked a proper reporting system for their donors. An online system where they could track and record their activities would help them greatly. I had this great idea, but I did not have the technical skills to bring it to life. Just like this, there were many moments in my life where I had great ideas but lacked technical knowledge. All those small moments of frustration culminated and pushed me to join Seneca College and the CPA program.
It was not easy taking classes completely online during the pandemic as getting academic help was limited and I was always left with more questions than answers. However, through sheer determination, lots of coffee, hard work and by aiming to get even just 1% better each day I came out successful in all my courses. Some notable achievements during my Seneca College life were winning three worldwide hackathons earlier this year. One of the hackathons was the Seneca Sustainability Hackathon and the other two were based in the UK. I probably should write an entire blog post just about the hackathons because they were absolutely fascinating to be a part of.
Another important achievement was being able to work as a research assistant over the summer 2022 semester as part of Seneca Innovation. Seneca’s industry partner for this project was trying to automate the customer onboarding process for their ride-sharing app using OCR technologies and AI. My partner, Batuhan Ipci, and I did not just meet but exceeded the industry partner’s expectations during the knowledge transfer of our final deliverables. Prior to this work, both of us had no idea about OCR and how we could turn messy raw data outputted by OCR and parse it into meaningful and organized data ready for the database. Being successful as research assistants acted as a reinforcer to continue pushing our boundaries to take part in new challenging work.
Why Open Source Development?
I am interested in open-source development, but I am not very familiar with how it works, which is what brings me to this course. I wanted to take a course that is practical and would help me understand how people collaborate and work on massive projects together in the real world. I want to get better at git and GitHub, and I want to become a part of the community that actively contributes to open-source projects. Through this course I am hoping to get exposed to many different AI/ML open-source projects to explore and understand. I am always fascinated and inspired by the many advancements in the vast field of AI.
The trending repo that caught my attention was Stable Diffusion
During one of the hackathons, I got to explore and learn about CLIP, Google Imagen and DALL-E 2. While exploring DALL-E 2, I was in awe of the amazing art that was AI-generated just through simple text prompts. This sparked my interest in AI, computer vision and deep learning. Honestly, I did not understand everything in the stable diffusion repo, however, it allowed me to learn about a new company Stability AI and the wonderful work they are doing. I also learned a new concept – latent diffusion model for high resolution image synthesis.
Looking Forward
It is a bit intimidating going into OSD 600 as I am very much aware of my limitations and my lack of real-world experience in working on big projects. As a beginner, I am still learning many things. However, I am excited about the learning curve and receiving constructive criticism and feedback. Upon graduation, I would love to work in a big reputable company for a few years, do a bunch of side projects to test out a few ideas I have and finally move on to entrepreneurial ventures in the tech space. I also see myself getting involved in tech startup incubators and the startup scene in Toronto.
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