A passion for anything by James

A passion for anything by James - July 2019 Scholarship Essay

I’ve always believed that being passionate about education means being passionate about anything, because it is only when one truly loves something that one will take their own time to learn and improve.

For me, my passion began with being a superhero and helping others; my friends and I would often throw bed sheets around our shoulders and pretend to be superheroes. We would lay air mattresses on the floor and jump from stairs to pretend like we were flying, something my parents weren’t too fond of the day they found out.

Although my flying adventures ended that day, my fire for helping others never did. As I grew older, I realized that I could be a hero, not with super strength or the ability to fly, but with my two hands and a computer. Using words like “if” and “while,” I could help build the future and help those who suffer from disabilities. When my first program compiled, a simple number guessing game, I was elated, filled with a sense of accomplishment. From then on, every successful program, every time the white text sprang up at the bottom of the screen, overwhelmed me with the same exhilaration. Even the failures filled me with a raging urge to hunt down the errors and change that demeaning red error text to a bright white.

All this excitement was further magnified after watching the cinematic masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey,” where one line became stuck in my mind: “I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.” With each tap of the replay button, I became more entranced with the idea of creating consciousness in machines. Now, exactly 50 years since the release of that movie, we have come so far in this field of computer science, yet we still stand on the bottom rung of this ladder of innovation. With so many more steps to take, I can only hope to be apart of the journey to make the climb.

This past year, I got my first taste of creating a conscious mind in a machine, albeit it wasn’t really anything like that, more of a simple program detected sirens and alarms from sound clips to help the hearing impaired. I was working in a subfield of computer science that I knew almost nothing about, which meant I had to begin with the basic research. Hours became minutes as I threw myself into the pages and pages of equations and diagrams on neural networks. The embers in my mind grew into raging fires as I recognized the beauty and elegance of concepts like backpropagation and cost functions.

Then came the actual programming; my hands flew across the keyboard as our team wrote code that converted over four thousand sound clips into spectrograms through Librosa, a Python package for music and audio analysis, and plugged the numerical summary values from the spectrogram into a three-layer neural network which was created with Tensorflow. As the values flashed into the bottom of the screen, a “1” for detection of an alarm and a “0” for null values, I was enveloped with a sense of wonder: what more could I do? What more could we do? To many others, this may have seemed simple. But to me, this was monumental, a rite of passage into the world of deep learning and artificial intelligence. The vast unexplored regions of this field, the ability for these systems to save millions of lives, are what continue to keep me up at night, wondering what could be. It is this passion for helping others and computer science that led me to not just learn, but to love to learn.