The FSE 150 experience: Best class of my life?

When I first heard about the Grand Challenges Scholars Program (GCSP), I wasn’t sure what it was. My first thought was, “Wow, that sounds like a lot of work.” Because of that, I didn’t sign up for the introductory course, FSE150, in my first semester. I thought I’d wait and see how my friends did in the fall before I decided to join in the spring.

Turns out, a lot of my friends ended up dropping the class because they said it was too much work and they were worried about their grades. Since I was getting straight As, they told me it probably wasn’t worth the risk for me either.

But the more I looked into GCSP, the more interesting it seemed. The program promised to train me in five key areas—Talent, Multicultural, Multidisciplinary, Entrepreneurship, and Social Good. It also included classes like FSE 150, 250, and 350 that would help me explore important topics like Health, Sustainability, Joy of Living, and Security.

Despite what my friends said, I decided to give it a shot and signed up for the class. I was ready to take on the challenge and see what I could learn.

The people

FSE 150 was truly a multidisciplinary experience. On my first day itself, I realised that everyone present in the class at the moment was extremely passionate about different engineering fields. This meant that we had an impeccable group of passionate individuals. We had a group building event where everyone had to talk about what they thought were the biggest challenges faced by humanity. And, surprisingly, I found the perfect group of people who were all interested in the theme area Joy of Living, everyone interested in the benefit of internet, our drive and passion to beat misinformation on the internet - Meet my team, for our future solutions project!

Over the field of 15 weeks, we worked on our future solution to fix the Hoaxes of the internet. More about that soon!

The lectures

Each and every lecture was a masterclass on it’s own - Here are some of my favorite takeaways:

• “How many people does it take to turn on a light bulb?” - In this class, I learnt that we as a society don’t realize how everything that just ‘works’ today is a collective effort of humanity. I was so moved by this class that I wrote a small article about it here - https://smort.in/p/how-many-people-does-it-take-to-turn
• “The lifecycle of a chicken” - In this class, we explored the entire supply chain of a chicken and how many vulnerability points the entire cycle has. This was a security lesson!
• Exploring theme areas - In this class, we all drew on a huge canvas as many connections to our themes as possible - This helped me discover all the connections to joy of living and how interconnected everything is!
• Diffusion of technology in society - This was a mostly social class where we explored what it takes for a technology to “diffuse” into society. I found this one particularly interesting because of how much it related to my own career so far.
• … and many, many more.

Each class is a whole another beautiful experience in itself. I cannot quantify the amount of information I gained over this semester!

The Guests!

We had a lot of amazing faculty and guest lectures throughout the class. A very notable one for me was the one involving Pavan Turaga.
Nowadays, when we think of AI, we only think about the text generation tools - ChatGPT, etc. Professor Pavan brought a refreshing view to this - and spoke about a lot of deep tech concepts, how AI works, and the possibilities!

We also had Matthew green talk about sustainability and I had an amazing experience in the sci-fi class where a professor had us create an entire sci-fi scene. It was so moving for me and my team that we decided to write a science fiction of our own!

The … assignments?

Usually students hate all kinds of assignments in classes. But the ones in this class were always very refreshing. My favorite were the GCSP Theme project and the Future Solutions projects.

Our future solutions project was a rather interesting one - we worked on a future solution to fight against “Hoaxes of the internet” - as misinformation is eating the world and something needs to be done about it.

The general idea for this was that yes, individual solutions do exist to detect AI generated content. But, is there anything that encorporates everything? Is there any way we can chain all these together, but at the same time keep everything low-cost for everyone?

Maybe decentralised learning would help! We can distribute compute over a number of nodes and then “tag” each bit of content on the internet so that it doesn’t need to be processed again. And that’s our project!

Here’s my slides for the Transformers presentation - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1hQs01L6iKRwRB3QOc2MzTWHB8sQg066_2oVeSeogyzc/edit?usp=sharing

Conclusion

I’m so glad I took this multidisciplinary experience. In this class, we learnt a lot about health, security, sustainability and joy of living. Taking on the GCSP program has been an enriching experience, offering valuable insights into health, security, sustainability, and the joy of living. The class provided engaging lectures and projects, such as the thought-provoking future solutions project, which addressed the issue of misinformation on the internet. The guest lectures and assignments also significantly contributed to the depth and breadth of my learning experience. Overall, it has been a rewarding and impactful journey. I would like to thank our professor Amy Trowbridge for this delightful experience and my team, Lakshay, Aryan, and Jesus for all the amazing memories geeking out on our projects together.