Reflecting on 2021
Review of 2021 - Issue #11
Hey Everyone! 👋
Happy New Year! 🥳
Welcome back to my newsletter, today we’re going to be looking over the year 2021! I hope all of you had a fun and productive year.
If it’s your first time here, my name is Jayant Arora, and I’m a 17-year-old Innovator at The Knowledge Society (TKS) in Toronto, Canada.
Well, you might be wondering what I did this year. Let’s get right to it!
Projects (Team) 🛠
Moonshot Project: Nema 🧬
One of the biggest projects I worked on this year was launching a moonshot project:
Moonshot Project: Inspired from Google X, the moonshot factory. Creating radical new technologies to solve some of the world’s hardest problems - the goal is to 10x impact on the world’s most intractable problems, not just 10% improvement.
At our company, Nema, we found a way to reduce plastic pollution coming from recycling plants through genetically modifying worms to decompose plastic.
We published a project website, article, and one-pager which you can check out if you’re interested in getting a deeper understanding on what we did! This was a great experience - in just 4 weeks, we were able to learn about finding problems, building ideas, presenting to investors, moonshot mindsets, and more.
United Nations Consulting Challenge 🇺🇳
In March, I worked on a challenge with the United Nations focused on increasing women’s employment in the digital economy. My team and I went deeper into solving this problem in Morocco.
Overview of Solution: Use laws, government incentives, and a UN certification to make hoteliers design and build upcoming hotels/resorts using a minimum of 50% local female engineers.
Personal Projects 💻
This year, I spent a lot of time exploring different technologies including Brain Computer Interfaces and Artificial Intelligence. As I worked with these technologies, I replicated a few projects and wrote articles on the technologies as well. Some projects I replicated were: Building an AI Number Plate Detector, Playing the Chrome Dino Game just by Blinking, detecting hand movement with EEG data, and more.
Here are a few interesting articles I wrote, you can view the rest here! Overview: Convolutional Neural Networks, Overview: Generative Adversarial Networks, and Explaining EEGs and BCIs. ✍️
Smaller Things 🤏
Winning the University of Washington CNT Hackathon
Launching my personal website! (jayantarora.ca)
Overall Reflection:
This year was great! I learned a lot about emerging technologies such as Gene Editing, Quantum Computing, Artificial Intelligence, etc. I also got to experience and learn through finding problems, building ideas, presenting to investors, practicing different mindsets (done > perfect, high standards, etc.) and more. Some skills I developed were time management, communication, networking, and my habits (shoutout Atomic Habits, great book!) I look forward to keeping you all updated in 2022! 😁
Anyway, that’s it for me! Hope everyone stays safe and does well in 2022! 💪
Regards,
Jayant Arora
If you’d like to connect with me on LinkedIn, click here. Click here to follow me on Medium! Visit my personal website: jayantarora.ca
Feel free to subscribe to my newsletter by putting your email in below. If you know someone who would like to read this newsletter, hit the share button and send it to them! Thanks for reading!