ESP Biography

Have you ever wondered what it is that runs our world? The electronics that powers everything from your home systems to your computers to, well, nearly everything now? In this hands-on-class, you'll get to build circuits, understand why they work, and then see them in action!

In this class, we'll learn a bit about how we can get machines to predict ridiculous things with relatively little code. Lately, Machine Learning has lately become a bit of a buzzword everywhere in computer science: everyone's talking about it, but relatively few people know what all it entails. Are machines really going to outsmart us? What all can they do? Will we have robotic overlords soon? Though the plan isn't quite to answer the latter question, there will certainly be a taste of the first two. It's surprising how much can be done with only a little bit of code!

In high school physics, teachers often talk about how to solve problems concerning pulleys and gravity and such. The thing is that physics is not always about solving for how large of a lever do you need to lift an elephant; or, say, how large the electric field is around a wire. These can be interesting problems, sure, but I'm not sure I've ever been excited about finding how much force I need to push a box uphill. Modern classical physics concerns itself with symmetries that happen in the universe and how these symmetries pop up tells us about the mysterious ways that Nature behaves; and maybe give us a hint towards the deeper connections the emerge between Nature and mathematics.

What are the questions that bug you about the world and the universe? What really is matter? How can we see? What does it mean when people say that a butterfly's flap of the wings can cause a tornado? In this class we'll be trying to answer and explore any questions that you've been itching to ask, but have never had the opportunity to. This is an interactive class where everyone will constantly be asking and replying, much more than just purely a lecture.

"The important thing about security systems isn't how they work, it's how they fail" (Cory Doctorow). Are we really secure? What does security mean - putting something behind a lock, encrypting it? Is it all of these things? Is it none of them? In this class, we will discover how things work to make them fail in just the right way.