Recently on Fresh Air, Cade Metz, a technology reporter, from the New York Times talked about how machines are learning on their own. My girlfriend forwarded me this episode because she found the discussion fitting considering I was utilizing machine learning techniques recently to help me find patterns in currency as part of my thesis. Here’s Metz describing neural networks: GROSS: So let’s back up. These are systems that can - what did you say? ... Read more

Apologies for the late post, but I came down with the flu which knocked me out for a good week. Luckily, I was able to rapidly experiment a bit after my last post where I chronicled acting as a human foreign exchange collecting currencies. I quickly realized that I wasn’t going to scale my learning of currencies by physically acquiring currencies in-person, so I decided to programatically write some scripts to help me collect currencies from some online sources. ... Read more

If you’ve been following along, you know I’ve been running an instagram account called 100 Days of Currency. What isn’t really told about this account is how I’m doing it which I decided to focus this post on. Ever since I selected the topic of currency, I wanted to take an ‘on-the-ground’ approach to help me think about my thesis more. I proposed the ‘why’ for my thesis in the following way: ... Read more

Here’s how I know I’ve been thinking about my thesis quite a bit this week in the form of photos I took throughout my week. In this last week, I continued acting as a “human foriegn exchange” soliciting from my peers (who are quite international) if they had foreign currencies. It’s amazing the level of trust and support everyone has provided as I explore this topic. They’re quite literally just giving me free money. ... Read more

If you’re reading this, then you just stumbled across where I’ll be documenting my thesis process for 2018 at NYU’s ITP. Let’s start with my 1-minute gong show description I gave to my class: The buzz of cryptocurrencies has recently made me think about the advancements of technology. The advent of the internet has allowed cryptocurrencies to exist as many things in the past have gone virtual or digital. ... Read more