Summer School 2 Days In.

There is nothing like a refresher course in theoretical CS how the industry has changed you over the past 4 years.

It was a great recap of a variety of topics through the first two days of the spanning from Approximation Algorithms, Cryptography, Formal verification, parameterized algorithms and open world computing.

Every professor tries to motivate us with real world implications or the bigger picture of what they are discussing to help us set a better perspective.

Particularly interesting for me personally were cryptography and open world computing taken by
Prof Srinivas Vivek and Prof Srinath Srinivasa respectively.

Cryptography examples were all based out of real world scenarios which helped in relating to the security issues which all of us face in every single interaction with software.. better. The problem set provided was a throwback to my college days and made me realize the college is definitely harder than work.

Open world computing on the other hand has been a great philosophical exercise in the lecture 1. Starting from the constructs of system design, so far we have covered the mathematical foundations of computing starting from set theory, finite state machines and regular languages. Further ahead we are going to delve into open world computing and multi agent systems. Excited to learn more as these set the foundations of intelligent agent based systems which is where the commercial AI is leading us to.

Though at times being one of the only persons from industry makes me feel out of depth (homework is a must to survive in class I must say!), It has been a great 2 days so far, looking forward to the remaining three days.