My application for Inflection Grants written on January 12th, 2024.
WORK IN PROGRESS
How would you spend $2,000? Be specific about what you’d build or try.*
I’d use the $2,000 dollars to buy a minivan. Minivans are a 7-8 passenger vehicle often stereotyped to be used by soccer moms but it’s potential as a hackathon mobile is heavily overlooked. Myself and my friends at the University of Waterloo find it inconvenient that the only method of transportation we have is to fly whenever there’s a hackathon in the United States. Driving is often a more viable option as the cost of gas is being split with multiple people and the memories made makes the experience on road a lot more fun and interesting than in the air.
I’d use the minivan for content creation, with the power of AI generation tools it’s possible to make fully functional programs in a few short hours. I think it’d be interesting to do hackathons on the road where we’ll film our journey and projects and share it on social media platforms such as Instagram, Tiktok, and X. I also believe other similar content such as modifying our van to fit our traveling needs would expose others with similar interests to the hackathon space growing our community to involve people of more unique backgrounds.
What have you done or built that makes you stand out? Could be a project, experience, or skill others don’t have. *
In the context of cars I have worked on cars extensively. At home I own a Mazda MX-5 (Miata) which I have upkept myself. I’ve performed oil changes, replaced brake pads, serviced the transmission and differential fluid, and much more. This’d ensure that when we buy an older van it’s mechanical needs can be met by a hobbyist mechanic.
I have a great interest in the field of Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning. So far my projects have consisted of making applications utilizing Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) where I developed the RAG pipeline myself scaling it to handle up to 10,000 documents at once, multi-agentic applications to automate tasks like email checking,