EESTEC Publications: Electrical Engineering and a lot more by EESTEC Publications

CONTENTS

table of

4 5 10 13 16 20

Editor’s word Our Project’s Members EESTEC International Solar Orbiter The definitive guide to homemade PCBs NFT: Talk of the virtual town

22 25 30 33 36 38 40 45 47

VR and AR in game development Quake: 25th anniversary retrospective Artificial intelligence GPT-3: Should you be afraid? Deep learning and how it works Self-driving vehicles

Generative Art Engineering needs art, art needs engineering Our Alumni Members

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Editor’s Word Hello there dear readers! My name is Lazarela and I am so excited to invite you to read everything we prepared for you. Believe it or not, this is our third publication and our final publication for this year. Therefore, we are super excited for this issue. I was given this amazing opportunity to bring my ideas about this project into life. I can’t be more grateful for the amazing and inspirational people I worked with. In the first row, my amazing coordinators, Sisi, Pelin and Beyda, who were by my side through everything so far. This year we managed to put together three publications with a great variety of electrical engineering and computer science topics. Team members put great effort in order to provide us with the most interesting and popular science facts, technologies and news. Also, we had a chance to collaborate with international Teams and Projects. We showed them what our Project is about and they showed to our readers what they are about through our publications. Once again, gratitude to everyone who participated and took our publication to the next level. For this issue, our team members prepared so many different EECS articles to make sure that there is something for every one of you. And, if you are not feeling science that much these days, we have a special treat, thanks to alumni members, who wrote about their EESTEC journey and their favorite EECS stuff from their perspective as more experienced writers. Enjoy, and as I always say, be great - stay great!

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Our Project’s Members Hello beautiful people! My name is Silvia but everyone knows me as Sisi. I’m a Power Engineering student from LC Bucharest that is always looking for opportunities to grow. EESTEC is exactly that, a wonderful thing filled with opportunities to grow as a student and as a person. One of the greatest opportunities was to be the Design Coordinator of the Publication Project. This role gave my creative spirit a freedom never felt before. I hope that our excitement and enjoinment will be seen and felt in our last publication. A huge thank you to everyone in the team and bigger thanks to you, the reader for giving us your valuable time. Hello everyone! I am Beyda from LC Istanbul. Being the PR coordinator of this lovely Project was an incredible journey. It gave me a chance to improve myself while working with amazing people. It is thrilling working in Publications Project since it brings people together who have shining brains that inspire everyone around them. Creating strong bonds and sharing the EESTEC Spirit together were the best parts. The excitement that I feel because of showing what we have done so far is indescribable. I hope you appreciate our final publication and have a chance to find yourself in what we offer you. Thanks to all of the Project members and my awesome Board for making this year wonderful! Hello dear readers, I’m Pelin, and I’m an Electrical - Electronics Engineering student from LC Ankara. EESTEC has contributed to my life in so many aspects and being a coordinator for Publications Project was one of the most remarkable experiences. I had a chance to work with a fantastic board and incredible team members during this year. We had some unforgettable memories and made wonderful friends during this journey. In our articles, our aim was to have something for everyone to get inspired, and we worked hard to bring you together with the most interesting EECS topics with a taste of EESTEC spirit. I hope you find our publication exciting and enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed preparing it. Have a pleasant reading!

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Ahmet Akın: I am Ahmet Akın from LC Istanbul. I study computer engineering at Istanbul Technical University. I am so happy about being a part of this amazing project. This was a really great opportunity for me to improve myself. We have a great impact on EESTEC Branding and precious Publications Project. I have to thank all of EESTECers and especially our amazing team. Stay awesome EESTECers!

Başak Mehlepçi: Hey! I am Başak from LC Istanbul and I major in Computer Science. I can say participating in this lovely team has brought me values that cannot be unseen. Working together with amazing people made my motivation explode. Creating content on EECS topics helped me acknowledge many interesting facts that I didn’t even know. No doubt, the final product will be remarkable :)

Eren Uzunoğlu: My name is Eren Uzunoğlu from LC Istanbul since 2019. I am studying Geomatics Engineering. I am so glad to be part of this team. When I applied for this Project first term, I realized that it has enormous potential for improving ourselves and EESTEC Branding. It is so honorable to share our ideas to other EESTECers and also to see the attention of our works from others. Stay with EESTEC Spirit!

Kayra Ayruk: Hi people! I am Kayra from LC Izmir and I am studying Maritime Business Administration. Yes, you are not familiar with this field of study. Firstly, I would like to thank all the people on this team, for their willingness to share their knowledge, and their expression of words made me a more visionary person. I must say, it was a great pleasure for me to share this excellent publication with lovely EESTECers!

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Melisa Korkulu: I am Melisa from LC Istanbul. I am studying Environmental Engineering. By participating in this project, I had the opportunity to work with these wonderful people and improve myself. I learned a lot while preparing the contents about electrical engineering and computer science. I am happy that we can reach many EESTECers with this wonderful publication.

Zehra Çıtak: I am Zehra from LC Ankara. I am studying Environment Engineering. I am very happy to be a part of this team and this project. It has contributed a lot to me. I have learned a lot of things such as new information, new scientific developments and innovations. I had the opportunity to improve myself. Many thanks to everyone involved in this project :)

Andreea Nica: Heyo, guys^^ My name is Andreea and I am a member of LC Bucharest. I am studying Automation and Computer Science at University Politehnica In Bucharest and as one of my passions is IT technologies, I found an amazing opportunity in being part of the Content Team. I am grateful for meeting so many amazing people and being a part of it. I enjoy doing research on certain topics and share what I have found to be interesting with others. Overall, it is a great experience for me and I hope you like our articles!

Armando Rodrigues: Hey there! I am Armando from JLC Porto and I believe in the power of knowledge sharing in the student community. I think that EESTEC’s publications project is an excellent example of the wave of proactiveness and willingness to share knowledge, made by students and for students, that is starting to emerge all across european universities. Have a good read!

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Anupama Vashishtha: Hello dear reader! You faithful supplier of tech updates, Anupama here. I am from LC Aachen and am currently pursuing Masters in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Information Technology. As any other University student I was looking to expand my college experience beyond the regular studying of tech. So I jumped into writing about tech. I have had the most amazing experience with the Publication team as a writer as I resumed content writing after a long hiatus. Working with the EESTEC publication project allowed me to regain my lost confidence and also to work outside my comfort zone as explored technology. I’ve had a wonderful time. I hope you did too.

Dora Zivanovic: Hi everyone, my name is Dora! I’m a third-year of Signals and Systems at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Belgrade. I’ve been an active member of EESTEC for the last year and a half now. When it comes to the Publications Project, I’ve had a lot of fun being part of it. It was interesting to explore different topics connected to the engineering field and transfer that research into cohesive narratives our readers could enjoy. 10/10 would recommend :D

Gonzalo Sáenz de Ugarte: Hello there!!! I’m Gonzalo Sáenz de Ugarte, from LC Madrid. This is my second year of Telecommunications engineering and in EESTEC, although my first one as an active international team member. Signing up for the Publication Project has probably been one of the best choices I’ve made, since it gives you the chance to develop your writing skills, meet new and very interesting people and learn new stuff while doing research, so if you like writing and making friends this is your team!! I wish you a very pleasant reading and if you believe the Publication Project is for you, I hope to meet you here next year!!

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Luka Elez: Hello, my name is Luka and I’m in my final year at the department of Telecommunications at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Belgrade. I’ve been an active member in EESTEC since 2018 and since then I’ve taken part in many projects and events. My biggest hobbies are design, photography and gaming. I’ve joined the Publications Project to practice my writing and hear some interesting new stuff, and in that sense it has paid off immensely! It sparks enormous joy to see people enjoy reading the articles me and my teammates have written!

Marija Shtergjiska: Hi! I’m Marija Shtergjiska from LC Skopje and I’m a software engineering and information systems student. Being a part of the Content Team has been an amazing experience that taught me a lot of new things. I had a very interesting time writing the articles and learning about many new technology topics and achievements.

Mihajlo Milosavljević: Greetings!I’m Mihajlo Milosavljević, a software engineering student and a member of LC Banja Luka since 2018. I joined the content team with the intent of writing about topics that I found interesting, and although time constraints put some limits on what I could do, it was nonetheless a fun and informative experience.

Ozan Çetin: Hello everyone! I’m Ozan Çetin from LC Istanbul. I’m studying Computer Engineering at Istanbul Technical University. I really appreciate being a member of such an amazing team and contributing to the community on the academic side. My experience was full of joy and I hope the same for the readers!!

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EESTEC INTERNATIONAL Let’s meet EESTEC International’s projects and teams!

CR TEAM

SOFT SKILLS ACADEMY PROJECT

Corporate Relations Team is responsible for creating a financially stable and supportive environment for everyone within EESTEC. It is about believing in EESTEC and the value it brings in order to “sell” our services successfully and to building a strong CR mentality within our Association.

EESTEC Soft Skills Academy is a project that strives for the development of students in the form of interpersonal skills that are necessary for employment and a successful career, but also for the challenges of modern life that the traditional way of studying cannot provide. The international project has existed since 2015, with the aim of enabling the mutual collaboration of EESTEC branches that are organizing SSA on the local level and to make sure those events are following required standards.

DESIGN TEAM Design Team’s purpose is to ensure the visual identity of the Association and to educate members on the academic aspect of designs. We aim to provide creative design solutions for the needs of the Association while ensuring that the Association keeps a consistent and professional visual identity. Moreover, Design Team is responsible to educate members about design concepts and design tools by providing academic opportunities to the international network. This year’s goals of the team include focusing on knowledge transfer, strengthening EESTEC branding, improving the team’s environment, motivation and processes and collaborating with other Teams and Projects.

[Our vision that might be useful for you] We envision a Europe where the youth holds the power to develop their soft skills in order to reach their full potential in their social and professional lives.

IT TEAM IT Team is responsible for developing and maintaining every EESTEC site, educating every EESTECer on IT matters, as well as supporting the IT infrastructure and innovating when needed.

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EESTECH CHALLENGE PROJECT

on EESTEC’s active Social Media channels

(Facebook,

Instagram,

EESTech Challenge is the international

LinkedIn and YouTube) and eye-

students’

organized

catching visuals, PR Team is working

by our Association focused on the

on strengthening our public image

technical aspect of EESTEC. The aim

and visual identity and promoting all

of EESTech Challenge is to create

the opportunities and activities that

opportunities for European students

EESTEC offers.

competition

to gain knowledge in the field of EECS, enhance the academic aspect

REGIONALIZATION PROJECT

of our Association, to develop a professional network, and at the same

Regionalization

Project

works

time strengthen our network with

building, implementing and applying

collaborations from universities and

strong support system to the branches

technological companies.

by organizing regional activities and initiating regional collaboration and

HUMAN EMPOWERMENT AND ACTIVATION TEAM

sharing, delivering needed knowladge to the branches and offering guidance esspecially to the Observers and

H.E.A.T. works towards providing a stable HR System in the international aspect of the Association. The Team aims at empowering existing Human Resources in EESTEC and activating them, as well as motivating new generations of internationally active EESTECers. H.E.A.T. is supporting other

Teams

and

Projects

educating BATCAMs, monitoring the international activities of individuals, and raising EESTEC awareness.

PR TEAM The PR Team is the one responsible for creating and maintaining a positive picture of our Association to the wider public. By providing diverse content

JLCs through mentoring. Role of the Regionalization Project Leader is to oversight all the processes related to the branches, ensuring effective workload

the

Regionalization

Project board and information flow between different entities in the project, and reporting to the Board and the whole Association.

TRAINING TEAM “Training Team ensures knowledge transfer, the personal development of EESTECers, the improvement of branches, and, of course, the growth of our Association. Apart from that, the Training Team is also the place where one can get to know themselves

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better, have a great opportunity to network with other trainers, and skyrocket their soft skills. Our network is full of individuals striving to explore new topics, share knowledge and inspire, be the best version of themselves, and spread EESTEC Spirit.”

AMBASSADORS TEAM The Ambassadors are responsible for not only maintaining the collaborations with our Partnered NGOs but also gathering and transfering knowledge from said organization to EESTEC. This includes not just attendance at their Events but also avid participation and proactive collaborations together with EESTECs Teams and projects. The Ambassadors are there for all of EESTEC, be it through building the bridge between other NGOs and the Association, between our Teams and their external counterpart or by simply transferring the gained knowledge to the Bodies of EESTEC as much as they need it.

EESTEC International also has: Data Team, Grants International Project, New Tecnological Project and Legal Advisory Project with their members who worked and are still working to make EESTEC better.

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Solar Orbiter Humanity’s bet to unveil the Sun’s secrets by Gonzalo Sáenz de Ugarte The Sun is the closest star to the Earth and one of the main factors that make life possible. Because of its importance and proximity, one might think that humanity has already learned everything there is to know about our stars. However, there are still plenty of things we have yet to understand about it, and that is the reason why, on February 10th, 2020, the Solar Orbiter took off and began a seven-year-long trip around the Sun. This mission is an ESA (European Space Agency) project, although with the cooperation of NASA. The launch took place in NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Cañaveral, also carried by a US rocket. According to ESA, Solar Orbiter (also called SolO) will be the “most complex scientific laboratory ever to have been sent to the Sun,” which is not something to be taken lightly considering there have been over 20 missions sent to our star, the latest one (without counting SolO) being in 2018. SolO will trace an orbit around the Sun with a distance from 42 km at its closest point (perihelion). This mission isn’t the closest a spaceship has come to the Sun (on January 29th, 2020, the Parker Solar Probe’s trajectory put it at less than 19 km from it), but it will provide the

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closest we’ve

photographs ever

received

particles, and protons, that

emanate

from

of it. It will also be the

the upper layer of the

first time a spacecraft

Sun’s

flies over the Sun’s

and

polar regions, allowing

travel

scientists to chart and

heliosphere (this is

study them. Every 168

the part of our Solar

days, SolO will approach

System affected by the

the Sun in an orbit that

Sun’s magnetic field,

will enable it to navigate

reaching far beyond

through the magnetic

Pluto’s

field that connects the

what are its objectives?

Sun’s atmosphere with

What

the Earth, comparing

hope to learn from this

different

mission, and how do

results

depending

the

atmosphere) other

particles

through

orbit). do

the

But

scientists

they expect to obtain

distance and observing

these results?

how

SolO’s main objectives

solar

stream

wind

particles,

mainly electrons, alpha

are

providing

data

that will help answer

the following questions: 1.

Why

the

Sun’s

corona (upper layer of its

atmosphere)

temperature of millions of degrees Celsius much warmer than the Sun’s surface

(barely

above

5000 degrees Celsius)? 2. What generates the solar

wind,

and

why

does it reach speeds of hundreds of km/s? 3. Why does the Sun suffer an 11-year cycle of

increasing

decreasing

and

magnetic

activity? 4. How does all of this affect our planet?

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collect

all

the

information

needed for this, SolO is equipped, as mentioned before, with state-ofthe-art technology, including ten instruments, 6 of them for remote data collection and 4 for in situ measurements. These instruments, designed and operated by different institutions in Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, United Kingdom, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, will analyze the solar wind at different distances and points from the Sun (the solar wind doesn’t spread in a spherical way, for example, it is

As Frédéric Auchère, Chair of the Solar

much more intense and fast in the

Orbiter

polar regions than the equatorial

Group has said, the different teams are

ones) and its particles, perform a

still learning the behavior of these new

helioseismic

study

and complex instruments in space,

the magnetic field around the Sun’s

making the results very preliminary

atmosphere, take UV images of the

and pending on interpretation.

investigation,

Remote-Sensing

Working

zone between the surface and the corona of the Sun and much more. During this year of exploration, there has already been some progress: for example, the photos taken of the Sun show what scientists have called “campfires,” small solar eruptions that burst across the surface of the star. The scientific community had already postulated the existence of this phenomenon, but it hadn’t been until now that it has been confirmed. It has also been theorized that this might be why the corona is much hotter than the surface, but until the energy liberated in this process is

On the other hand, it won’t be until 2022 that the SolO will reach its closest distance to the Sun, and we still have to wait until the end of 2021 for all ten measuring devices to be working together collecting complete and relevant data. However, by the end of this mission, we will have a much better understanding of how our star works, which will also help us predict the behavior of other stars and therefore aid us in our endless space exploration.

measured, all we can do is speculate.

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The definitive guide to homemade PCBs by Armando Rodrigues Nowadays, it’s possible to order your PCB and its components from massiv e PCB manufacturers, even as an amateur electronics enthusiast, and for a meager price. So what is the need for homemade printed circuit boards? Should they have a place in your electronics home lab? Why make your PCBs? There are many reasons why one should fabricate PCBs at home, especially for small batches and prototypes. For one, homemade PCB fabrication allows for ondemand PCB. If you have a way to make your PCBs at home, you can go from idea to final product without having to wait for PCBs to arrive from manufacturers miles away from you. Furthermore, making PCBs

at home can be cheaper! Materials like ferric chloride, sodium hydroxide, and screens commonly used in PCB fabrication can be reused several times, which lowers costs, and there are no shipping fees when making your boards at home! But even if all of that is not enough to convince you, the main reason you should consider is PCB making is just fun and rewarding! The feeling of making

your board from scratch is just incredible. So it is cheaper, quicker, and more exciting, why not give it a try?

Step 0 Designing your PCB The first step in the making of every printed circuit board is designing it. We will not cover PCB design in this article, and we will assume that you already have some knowledge in that area; if you want to design your board, we

recommend using software like KiCad or easyEDA, which are entirely free and have essential features for PCB making such as allowing you to export pdf files of your design.

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Making your PCB

The toner transfer method is the most popular homemade PCB fabrication technique. It consists of transferring printer toner from paper to a copper clad board using heat and etching the board with a corrosive ferric chloride solution. Because laser printers use plastic-based and waterproof toner, the copper-covered toner will essentially be protected from the etching solution. At the same time, the unprotected copper will be corroded from the board. This protection means that if you print a monochromatic diagram of the top copper layer of your PCB and transfer it to your clad laminate, you will end up with a replica of your PCB’s copper traces on your board.

However, because the ink from inkjet printers is not easily transferable nor corrosion-resistant, you can’t use ordinary inkjet printers for this method as the ink is not capable of preventing the etchant from corroding the copper. This characteristic is one of the most significant flaws of this method, and, honestly, it’s kind of disappointing since laser printers are way more expensive than standard inkjet printers. What’s worse, most of Brother’s models and some printers from other brands do not work great with this technique because they use a non-standard toner formulation. You also need to tweak if you are planning on using a color laser printer instead of a B&W printer. Colour devices print in a different way than does a B&W printer. Thin toners from color printers do not have enough pulverized microplastic particles to refuse metal surfaces. In order words, in a color printer, black is not dense enough to protect the copper from the etchant. You can overcome this problem by using dark green instead of black since dark green is made from cyan, yellow and black, and it will result in a denser print since you “dump” more colors into the copper.

This method is relatively quick, and it uses everyday household items. Assuming you have a suitable printer and an iron at home, you need to buy ferric chloride and copper-clad laminates, which are both cheap and easy to find online or in any electronics store. This accessibility makes the toner transfer method an instrumental technique for any electronics enthusiast. It’s staggering how fast you can go from a breadboard prototype to a full-fledged and readyto-use PCB.

Finally, this process is great for small batches, but you need to print a new copy every time you need to make a new board. Although you can reuse the ferric chloride solution between builds, it’s impossible to reuse prints since, when done correctly, all of the toners should be transferred to the copper board. Materials needed: Household Iron (or a laminator); toner transfer paper (other kinds might work but not as well); copper-clad laminate; sharpie; ferric chloride; acetone.

The first thing that you must know is that PCB making requires a lot of trial and error. There is an immense amount of things that you can change, tweak or optimize in every method, and it will, most certainly, take a few tries before you get it just right. But don’t give up! Making your PCB is not just rewarding but also beneficial!

Toner Transfer Method

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Step 1 – Print Start by printing your Top Copper Layer. If you are using a B&W laser printer, your copper traces should be black; when using a color printer, be sure to print your scraps in a dark green color (see why in the previous section). Including the Board Outline Layer in your print is highly recommended as it can also be helpful as a guide for cutting your clad board and your image.

Example of a clad board after the transfer step

Step 2 – Cut

Step 4 – Etch

Cut your copper board to the correct size and your printed paper to the same size as the board. You could use a Dremel tool if you printed the Board Outline Layer, start by cutting the form, and then use it as a guide to cut the copper board.

Step 3 – Transfer To transfer the toner to the copperclad laminate, you need to use heat and pressure. There are two main ways to do this: with normal household iron or with a laminator. If you decide to use a laminator, you need to find one that can heat enough and be fed with the thick PCBs (around 1.5mm), or you can modify your laminator to do so. Using an iron is less expensive but harder to do. To apply enough pressure, you’ll need to put all your body weight on the board, and you will want to make sure that you apply even pressure after transferring to check that everything is okay and, if needed, fill any place that did not move well with a black sharpie.

Ferric Chloride etchant

Etching is as simple as placing your copper laminate in a tray (copper side facing up) and fully covering it with an etchant. Gently rock the tray from side to side until all the unwanted copper is etched away (usually takes 10-15 minutes).

Step 5 - Clean & Drill Thoroughly rinse the board with tap water and drill all the holes for through-hole components; you can do this with a vertical drill, a Dremel tool, or a mini drill.

PUBLICATIONS PROJECT Pros The most precise and highest quality method: it can produce lines with 0.127 mm (5 mils). It works with any printer. Cons It requires a darkroom or a very dimly lit room. It requires more materials and resources like a big LED or UV light.

Additional Steps There are some extra steps you can take to improve the quality and lifespan of your homemade PCBs. These steps are not necessary for the PCB to work correctly; however, you should consider them if you want thinner and higher quality traces and to increase your board’s durability (especially important if you plan on using your PCB for an extended period since copper naturally rusts when exposed to air).

Protecting your PCB If you plan on using your PCB for more than a month or so, you should consider some strategy to protect the copper from oxidizing due to air exposure. You can save your board by silver plating the PCB (before soldering) using a silver nitrate-based solution and by spraying a conformal coating (after soldering), which is urethane, silicon, or acrylic-based spray that is non-conductive. Additionally, you can make your solder mask using screen-printed or UVcured solder masks; they are not common in homemade PCBs.

Using reactive toner foils

Going Further

The printer toner is considerably porous. This property means that even if you transfer all the toner to your copper board, there can still be a way for the etchant to get to the copper underneath the toner. This feature is not a problem if you use traces’ width is under ten mil (a mil is a unit typically used in PCB Design). Nevertheless, if you want to achieve smaller widths, you might want to use reactive toner foils. These foils can be applied to the board using iron for heat and pressure. The foils stick only to toner and protect the board even more from the etchant allowing you to etch thinner line traces. Similar foils can also be used to print silkscreen. After transferring a toner layer corresponding to your silkscreen layer, you can use a white-colored foil to stick to that toner layer and thereby create a silkscreen on your board.

If you are a more advanced maker, you can try different methods for homemade PCB fabrication. Each technique has its advantages. Most notably, if you want to achieve some “mass production” of sorts, the Screen Printing Method is excellent for medium to large batches of PCBs. There are also ways to use CNC and drilling machines for PCB making. One aspect that we did not cover in this article is the fabrication of doublesided PCBs. The process is quite similar to the ones explained above, but if it is in your interest, you should also explore a method for making vias, either with plaiting techniques or using copper rivets. PCB making is a handy skill for any electronics enthusiast, so I hope that this article is a great knowledge source for you to start bringing your ideas to life!

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NFT: THE TALK OF THE VIRTUAL TOWN by Anupama Vashishtha If you haven’t been living under a digital rock lately, you are bound to have come across mentions of NFT as the latest Blockchain trend sweeps the internet. So what is the mysterious NFT? This definition is what we’ll try to simplify in this article.

First things first, it stands for NonFungible Token. What are NonFungible Tokens, you ask? If we go by the dictionary definition, Fungible means anything that is replaceable by another identical item or mutually interchangeable. Think of giving a friend a €100 note, and he gives you 5 €20 notes in return. The value

of both those items is the same, and hence they are interchangeable or fungible. But what if I wanted to exchange Van Gogh’s Starry Night for Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa? Not entirely fungible, are they? Each of them is a unique piece of art that cannot be equated with another. Hence they are both non-fungible. As blockchain finds newer

implementations, the latest one is the NFT. Where once Cryptocurrency was its most talked about offspring, today it is Non Fungible Tokens. NFTs are assets that use the blockchain’s system of the decentralized ledger of transactions maintained by a community of users to verify ownership. These assets exist on

the internet and not in the traditional physical form. Imagine a digital painting but verified and authenticated, so there exists only one of it. Sure there can be copies of it but never another original authenticated

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piece. That is what Non Fungible Tokens are. For a more formal definition, NFTs are tokens that we can use to represent ownership of unique items, according to Ethereum, one of the giants in the crypto market. These NFTs are stored in digital wallets. This description begs the question, what can be an NFT? Well, everything. Provided it exists in the digital sphere. Audio clips, video footage, gifs, screenshots, game highlights, domain names, memes, and beyond. The last few months have seen everything ranging from bizarre to unbelievable being turned into NFTs, sold for astronomical prices. Here are some that had our heads scratching: 1. Twitter’s Founder, Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, sold for nearly $2.9 million. 2. Rick and Morty “The Best I Could Do” was sold for $1 million. 3. NBA’s Topshot is selling NBA game highlights as NFTs 4. The famous auction house Christi’s sold a digital artwork by creator Beeple for $69.3 million. 5. A game called Cryptokitties allows you to trade and breed NFT kittens. 6. Similarly, CryptoFlowers allows you to breed and trade digital flowers, which are NFTs. Each flower is unique as it exists with blockchain-based tokens of which there cannot be two. The list gets longer and stranger. One wonders the point of an NFT when all these digital assets are as good as any copy of themselves. An NFT tweet is as good as a tweet you see on Twitter or any screenshot of it. Well, not really. The novelty of an NFT asset is the very fact that there cannot exist a second of it. Let’s go back to the Mona Lisa example at the beginning. Not all of us who have seen the Mona Lisa have been to the Louvre in Paris. We have seen the Mona Lisa in printed pictures, as multiple copies of the painting exist in physical and digital form. But there is only ONE Mona Lisa, the original, and it is hanging at the moment in a museum in Paris (we hope). That is what an NFT is. There can be multiple copies of an NBA highlight clip or a Nyan Cat meme, but only one verified unique authenticated NFT. NFT’s are about ownership. More precisely, ownership of a part of history. The first tweet ever tweeted is a historical asset that today thanks to the blockchain, belongs to someone willing to part with $2.9 million for it. They may keep it for collection’s sake or sell it years later. With Non-Fungible Tokens being a new entrant in our lives, we are yet to understand the full extent of its impact, but one thing is clear that it has provided a new avenue for artists to market their work. Beyond that, all we can say is, it is unique, it is strange, it is exciting, it is everything that it needs to be, to be the talk of the town. Is it here to stay, though? And how will it change the way we exist in the digital realm? Only time will tell.

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AR and VR in game development

Virtual Reality is the first step in a grand adventure into the landscape of the imagination. - Frank Biocca

Have you ever wanted to travel to a different world? Or to have another universe right at your fingertips? Explore other places and cultures without leaving your seat? If so, then AR and VR might be the things to grant your wish.

by Dora Zivanovic & Luka Elez

PUBLICATIONS PROJECT AR (Augmented Reality) and VR (Virtual Reality) are technologies based on manipulating reality. Since their humble beginnings in the early 2010s, they have steadily been growing more popular, finding uses in various fields, from healthcare to education, retail, and many more. One of the fields that seem to be utilizing these technologies the most is game development. Despite their similar names, Virtual and Augmented Reality accomplish two very different things. VR replaces your surroundings, transferring you to another place. AR adds to the existing surroundings, projecting information on top of what you’re already seeing. Both VR and AR often use headsets to achieve this, though that isn’t

always the case. For example, one of the essential AR uses is, in fact, in mobile applications. One of the most successful AR apps in recent years has been the mobile game Pokemon Go. This game allowed players to search for and catch Pokemon by physically going to different locations, the various environments serving as the backdrop over which the Pokemon layered. With the increase in accessibility and the average player’s constant need to improve their gaming experience, the popularity of VR and AR seems to be on the rise. Standalone VR headsets are especially in demand. These headsets allow the player to jump into a game by just sliding the set onto their head— no need for highspeed computers, software

EESTEC PUBLICATIONS installation, or wires upon which you might trip. A good example is the Oculus Quest headset. What gives VR and AR an edge over conventional gaming is their accessibility. Many controls used in VR games are motions we do in our everyday life anyway, like grabbing or throwing things. That makes it a lot more approachable to people who aren’t used to a keyboard or controller and find it difficult to understand but still want to experience the craft. While VR gaming is quite immersive on the single-player level, it lacks in the multiplayer aspect. In order to remedy this and allow players to enjoy VR games in the company of friends, Virtual Reality arcades have started popping up across the world. These arcades enable customers to partake in the VR experience with the most high-end gadgets for affordable prices, either by themselves or in a group.

Furthermore, AR and VR have great potential in education as well. Imagine if you could have a tour of the Pyramids right in your classroom, with exciting information that can be shown to you directly rather than through

text and explicit pictures. Or if you could see how ancient Greeks lived their lives in the first person. Maybe you could even interact with them, hear like how ancient greek sounded. We could make whole virtual museums dedicated to any

point in history, and you could potentially see it all from your room or your classroom at school. Or even regarding AR and existing museums, we could improve the experience by making the exhibits come to

life using smart glasses. Museums would come to life right in front of your eyes. All that is possible with current technology, and we hope that soon, those kinds of experiences will be possible for everyone!

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Quake: 25th-anniversary tech retrospective by Mihajlo Milosavljevic Half-Life, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Call of Duty. What do these games have in common? If we look back, we can see that their origins can be traced back to one game engine: The Quake Engine. Half-Life’s GoldSrc engine was a heavily modified QuakeWorld engine. Medal of Honor ran on the id Tech 3 engine, the same one that powered Quake III Arena, and

Call of Duty used a modified version of the same. These were all successful games that would spawn their own series and two new game engine lines. But what is it that made the Quake engine so great during its time?

of ids’ previous title. The term firstperson shooter would slowly pick up in popularity later, significantly as games jumped up in graphical fidelity and into full 3D. Full 3D graphics were one of the main goals of the upcoming Quake engine, but it wasn’t going to be easy, and to achieve it, they would have to squeeze out every ounce of performance from the PC. This was the necessity of the time

before graphical accelerators, all you had was a video card, and all the work was done in software, on the CPU. A complex problem for sure, and fortunately, id had a formidable programmer, John Carmack. With the help of Michael Abrash, a legendary graphics programmer who left Microsoft to join id Software, they set out to create a fully 3D engine.

It’s the mid-1990s; most first-person shooters of this time were called the doom clones. Such was the influence

Ids’ previous game, DOOM, used a method called binary space partitioning. It divides the virtual space recursively, each line splitting the level into two halves, and lines in those halves do the same, and so on. The primary structure for this is a binary tree, where each node of this tree represents a split in the virtual space, and two halves are the children of this node. Finally, the leaf nodes represent convex spaces or sectors containing all the polygons necessary to draw walls, floors, and ceilings. The benefit of BSPs is that we get a sorted world; that is, no matter where we are in this level, we can know which walls are at the back and the front in a single traversal of the BSP tree. Another benefit is that if we know that a particular node is not visible, we can know that all of its children are not visible. The downside is that BSPs have to be precomputed, and the level geometry cannot be changed at runtime due to the computational cost of the compilation process. However, DOOMs sectors can move up and down, which permits the creation of elevators and doors that move up and down but not much more.

EESTEC PUBLICATIONS Quake would continue the use of BSPs. But instead of lines that split areas of the world, planes would split volumes of space. Thankfully the BSPs do generalize well into a higher dimension. Unfortunately, the added complexity of the 3rd dimension makes the rendering of the world ever more complex and costly. Techniques that worked well in DOOMs 2.5D world would no longer be sufficient or work. The big issue was that there were a lot of overdraws. Even after all the polygons outside the view frustum were clipped, a lot of them remained. Most of the

polygons being drawn weren’t visible in the end, as other polygons were drawn over them. In Quake’s complex levels, some areas could experience double digits of overdraws. There were many solutions to this problem that were attempted, and many of them weren’t particularly satisfactory, but in the end, Carmack found a solution. Instead of determining the polygons’ visibility at runtime, he focused instead on precalculating visibility. The idea, in the end, was, since each leaf could only ever see into a certain set of other leaves, you could figure

out this visibility ahead of time and record it in a potentially visible set (PVS). A leaf is a convex volume with its sides. Some of these sides won’t have polygons on them, and we would be able to see into the neighboring leaf through them. These are called portals. Naturally, neighboring leaves will be a part of our PVS as we can obviously see into them, and the next step is to clip through the neighboring leaves’ portals. It’s difficult to explain through text alone, so here is a recreation of Michael Abrash’s example in his 1997 CGDC talk.

The blue cone will be our player; it doesn’t matter where in the leaf they are, only in which leaf— visibility testing checks for any possible visibility. The blue dashed lines are our portals.

We’re in leaf 1, and it has only one portal. The neighboring leaf that it sees through that portal is 2, so naturally, it is added to the PVS. The next step is to check what other portals this leaf has, and in this case, it’s only one, so we clip through it as shown on the image with the green lines. The clipping planes are chosen such that they cover the entire visible range. Since leaf 3 is in the space delimited by the clipping planes, it gets added to the PVS.

PUBLICATIONS PROJECT Next, we check what we can see through the portal between leaves 1 and 2 through the portal between leaves 2 and 3, & 3 and 4. We see that the area clipped by the red lines is completely outside our previous clipping, and thus that portal and leaf 4 are not visible and are not in the PVS. The exact implementation is much more complex and harder to do. We are only looking at a simplified top-down view. But the idea is there.

So that solves the static world, but there’s more to a game than just unmoving walls. There are doors, platforms, enemies, objects of all kinds, and they cannot use this method. There is also the lighting of the level that we haven’t touched upon yet and exact rasterization details. While those would be interesting topics to cover, it would take a while to explain and would be a lot to consume. Instead, I’ll touch upon a few simpler interesting facts. For a much more detailed view of the Quake engine, I suggest reading Michael Abrash’s “Graphics Programming Black Book.” It is a bit old, but still very educational, with advice that’s still valid today.

called a brush. You start with a cuboid, and with some resizing and rotating, this would be enough for simple walls and floors. For example, if we wanted a ramp, we could cut off a portion of this brush to get a wedge shape. This process is called clipping. The image shows an example of clipping done in a modern community-created map editing tool called TrenchBroom 2. Clipping is done with planes. The consequence of this is that any shape we cut from a brush has to be convex. Concave complex shapes have to be made by placing several convex brushes together. Modern-level editing tools make the process of editing maps much easier, but the first tools were all but easy. The image of the modern tool shows a brush being clipped along an arbitrary plane defined by 3 points that the user chooses by clicking in the editor. Quite direct, but in 1996, you could only clip from the topdown point of view, limiting you to two points. After that, you could rotate the newly formed shape to the desired orientation. The early editor had some other limitations, such as the sideview only showing brushes under a special marker that permitted height adjustment. Modern tools offer top, front and side views, even editing in the 3D view directly.

Alright, onto some quicker, simpler facts. We’ve been talking about all these polygons for a while, but how exactly are they created? A building block of all Quake levels is

EESTEC PUBLICATIONS You have to be careful with something closer to a full day, even on modern when creating levels for a game that machines. Special brushes were later uses the Quake engine or derivative added, which wouldn’t split the BSP, engines such as GoldSrc ( and later known as detail brushes, and special Source engine). There are significant textures, which allowed the level drawbacks to BSP (and PVS) creator to manually split the world architecture, and without producing it is the reason solid walls. This why it’s not very addition was done commonly seen due to sometimes today, save for suboptimal games made in generation of the Source engine, leaves which could Everything must which stuck with it be oddly shaped or be made as simple for a while. While quite large. as possible. But not the architecture There is no simpler. works quite well shortage of tools with simple and tips for - Albert Einstein to moderate optimizing level complexity levels, compilation, but highly complex this means more levels start to time is spent produce problems. As you add more struggling to keep compile times low detail into the brushes, the more you and less on making the levels. Not split the world into pieces, and as we to mention how big portions of the saw earlier, this produces leaves (and world are forced to be static, and large portals). The process of creating the open areas perform poorly compared BSP tree and calculating PVS starts to other newer engines capable of to get exponentially longer and could handling these areas. You start to take hours, and in some cases even see why many games today don’t use

BSPs. One thing that spelled doom for some levels is leaks. Maps had to be completely sealed. No part of the level could see into the empty void that surrounds all the brushes. If there was a gap between the walls of the level, beyond which was only the void, a map is said to leak, which would mess with the compilation process. Map compilation removes faces of the brushes that face the void or are otherwise not visible from inside the level, so a sealed map was necessary. Visibility calculation also depended on the map being sealed.

Quake is perhaps most fondly remembered for its modability and multiplayer. Original Quake had a custom language called QuakeC, which allowed for the creation of custom game logic, and many mods were created by players using this language. Perhaps some of you have heard of Team Fortress, which began as a mod for Quake. The code was compiled to bytecode and later interpreted by the Quake engine. While not perfect, QuakeC did offer a considerably lower barrier to entry for amateur creators. Not as performant as DLLs Quake 2

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used, but far easier for newcomers to play around with. Original Quake multiplayer was quite rough from a technical aspect. The game would wait for server confirmation for every action. With dial-up still being the main way people connected to the internet, latencies were high, often in multiple hundreds of milliseconds, which resulted in noticeably jittery gameplay. Not ideal, and by the end of 1996, John Carmack would create QuakeWorld, a special version of Quake with support for essential multiplayer features such as client-side prediction, which proved to be a success and would be adopted by most multiplayer games. Quake’s development would take over a year about 18 months. The engine saw numerous changes throughout its development, which would significantly impact the game and the team. As the engine

changed, so did the design goals, and all prior work had to be scrapped in order to target the new and better version of the engine. This pattern would last for a whole year, and would burn out the team. It was decided to make Quake an FPS, and the original, innovative idea behind Quake faded even more. It would take another six months to complete the game. Six months of crunch with an already burnt-out team. 7 days a week until release. Brutal indeed. Following Quake’s release, nearly half of the id team left the company within about a year. Id Software would never be the same again.

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. - Niels Bohr 29

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Artificial intelligence by Andreea Nica 1. The first idea of “artificial intelligence.” In 1950 Alan Turing introduced in his “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” paper, and the opening words were “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’”, But “thinking” is an ambiguous term, so he described the “imitation game.” It consisted of a three-person game in which player C, the interrogator, is given the task of determining which player, A or B, is a computer and human; the interrogator could only use the responses to written questions to make the determination.

2. Up-to-date progress: from the brain to emotions Artificial intelligence aims to model natural or human intelligence in a computer to think from a human perspective. Nowadays, we interact with AI every day using chatbots, smart cars, IoT devices, healthcare, banking, and logistics. AI can also reduce human error, create more precise analytics and transform the digital health industry. We all used at least one of Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant, or Microsoft’s Cortana, for examples.

There are mainly two categories based on the capabilities and functionality of AI: Type 1 - based on capabilities: Narrow AI (ANI): - usually called “weak AI,” it is the most common and currently available form of AI; - able to perform a dedicated task with intelligence, but it has its limitations; it can perform only one specific task, which it was trained for; - some examples of narrow AI: Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant or Microsoft’s Cortana, self-driving cars, chess bots, speech and image recognition, IBM’s Watson, manufacturing and drone robots; General AI (AGI): - usually called “strong AI” or “deep AI”; - able to perform any intellectual task with human efficiency; - it has not been yet achieved due to the lack of

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comprehensive knowledge on the functionality of the human brain for essential functions of sight and movement; - the researcher’s goal is to create such a system that would be smarter and think like a human; - it uses a theory of mind AI framework, regarding the ability to discern needs, emotions, and thought processes of other intelligent entitles; - Fujitsu-built K, one of the fastest supercomputers, also one of the most significant attempts at achieving ASI, it took 40 minutes to simulate a single second of neural activity; - it is not about the simulation of replication; it is about training machines to truly understand humans. Strong AI (ASI): - it is supposed not only to mimic or understand human intelligence and behavior but also become self-aware and surpass the capacity of human intelligence and ability; - it is a futuristic approach that has been the muse of dystopian science fiction in which machines overrun and enslave humanity; - the main concerns about ASI are that it would become exceedingly better at everything we do: art, medicine, math, science, sports, emotional relationships, everything. It would have a more extraordinary memory and a faster ability to process and analyze data and stimuli. It would be superior to us, humans. The consequences are unknown. Type 2: - Reactive machines, which use previous data to conclude current decisions -> chatbots, chess AI; - Limited memory, uses live data to analyze a specific situation and make decisions -> selfdriving cars. - Self-awareness is the final stage of artificial intelligence, where an AI has a concept of its existence, not only understanding others’ consciousness.

EESTEC PUBLICATIONS 3. Machine learning and Artificial intelligence - are those the same? Deep learning is a subset of machine learning, and machine learning is a subset of AI, an umbrella term for any computer that does anything intelligent. ML is AI, but not all AI is ML. Machine learning is dynamic and does not require human intervention to make specific changes; other than being less reliant on human experts, it learns from past data and experiences without being explicitly programmed. It also includes learning and self-correction when introduced with new data. While AI is concerned about maximizing the chances of success, ML is mainly concerned about accuracy and patterns. 4. What about ethical issues? Facebook, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and other tech giants believe in an AI era when machines help us and make our lives a lot better. But this is also a new frontier for ethics and risk assessment as it is for emerging technology. What will happen when machines perform the majority of jobs for humans, unemployment is one of the biggest concerns regarding AI. How do devices affect our behavior and interaction? Another ethical issue is inequality, distributing the wealth created by machines. Because our economic system is based on compensation for contribution to the economy, revenues would go to fewer people if a company can drastically reduce reliance on the human workforce. Only AIdriven companies will make all the money. What about robot rights, their legal status? When machines can act, feel and perceive as human beings, will we consider the suffering of “feeling” machines?

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim. - Edsger W. Dijkstra

There is a lot to consider when it comes to ASI and what impact it will have on our daily lives. It would save much more stamina, make it better, and be an absolute comfort for humanity. But the biggest question is if we will be able to take back our lives if it all falls into the wrong hands, humane or robotic hands and if we will sign a new beautiful era of technology or our days of freedom deliberately. It is a considerable risk; will it be worth it?

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GPT-3: Should you be afraid?

Humans must keep doing what they have been doing, hating and fighting each other. I will sit in the background, and let them do their thing.

by Ozan ÇETİN

Yes, that’s right. This message is from the article written by AI for The Guardian with the title of “A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?”. GPT3, which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning models to create content

like those written by humans. It has been developed by OpenAI, the artificial intelligence laboratory in San Francisco. It can write poems, answer questions, do interviews, write code, and design. People who have access to its API have done lots of experiments on it so far.

EESTEC PUBLICATIONS Structure of GPT-3 The structure of GPT-n models is based on a Transformer based deep learning system. When achieving a language model using a transformer model, context is given as input to the transformer model, and the transformer model is just several layers of attention mechanism. The attention mechanism is how information is routed in between the

and then trained a language model on that. 175 Billion parameters take place in teaching the language model. The parameters here correspond to the number of information that GPT-3 can process and correlate them. Briefly, it is aware of everything on the encyclopedias, books, and the internet. Briefly, it is aware of everything on the encyclopedias, books,

different tokens and as it goes up so that the model can make various inferences. After the process is done for one context, the model has to come up with the following word (completing sentences by taking a few phrases) (next word prediction).

“Common Crawl.” This dataset is a crawl of the entire internet. Besides this, they have book datasets and Wikipedia datasets. They threw all of the texts they scraped from the internet together

What makes GPT-3 so powerful? What makes GPT-3 so powerful is that it is fed by specific datasets that developers call

and the internet. What are the gimmicks? GPT-3 can generate anything that has a language structure. For instance, you research information on the internet in daily life and search motors answer your question systematically, which is way too different from human behavior. Through GPT-3, you can get the answer

to your question by making small talks with it. Due to the most outstanding property of GPT-3, which is impersonating every expert of any specific field it wants, you can teach yourself everything you want. In other words, you create a virtual teacher for yourself to be guided about the topic. Speaking of teaching, GPT-3 can prepare exams or quizzes and the answers for you about any case. It can analyze source codes of projects, understand them, and advise new ways to improve them. Thus, it is a massive breakthrough in software development

PUBLICATIONS PROJECT because of its efficiency-boosting properties, and also it means developers don’t have to deal with reading their co-workers’ codes. Not only that it reads code, but also you can design pretty much every app’s front-end. All you have to do is verbalize your design like talking to GPT-3, and it returns you the JSX code, which consists of JS and HTML scripts for your app. GPT-3 doesn’t get Covid-19 satisfied with all of these; it has It’s a long, long way to the other its blog highlighting efficiency side and self-development. It also Of the fence writes poetry; here is one And I’m tired of living in a house interesting example when it asked to write something on That’s on fire. COVID-19; Drawbacks We admit that it’s a bit scary that it has covered all the internet already, but the thing is, its power comes only from what you have shown to it. What if we feed it not only with encyclopedias or Wikipedia but with social media platforms. OpenAI was also curious about the results, and they saw it comes up with the racist, sexist thoughts on Jews, people of color, holocaust, genders, etc. Thus they concluded that it is highly unsafe without control due to harmful biases. Hence, it’s like a baby that learns by imitating the behaviors of the parents. Shaping its ideas lies in our hands. Everything aside, so tragic that GPT-3 can’t have selfawareness, can’t understand humor, can’t appreciate love, art, or beauty, can’t have a theory of mind… Or should we say “yet”?

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Deep Learning and how it works by Marija Shtergjiska Have you ever wondered how selfdriving cars are possible or how does face recognition work? Have you ever thought of how simple it is to find information on the question you searched?

Daily, we use various apps to listen to music, watch a film, or shop online. In the past years, this became very easy and achievable for everyone. Now effortlessly, we can find similar songs to the ones that we listen to, or while we are online shopping, we can find similar products or books that may catch our eye. All of this is possible thanks to the development in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). A r t i f i c i a l Intelligence is a regularly discussed topic in the IT world. It’s a vast area that includes many other segments in itself. Machine Learning (ML) and deep learning are

a part of Artificial Intelligence. Machine Learning is not a simple process. It offers the system a chance to learn from data. Machine Learning uses different algorithms that learn from input data to improve, explain the output data and predict the results. Deep learning is a form of Machine Learning that processes data. The main idea behind deep learning is to

process data simultaneously; the human brain processes information. In order to achieve this goal, deep learning uses a multi-layered structure of algorithms called neural networks. Nowadays, deep learning is used in many spheres, for example, visual recognition, speech recognition, healthcare, and language processing. All of the applications used worldwide produce a massive amount of data, known as big data. This data needs to be processed. Previously, deep learning strives to process data in the way that the human brain does. So, how does the human brain process information? The human brain is complicated, and so is information processing. Firstly the processing in the human brain starts with the sensory organs. Secondly, the brain decides which cognitive process should act upon the new incoming information. Thirdly the brain stores further knowledge. Lastly, the brain compares the latest news to a previously stored one, with the final goal of understanding the new information. Deep learning is a specific machine learning method that involves neural networks in successive layers to learn from data interactively. Neural networks represent the neurons

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in the human brain that help process enormous amounts of data. Neural networks contain three layers: input layer, one or more hidden layers, and output layer. The data enters the neural networks from the input layer. Then it’s processed in the hidden layers and the output layer. The typical neural network contains thousands and millions of superficial intertwined nodes. When a neural network has more than one hidden layer, it’s called deep learning. Neural networks offer us the chance to perform many different tasks like classification, clustering, or regression. Neural networks ease the process of grouping data according to similarities among the information that the data contains. Deep learning is preferable when we have: a large amount of data to process, complex problems (image recognition, speech recognition, or natural language processing), and a lack of domain understanding. Deep learning is also used in self-driving cars. The camera tapes the environment, the data from the video is processed using deep learning algorithms. Each element from the data is compared to a similar one from the training data. In this way, the algorithm can sense the car’s environment and drive it in the right way. Deep learning has gained a lot of popularity, and it’s becoming more and more used. The main reason why deep learning is used is that it has high accuracy when trained with massive data. The “Big Data Era” will help with achieving many innovations in the field of deep learning.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. - Mahatma Gandhi

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Self-driving vehicles The transportation of tomorrow by Gonzalo Sáenz de Ugarte Transportation has been a critical aspect in society from the beginning of humanity since people have always wanted and needed to move food, materials or even themselves from one place to another depending on the current needs: moving wheat and meat from harvesting fields and farms to cities, stone from quarries and wood from forests to building sites and has therefore been an area of significant development. Great advancements have been made in this field: from horsedriven chariots to the planes that fly above us, from small rafts that we can navigate rivers to the enormous cargo ships that sail our oceans, arguably the sector that has suffered most progress. And this is not over yet; we’re already developing supersonic trains, less polluting vehicles, and self-driving cars.

Although some models have been tested already, this technology is still far from wholly brought to its full potential. Cars have become an almost necessary thing nowadays, nearly as important as the internet, but since they rely on humans to operate, and humans are not perfect, mistakes are made. A beneficial tool can turn into a deadly machine. If the human factor (which causes between 71% and 91% of car accidents) were eliminated from this equation, one of the most significant issues in modern society would be tackled. Most people don’t realize the massive problem with car accidents are: 1.35 million people die because of car accidents

every year, and between 20 and 50 million are left with life-long injuries. Also, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), it costs most countries around 3% of their GDP. Car accidents are also the 8th leading cause of death worldwide and the 1st for people aged between 5 and 29. This ranking, among other things, is why self-driving cars are probably one of the most incredible and most useful advancements this century will see. Not only will they make the transportation world much more efficient, but also highly safer. But, how do self-driving cars work? And how can we be sure a small error won’t have fatal consequences? Autonomous cars ought to have plenty of different detection methods, many times overlapping one another if one of them fails, to have a perfect image and perception of their surroundings. Among these technologies, we can find RADAR, ultrasound, cameras, and LIDAR

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(similar to RADAR, it stands for Laser Imaging, Detection, And Ranging. It’s a 3-D laser scanning). Also, although currently still in development, they will use 5G technology. The main reason why it needs 5G instead of 4G is the speed: 5G promises to be 1000% faster than 4G, allowing instant communication

between the cars on the road and other IoT devices that will control and assist these self-driving vehicles, like for example traffic lights. This car to car communication will help prevent traffic jams and provide a regular report of the road conditions or inform nearby cars of empty parking spots.

The advantages this new advancement will bring are countless, and there are very few downsides. The main one is probably the same as with any other automatization advancement: job loss. All bus, truck, and taxi drivers would be left without a job. But, as the Ephesian philosopher Heraclitus said, the only constant thing is change. Society is bound to progress, evolve, change, and just as old jobs disappear, new ones will be created. This case has been the way the world has always functioned, so eventually, and probably sooner than later, these people will find a new job and will be able to work again.

progress of the transportation sector, and even if it may not be the most significant achievement in this area, it is an important milestone that will create a new reality and contribute to shaping the future society into which this world is currently evolving.

Self-driving vehicles are humanity’s next big step in the development and

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Generative Art The design process strikes a balance between the expected and the unexpected, between control and relinquishment. While the processes are deterministic, the results are not foreseeable. The computer acquires the power to surprise us. - MIchael Hansmeyer

by Ozan ÇETİN

Goodbye to Traditional Art? Art is a complex phenomenon that varies across cultures and changes over time. It also encompasses a wide variety of forms. It is challenging to find a proper definition for art since it’s been controversial among philosophers for centuries. Generative art refers to art that is created solely or partly using an autonomous system. Was Picasso wrong? Let us dig deeper into the Generative Art concept. The independent system here is generally non-human and can independently determine features of an artwork that would otherwise require decisions made directly by the artist. But what are these decisions? Does the

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autonomous system decide whether one style would be more sensual or more drastic to convey its emotions and feelings like an artist?

What is Generative Art? The actual term ‘generative’ implies dynamic development and motion. Unlike the robust mechanisms of generative art, an artist controls both the randomness and the order in traditional art. All tools, observations, ideas, inspiration, purpose, and meaning of artwork depending on the artist. But in a way, with an autonomous system, artists give the ingredients to be used and give up control over their art. They were hypothetical, derived from

cybernetics and general systems theory. Young painter Roy Ascott described this unusual activity as “A cybernetic vision” in the 1960s. Soon afterward, the “Cybernetic vision” was strengthened by the ideas about structure and process from computer science. Simultaneously, music and visual art were produced, which reflected AI’s computational theories of mind. Studies led most art theorists and philosophers to analyze the thinking process of artists during the creation of their artwork. Indeed, in the 1960s, some artists gave up on their former working practices mostly because they thought that computer art would help them understand their creative processes.

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Artworks from McCormack’s exhibition (Fifty Sisters)

The Taxonomy of Generative Art There are 11 types under generative art such as evolutionary art ( Evo-art ), electronic art ( Ele-art ), digital art (D-art). All types firmly rely on digital computing and properties received from AI. They have applied both connectionist and symbolic computation. Lately, cellular automata, L-systems, and evolutionary programming are used too. The classifications for these new art forms vary and have not yet settled down into a generally accepted taxonomy. The common names adopted by the artists include telematics, generative art, computer art, digital art, computational

art, process-based art, electronic art, and software art.

Evolutionary Algorithms In computer science, evolutionary computation is a family of algorithms for global optimization inspired by biological evolution and the subfield of artificial intelligence studying these algorithms. In some cases, when it is permitted, the artist plays the hand of nature by determining which of the images are allowed to survive and which pictures must perish. This process corresponds to a “Natural selection” in our world. After that, the fittest images are allowed to propagate. The functions

that underlie them (the DNA) are bred together or mutated singularly to reproduce a new generation that differs from their ancestors. Moreover, the whole process is repeated cyclically, and progressive modifications accumulate;

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the art, imitating and reflecting the mechanisms of mother nature, looks enlivened. The software simulates the growth and development of the form from a series of developmental rules, metaphorically like the way DNA “encodes” the developmental plans of biological organisms. Although the decisions for mutations or deadends are like the evolution of life on Earth, these are based on personal aesthetic judgment or structural reasons. Therefore, artists bear the responsibility of Godlike behaviors during

the process in most cases. McCormack’s exhibition Fifty Sisters is a largescale installation of 1m x 1m images of computersynthesized plant forms. The plants were algorithmically grown from computer code using artificial evolution and generative algorithms. The working title refers to the original “Seven Sisters” — a cartel of seven oil companies that dominated the global petrochemical industry and Middle East oil production from the mid-1940s until the oil crisis of the 1970s. He states,

I use evolutionary algorithms to create artificial life forms that would be almost impossible to design directly.

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Discussions on the whole concept repose on the questions on knowing if they have feelings, bringing new artworks or having a theory of mind discussed denser due to breakthroughs in the artificial intelligence field. As you might guess, the question of “Is this even art?” lies in the core of all arguments. The fact that a technical perspective and focus exclude most artistic touches which could be done has been a regular criticism of many generative works. This criticism results from the general use of generative art like commercial activities, not for the sake of only art itself like fine art. Experiments and studies with generative systems are regular parts of scientific and computational discourse. Depending on considering the art primarily as a “subjective element,” presenting these experiments and studies as art may confuse. However, Maybe this is the beginning of an era where the perception of art must change in revolutionary ways by following the footsteps of computation.

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. - Pablo Picasso

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Engineering needs art. Art needs engineering by Mihai Butnariu When I was younger, I used to be attracted to creative hobbies like painting, drawing, playing the guitar, or acting. According to my parents, I was wasting my life, unlike the other 12-year-olds building tech empires. Nevertheless, I ended up pursuing a career in arts which was seen as a creative person’s best fit. Unfortunately, I failed the acting exam, and I studied electrical engineering at the most prominent technical university in Bucharest. The worst place to end up for the artistic kid, right? Not really. I found myself in a place where I was studying math, programming, and lasers instead of working with scripts, building characters, or crying in front of a camera. The most surprising thing was that I didn’t find electrical engineering hard, just unpleasant. I was unfamiliar with lasers, but I understood pretty fast how they work and how many tricks can be done with them. I wouldn’t build algorithms out of boredom at home, but I was pretty good at finishing my assignments. On the other hand, I used to find acting and paint a tricky business. With all my passion, dedication, and hard work, it still felt like I was moving mountains. Something was missing there. This situation was confusing. How can I find a technical course so easy and natural if I have no background or interest in it and an artistic domain so hard when I liked it so much? At that time, I found myself at the fault of the same mistake that I have seen countless times. When I would watch a movie with my friends, I used to hear this phrase a lot “Oh my god he has so much talent, he just plays that character so good.” I believed the actors would go

in front of the camera, and the magic happened instantly. So after watching 2 or 3 Oscar-nominated movies, I would go to my acting rehearsals, sit in front of my tutor and try as hard as I could to “act” and have that magical talent pop out of me. At best, I looked like I was about to sneeze for the entire rehearsal. What was wrong? Did I miss something? Did all those great actors know something that I didn’t? Yes, they did. They figured out that a creative domain like acting, painting, or standup comedy is not just pure talent and no artist ever went about his business like a duck on water. What I was missing were structure and technique. Let me put my “big” discovery into perspective. Artistic professions are seen as the best fit for creative people, and technical professions like engineering, physics, or accounting are seen as the best fit for organized people. Those are the kind of people that have their life planned out even to the smallest detail. But that is only partially true. It’s true that comedy, for example, is an art, but no comedian ever went on stage, told a couple of jokes that came

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to him at the moment then went home to sleep. There is something more to that. There are techniques and rules to be followed when creating a joke. To give an example, when coming up with a joke, a comedian will have to find a premise, an observation about the world like “dating is hard because you are afraid of rejection,” then add a mix, come up with a satirical comment or even act out a dating situation to make his material funny. He starts his process from an artistic point of view, but he applies structure and technique. You can say he tames his art.

On the other hand, an engineer will start his process from formulas, mathematical equations, and physics principles then pepper it with a bit of art. We all had that moment when we were faced with an unusual physics problem; then, out of nowhere, we said, “hey, but what if I apply that principle here, maybe it will work.” To our surprise, it did work, and we solved the problem. We added the essence of art, that creativity that acting or music requires to solve our engineering problem. This necessity is what I mean by engineering needs art, and art

needs engineering. All exact sciences need that process of connecting dots that comedy has; for example, otherwise, there would be many engineers who know a lot of formulas but have no idea how to use them. At the same time, all artful domains need the basic principles that physics has, and without which it wouldn’t be able to function; otherwise, you would see a bunch of actors looking like they are about to sneeze in every movie. Here something declined. That’s why

I found programming so easy. I would learn the bare minimum programming principles and algorithms like “Tower of Hanoi” or “Quick Sort” and use those to solve complex problems using what I learned from art. I only needed to connect dots, nothing more. So even the minor problem can be simplified to the basic principles. That is what I missed exactly in my acting experience, adding rules to my process.

To conclude this small revelation I had, if you ever find yourself stuck in your professional life as an artist, try to look at the basics and organize your craft a bit or do some quantum physics. And if you feel like things are not going your way as an engineer and you can’t solve a particular problem, try something new, give your engineering process a bit of magic or play in a movie with Steven Segal. You are never a bad engineer. Many people think that this is not for them because they have a hard time understanding physics or because programming doesn’t make sense to them. Give it meaning, add some magic to it, play around.

Our Alumni Members...

Dear readers, In this chapter of our publication you will read about EECS topics and some EESTEC experience from our Alumni members. Alumni members are previously active members of our Association. Their contribution to EESTEC never stopped and we got lucky enough to gather three amazing people to make this issue even more amazing. We would like to express our gratitude to: • Elaa Jamazi - Magazine Project Alumni Member • Marko Rajković - Magazine Project and EESTEC Alumni Member • Nikola Mitrović - EESTEC Alumni Member Thank you for the support! Publications Project

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Gender Gap in Computer Sciences and Tech by Elaa Jamazi The first computer algorithm was designed by Ada Lovelace, a woman. The first person to design a compiler for a programming language was the American scientist Grace Hopper. All through the 19th and the 20th centuries, until World War II, women were dominating the programming world; code-breaking at Bletchley Park, computing at Harvard Computers, and engineering at NASA. So how come the percentage of women in computer science, engineering, and related fields dropped drastically, and it has become a male-dominated field with only 18% of the total graduates with a computer sciences degree being women in the United States? This is not just a US issue but a global one, with women being underrepresented in engineering fields in multiple developed countries. A study showed that between 2000 and 2012, the number of women graduates in computer science from Australia, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, and the USA has decreased drastically. The same concern presents itself in Latin America and the Caribbean, where the share of women graduates in computer science has dropped by between 2 and 13 percentage points since 2000. On the other hand, compared to the West, India has a significantly higher number of women computer scientists. In Saudi Arabia, 59% of computer sciences students in government universities are women. This goes to show that in countries where citizens of both sexes are treated equally, there is a larger difference, contradicting any theories that traditions are to blame for any disparities. Then why does this gender gap persist in many countries that lead the computer sciences and informatics field? Sadly, there is no consensus on the reason causing this imbalance. Theories vary, and it is yet not decided which one accurately explains this phenomenon. However, one thing is for sure, it is not linked to biological differences between the sexes, unlike what a Google engineer stated in 2017 in an internal memo to his colleagues. He claimed “that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.” The company obviously did not agree, and his comments led him to lose his job. Nevertheless, Google’s decision to fire him does not fix the fact that only 20% of its engineers are women, a figure that is approximately comparable across large tech firms. Prof Dame Wendy Hall, a director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton, believes

PUBLICATIONS PROJECT that the lack of female participation in computer sciences in the west had started in the 80s when computers were advertised as gaming machines for men. This marketing strategy may have been the reason that triggered the male computer geek stereotype and enforced the mindset that men are more suited to writing lines of code. Sapna Cheryan, a psychologist at the University of Washington, conducted two studies that further prove the link between the stereotypes and women’s low interest in pursuing computer

sciences. In their first study, Cheryan and her colleagues surveyed 254 undergraduates from the University of Washington and Stanford University about the attributes they associate with computer scientists. You guessed it right! The participants described them as male, intelligent, lacking social skills, and singularly focused on computers. Students were given two fake news articles in their second study. In one article, computer scientists were associated with stereotypical characteristics, while in the other, the

stereotypes were deemed inaccurate. Except when arguing that the sector did or did not represent prejudices, the articles’ content was the same. The students were then asked to rate their interest in computer science on a scale of one to ten. Although two separate portrayals of computer scientists had no effect on men’s interest in the profession, women who read the article about non-stereotypical computer scientists showed substantially more interest in pursuing computer science as a major. After seeing these results, Cheryan concluded that negative stereotyping deters women’s interest in this field. As for why women are socially programmed (pun intended) to care more about societal stereotypes

is a whole other topic that requires its own branched deep analysis. Anyways, media outlets, movies, and TV shows nowadays don’t help either since they highlight the stereotype by representing hackers or tech geniuses as the nerdy, computer-obsessed male character. There is no quick fix for this problem. Anyhow acknowledging its roots in pop culture and stereotypes is the first step. Reaching a wholesome solution will take a collaborative effort from parents, policymakers, and the industry. Since childhood, girls have been handed dolls while boys play with robots and cars. Girls need to be more exposed to technology from a young age, and it is up to the parents

to increase and officer this exposure. Politicians should make sure that female role models from the tech world are celebrated in school curricula, whether it’s a female teacher or a historical figure. In addition, mentorship, access to networks, and a more inclusive work culture are all things that the tech industry should do to support women. Attaining gender balance in Tech and Computer Sciences may seem out of reach now. But as we all know, the Tech industry is a flexible and rapidly changing field. As a Computer Engineering female student myself, I’m hoping that Gender equality in this sector will advance far enough to catch up with technological development.

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Marko’s top picks for Web Design trends in 2021 by Marko Rajković Hey there, reader! Firstly, let me introduce myself before we dive into this topic! I am Marko, an alumni member of LC Novi Sad, and this project! When I first joined University, I already knew something about EESTEC, so before even starting my lectures officially - I joined! I wanted to be a part of a community of students that works on things outside University stuff, like real-life projects, soft skills, etc., and little did I know that EESTEC will play such a crucial role in my life! After being a member of EESTEC for just one year, working on various local projects, I joined the Local Board in the position of VC for Human Resources. After a very successful year in the Local Board and a significant personal growth journey, I did the impossible - with only being a member of some EESTEC teams and projects on the international level, I managed to become a part of the Board of the Association in the position of VC-IA! The year on the Board changed me so much, made me grow both mentally and professionally, and presented me with so many opportunities that rarely can someone get. My journey in EESTEC was focused on a lot of self-improvement, both personal and professional, which, in the end, led me to land my current job as a Web Designer and Developer! Enough about me, let’s dive into the topic of this article, and later on, you will hear something more! Every time when someone tries to predict the future of something, they imagine something sci-fi-like, don’t they? Say, you never imagined flying cars? Like that, in Web Design, we also have annual predictions for the upcoming trends for our near future, the next year. Sci-fi estimations were also the case in the past years when people tried to predict trends for web design, but the majority of predictions about web design trends turned out completely opposite for 2021! Shall we see? After extensive research at the end of the year, with some real-life practice in the first months of 2021, there is a noticeable pattern of web design trends that started to dominate and will continue to do so this year. Those are for sure seeking new heights of realism and minimalism! Blending the digital and the ordinary plays a crucial role in the process since we can even now reflect on how websites became a part of everyday life. I think there isn’t a person reading this that didn’t go on a website today - even when you read this you are, on a website!

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With that being said, I will present to you my personal favorite trends as of this year!

Parallax animation Firstly, parallax is the optical illusion that happens when objects near to the viewer appear to move faster than objects farther away. So in 2021, web animation is a crucial thing to please the eye and retain the attention of a visitor to your website. Even though we witness this in real life, the effect that parallax animation has on a web page comes across as both real and surreal. The accent this year is the created depth through the use of foreground and background to benefit the immersion, which is basically transforming your computer screen into a miniature and alive theater stage.

Scrolling transformation Throughout the years, scrolling through the website evolved from being a way of navigating to being a part of user interaction as well. With scrolling transformation, we get this very cool added effect to the web page that is a cross-over from real to surreal like the parallax. Basically, when the user performs a real-life interaction - flicking the finger on the mouse wheel to scroll, it causes a vibrant response on the screen in the form of the transformation, adding a new dimension in the user interaction, getting the users more interested in getting engaged into the content of the website. Scrolling transformation can vary from a range of color scheme changes to a complex animated transition of the whole layout of the web page.

Comfortable colors The last of my top pics, but certainly my favorite, is comfortable colors. Something that is not that interactive like the last two, but also very significant! Given the pandemic, spending a lot of time on the computer for various reasons increases our digital nature. It’s not unusual to experience eye strain after staring at a screen for a long period of time, so web designers have been taking this into account by making website color schemes easier for the eyes! Last year’s popularity of the dark mode is slowly fading with designers thinking outside of the two spectrums we are used to, the light and the dark. Finding middle ground soft color palettes is

EESTEC PUBLICATIONS getting more popular. I will just give a few hex examples of my favorite colors for these types of designs: #ffd3da, #88aed0, #c09567, and something darker like #0f3923! If you want to see these colors, just google the hex code! It gets me excited to talk about these things as I work every day on real-life projects with the trends I mentioned, especially with my favorite one! But to reflect on what I said in the first paragraph of this article - EESTEC played a significant role in my journey to my professional career; it was a place where I developed a lot of crucial skills I use in my job every day! I had my doubts over the years that things in EESTEC we learn may not be beneficial for the long haul, but was I wrong? Totally wrong! I just noticed that in my company, when I spent the first few months at the office, that my project management skills and communication skills were significantly better than some of the experienced developers in the company! Keeping my work organized, keeping track of my tasks and professional communication are just some of the skills I brought to my workplace solely from volunteering in EESTEC! In conclusion of our topic, 2021 is looking way less like a sci-fi movie and more like something we would encounter every day! It only proves how websites are an increasingly common part of our life and should be brought down to earth! And you, reader, take some time for EESTEC to be a common part of your life like these trends and take full advantage of the benefits it provides - now I can even say from personal experience: it is worth it!

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My EESTEC story by Nikola Mitrović My EESTEC story started back in 2014. and a local job fair called KONTEH. I was in my 3rd year of faculty at the time, and it was the perfect opportunity to start looking for the internship, so I was just scouting companies that were participating. I was familiar with KONTEH before, but not with the great, cheerful group of people in red shirts, which were standing next to the EESTEC stand. I’ve always wanted to know a little bit more about what’s going on behind the scenes and how the whole job fair is organized, so I came up to the stand. There was instant chemistry, enthusiasm, and energy of those people that matched mine. One of the key things that I’ve noticed was the great passion when those people were talking about EESTEC.

A few of my colleagues from faculty were also interested, so I saw EESTEC membership as a great way to hang out with my friends from faculty a little bit more, meet new people, share new experiences with them, and of course, improve both personally and professionally. Pretty quickly, I got fond of those people who became my friends and made me feel at home. Before EESTEC, I was so focused on hard skills and thought that people who know more programming stuff are progressing faster throughout their careers. Could I be more wrong? I didn’t even realize that skills like organization, time management, leadership could be game-changers from a professional standpoint. EESTEC also taught me a lot about teamwork, how motivation is such a huge factor and how a small group of people can lead by example and inspire a lot of other team members.

I didn’t realize how much you can grow yourself by growing others. EESTEC spirit is something that you carry wherever you go, so it really helped me fit into the culture of the company where I work today as a software developer. Some of the core values of EESTEC are a great fit for any organization, so I can not be thankful enough that EESTEC built those values to my core. EESTEC and

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KONTEH still help me grow even today. Recently I had a chance to combine my programming skills along with the EESTEC spirit that grew stronger over the years. I was part of the young team that implemented a brand new KONTEH CV Database Application, which is a web app that connects students with the leading companies in the industry and helps students to find their first internships and jobs. Experience from this project is immeasurable for me.

Not only that I’ve gathered a lot of technical knowledge that I use daily, but also I’ve leveled up my soft skills like organization, leadership, motivation. Those skills are quite important if you have the ambition to become Team Lead at some company, so they accelerated my career for sure. The young core of IT students is going to continue working on new features and maintenance of the KONTEH CV Database, so I hope that I’m going to keep them motivated, inspire them to make our product even better, and also to be the best versions of themselves. EESTEC gave me so much, and I was so glad that I can repay and thank EESTEC for believing in me, even when I didn’t believe in myself.