Keynoting at WOI awards, launching MoodSpace, and getting selected as a Rise global finalist
Vinaya Sharma | April Newsletter
Hey! If you’re new here, I’m Vinaya and welcome to Bits and Bytes! I’m a 17 y/o emerging technology enthusiast hoping to change the world! 🚀
In this monthly newsletter, I share bits and bytes of my learnings to help you grow from my key insights! 🌱 Stay tuned for bits of self-improvement techniques, and bytes of groundbreaking tech innovations.
Finally. After 2 months of being on the run giving presentations and talks April has let me build, iterate, and launch and it’s been so energizing. Check it out!👇
Women Of Influence Keynote 📣
The month started off with a bang as Pavi Dhiman and I got invited to share our journeys at the 2023 Top 25 Women of Influence+ Awards ceremony. I shared my experience getting into tech, implementing projects, working with companies, and of course failing and learning along the way.
Spending the day with such influential women left me inspired, excited, and in disbelief. Thank you once again Rumeet Billan, Ph.D. and the Women of Influence+ team for pulling off an incredible event and helping me build amazing relationships both during and after the event through your continued support.
You can check out my keynote here, and the Meet A Role Model feature they did on me here.
VoltVision.AI Updates 👀⚡️
Throughout early April I continued to make fast progress with VoltVision.AI; my attempt to solve the energy crisis through cheaper, faster and safer electric grid fault detection and maintenance.
I started by creating a full-stack solution to the broken fault detection procedure. The solution included:
Autonomous drones for power line inspection
Data being mapped onto a virtual grid
A mobile phone connection to send pictures to the platform from the ground
Automated emergency response messages sent to operators and customers
Breaking step 1 down further, I began by building ML models to detect transmission line faults.
After reading way too many research papers I narrowed down the model to either YOLO or Faster R-CNN. But YOLO being a single-shot object detection model reaped many benefits in terms of speed, and computational efficiency. Since drone-based real-time fault detection would be optimal I choose to go with YOLO. 🛸
The results were insulator faults being detected, along with the exact location of the faults. The model performed with great accuracy as seen by the large correlation along the diagonal of the confusion matrix. If you want to learn more about my journey and building the YOLOv8 model, check out my article.
These past couple of months working in energy I’ve gained a lot of traction, made a lot of progress and got a lot of recognition, but the sheer friction of having these projects actually implemented put me down.
I decided to take a break from getting the autonomous drone parts working and pivoted to a new project.
Building MoodSpace for buildspace 🎯🧘♀️
I mentioned in my last newsletter that I would be participating in buildspace’s Nights & Weekends; a 6-week program to build, ship, and iterate on your projects.
I came in thinking I would build out my autonomous drones but then decided I wanted to work on something direct to consumers. For a while now I had wanted to build something in the mental health and wellness space, I’ve found myself previously downloading and exploring various of those mental health apps but none ever seemed to stick. I ended up spending a lot of time seeing what is possible and what was already being done.
I realized a lot of the apps were just “helping you feel better” with affirmations, positive thoughts, and motivational quotes. Some helped you reflect on your day but you kind of just write a bunch and then leave it there - nothing happened. Although this might help some, I realized my mental health has a strong correlation with productivity. When I get a lot of work done - I’m happy, and if I waste time - I feel horrible at the end.
That’s when I realized improving wellness for me means:
first understanding myself - what gives me energy and what makes me burnt
identifying ways to accomplish my goals - breaking them down into smaller steps
holding myself accountable - really finding a way to make sure I’m following through with my plan
After deciding on these key features I realized this became more of a productivity than a mental health application, and since I typically do my work on my laptop, after speaking with a couple of people I decided to go with making this a Chrome extension rather than an app or website so that it is easily accessible while you are completing tasks.
I then got to work. This was my first time building a Chrome extension but after a couple of tutorials, I figured it out and built the V1 of MoodSpace, simply featuring a mood journal, a place to write and track to-dos, a place to reflect, and a section to really analyze and discover patterns about yourself. Since this is sensitive data I was originally saving the data to local storage on your web browser so no one else would have access to it.
Following buildspaces deliverables I posted my V1 launch alongside other project updates on Twitter. The buildspace community was insane and I began getting a lot of traction, people were interested in what I was building, many were downloading it and I got loads of feature requests and advice.
From there I continued building out the next features:
accountability groups so that you could share to-dos and journals with friends and family to further hold yourself accountable.
transferring the data from local browser storage to a cloud database so that data can be shared in accountability groups
encrypting all data in a secure manner, to make sure no one can access a user’s sensitive data
ability to export your data, and small UI updates
Again I posted my updates, this time on Twitter but also on Youtube and TikTok to increase reach and get more users onto the extension.
With a lot of people now using MoodSpace things got really exciting, but it also led to me having to keep momentum strong to quickly develop the last remaining main features. The last main feature I got sorted out was the AI coach that would provide personalized advice and support. I decided to build the AI chatbot with a focus on SMART goal setting, and CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) based chats.
What I want to build next:
The next steps include a complete automation of goals set in the chat to be reflected in your daily to-dos and making better use of a user’s daily to-dos, moods and reflections to check in on them and hold them accountable. You can check out my MoodSpace overview video here to learn more, and my builspace week 4 update to see where I am at now!
If you want to check out MoodSpace or know someone that can benefit from it feel free to share it around. You can find it at MoodSpace on the Chrome web store and as always I’m open to any feature requests and advice!
now time for some other fun stuff that happened this month
Winning the Ingenious+ Regional Award for Triage.AI 🤖🚨
In February I submitted one of my earlier projects Triage.AI to the Ingenious+ Regional Competition. This month results came out and I got selected as one of 57 Regional winners across Canada.
Getting selected as a Rise Global Finalist 🌍
Rise is a program that finds promising young people and provides opportunities for life as they work to serve others. Each application year, Rise invites 15-17 year olds from around the world to participate in the Rise Challenge.
Applicants introduce themselves through videos, create an individual project that demonstrates their talents and benefits their communities among other activities. Rise selects up to 500 Finalists to advance to “Finalist Days,” where they demonstrate their motivations, problem-solving abilities, and teamwork skills in a 3 part interview. From the Finalists, Rise selects up to 100 Global Winners.
My Rise project was also Triage.AI and I have to say its thanks to the Rise project structure that I was able to gain such a clear understanding of the design process going from problem → brainstorming → designing → building as I speak about in my Triage.AI article.
Working on my Rise project these past couple of months had been an emotional rollercoaster of success and failure. Constantly iterating, and constantly getting feedback. After this long journey, it feels good to be recognized.
Some life updates and closing thoughts
This month has been a perfect balance of building, shipping, speaking, and relaxing, and I hope to keep the momentum strong going into May.
My plans for the next couple of weeks include iterating on and getting users for MoodSpace, prepping for Rise Finalist Day, and focusing on school a little more as tests start piling up. 😅
In terms of some more exciting news, I’ll be speaking at C2 Montreal at the end of May so if there’s anyone I should meet while down in Montreal reach out! I also got accepted into RBC Summer Tech Labs so I can’t wait to build more projects to tackle real-world challenges faced by RBC this summer.
Good job on building MoodSpace!
Well done 👏