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Individual Reflection

·406 words·2 mins

What I have learned!
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From Guest speakers
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5/20/2025
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Just in the 9 days on this program so far, I have met incredible speakers with diverse knowledge and fascinating experiences.

I have learnt and been most captivated by the speakers at the European Commission and at the NATO HQ. At the European commission, Nathalie Vandystadt spoke about how the European commission is reacting to the surge in AI technologies from both the U.S and China. I found it very interesting to ask questions on how Europe seeks to become a competitive headquarters for AI technologies and infrastructure, particularly what incoming proposals would tackle their shortage in talent. She spoke of scholarships such as “Marie Curie Scholarship” and the EU’s 10bn Euro investment package. Despite Nathalie delivering these policies in a very inspiring fashion, I still felt that the policies she spoke of alone would not be attractive enough to convince established scientists to give up their positions in the U.S. The defunding of research programs in the U.S is the perfect opportunity to poach talented researchers, I am not sure that I am convinced enough has been done.

I was also very interested to hear from Max Strotmann and his views on how the bureacratic burden the E.U imposes on it’s member states affects innovation.

He provided a fresh perspective that I had not considered before. He argued that the E.U did not struggle to attract companies and that it’s immense single market made them very attractive for large corporations. He argued that the biggest hurdle for innovation and entrepreneurship in the E.U was because financial markets are different for each nations. This makes it much more difficult to find funding in the E.U compared to the U.S.

Individual Contributions to the project
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  • Exploring project ideas.
    • suggested an idea exploring political sentiment in countries by scraping a variety of diverse news websites and classifying the articles based on the issue they talk about. This could then be used to estimate the most spoken about political issues.
  • brainstorming different user types and jointly coming up with one.
    • spoke to professors and thought of adding the ‘recent policy search’ feature to the second persona.
  • testing and verifying API calls are possible for our primary data set.
    • simply called and analysed necessary API calls.
  • testing webscraping is also an option.
    • scraped sites and looked over the html to ensure that the data we needed was scrapable.