Ayomide A.

Have you ever struggled to start a conversation with your professor? Or wondered how to introduce yourself to an industry professional without it feeling awkward? That’s exactly why Data Science Student Society at UC San Diego started the NEW podcast initiative. The goal is simple: make networking less intimidating for students by bringing real, honest conversations with professors, alumni, and industry leaders directly to you. By hearing how they think, what they value, and what advice they give, it becomes much easier to start meaningful conversations yourself. Our first episode features CSE Professor Julian McAuley, a leading expert in Recommender Systems. In this conversation, we go beyond the LLM hype to discuss AI research, career advice, and what students should actually focus on. If you're interested in ML, recommender systems, or academia, I highly encourage you to give it a watch. This initiative is also a powerful (and zero-cost) way for professors, alumni, and industry professionals to give back. Through a recorded format, their advice and insights become accessible to students anytime, anywhere, long after the conversation ends. If you're a professor, alum, or industry professional interested in joining us on the podcast, we’d love to connect. Let’s make networking more human and more accessible. Thank you Tanvi Vidyala for leading this project!

23

2 Comments

🚀 🚀 How I helped build a rocket as a software engineer 🚀 🚀 Full Article: https://lnkd.in/gFavf3eY Last year, Shawn Wei Chew and I had the amazing opportunity to serve as software leads for our school’s rocket team, Rocket Project at UCLA. We wrote code for a hybrid propellant rocket that reached an apogee of 19,200 ft, making it the most successful flight in our team’s history. Coming from a traditional SWE background, we didn’t know what to expect, and from our first outing messing with microcontrollers, multi-threading & communication protocols - we’ve learnt tons along the way So we wrote this article hoping that it would be helpful for prospective club applicants, future batches, or at the very least, interesting to the average reader. Enjoy! Acknowledgements - this article (and rocket) would not have been possible without: • The larger Rocket Project organization, who helped build every single other part of the rocket from scratch that was not code — to me, software is tremendously easier than engineering so I don’t know how they do it LOL • Shawn, my fellow co-software lead and one of my best friends, who helped review and proofread this article. • Angela & Yifan, our amazing electronic leads who helped read this article and put out countless of fires when Shawn and I couldn’t • Our two other software leads who helped build this software system with Shawn and I • My wonderful friends who I roped in to build the web app with us • The electronics team, who were all extremely fun to be around and helped us figure out the hardware side of things so I could just write code

63

11 Comments

This weekend Aarav Ghai and I and I built a "self-learning" voice assistant for the Santa Clara University's 24h Hack4Humanity. I have never appreciated Amazon Alexa more. The concept of our project was pretty simple looking back: 1. Embed function descriptions that are linked to a Python script 2. Embed the prompt, semantic search the closest function and run the Python script 3. If there isn't a function in the database close enough, generate one with an LLM 12 hours in, I managed to get the semantic search working. I was ecstatic. I thought I managed to create a local semantic function caller with just ~150ms of latency. These industry giants got nothing on me. That's when the false positives started coming in. If you embed "Turn off the kettle and the heating element" and "Turn on the kettle", then query "Boil some water". "Boil" and "heating" are semantically close, causing the query to trigger the former function. The python script generated was low quality too, as it didn't have context to the dependencies or the linked devices. And we didn't even train a wake word(think "Hey Alexa" or "Hey Siri") yet. I then realized just how deep the rabbit hole goes. We still demoed our MVP, and I'm incredibly proud of the project we managed to put together in just 24 hours. However, I also realize the hubris of thinking I can compete with fine-tuned industry products with just a week of prep and a day of implementation. I'm really grateful for this learning experience, and can't wait to participate in another hackathon in the near future. Bonus shout out to Atay Moya, who although got sick before the hack-a-thon but still came through and helped us figure out how to link ChromaDB to Electron.

18

Everyone is hyped about AI. Companies are hyped about AI. Many people are thinking, “Why do we need juniors if AI can do the work?” But the real fact everyone is ignoring is this: Who will become the next generation of senior developers if we don’t have junior developers today? The impact of AI might not look harmful right now, but in the long run, we may not have enough strong senior developers, because many companies are not focusing on the importance of hiring and growing junior developers today. The biggest damage AI has already done is this: it has broken the junior-to-senior developer pipeline.

6

Based on the provided articles, here are 3 promising AI startups with recent funding news: 1. Flint - Raised $5 million in seed funding (October 14, 2025) - Led by Accel with participation from Sheryl Sandberg's fund and Neo - Building an AI platform that autonomously builds and updates websites - Source: https://lnkd.in/dYMYVyWu 2. Leonardo.ai - Acquired by Canva (announced July 29, 2024) - Had previously raised over $38.8 million from investors including Smash Capital, Blackbird, Side Stage Ventures and others - Specializes in generative AI content creation with over 19 million registered users - Source: https://lnkd.in/d3J5DAMA 3. Coco Robotics - While specific funding isn't mentioned, the company announced launching a new physical AI research lab (October 14, 2025) - Partnering with OpenAI and led by UCLA professor Bolei Zhou - Focuses on autonomous last-mile delivery robots - Source: https://lnkd.in/dUbYZDCf

3

If you're a Senior Engineer looking to move up, the next role will likely be a Staff Engineer. And in this guide, Shruti shares tips from her own experience of getting promoted to Staff Engineer at PayPal and Slack. She talks about what Staff Engineers do (and how it's different from Seniors), why you might not be getting promoted, and how to take that next step. https://lnkd.in/g58dnFEG

103

3 Comments