A message from an ex-student

The email

Hey Joel, not sure if you remember me but I was one of your Software Design and Development students in 201* and 201*.

After graduating I went on to study Software Engineering at UTS. I am coming close to completing my degree and I just feel like I needed to reach out to you to say thank you. I truly believe that if it wasn't for your enthusiasm and patience, I would not have aspired to achieve the milestones that I have today.

For my major project in year 12 I developed a pretty basic chatbot but for me back then it was the most mind blowing thing I had done. Next semester I will be writing my thesis on a prototype proactive chatbot that I will be designing and developing to help drivers diagnose problems with their own vehicles.

I have also taken a keen interest in machine learning and AI. I have just developed a lane detection warning system for rural roads with no line markings using a semantic segmentation CNN model that I trained. Now I am curious to explore implementations of CNNs for Natural Language Processing and how this can be applied to chatbot technology.

I am very excited for the future and even more grateful for your teachings that set me off on this journey. You had an amazing impact on my life and cannot thank you enough!

The cover image

Created by Dall-E 2 with the prompt a happy computer teacher reading an email on a laptop, in pixel art style.