Fellowship Spotlight: Leo Horwitz
The following was written by Leo Horwitz as a part of the 2022 TechShift Summer Fellowship program.
Nearly 40% of total energy consumption in the United States can be traced back to buildings, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (“Frequently Asked Questions (Faqs)”). To lower that number, engineers across the industry are hard at work designing more efficient and sustainable buildings and dreaming up systems to capture emissions from current buildings. Even with all of that knowledge and dedication, there is only so much they can do by hand. That is why we must harness the power of computational intelligence to be part of the solution that drives down global emissions.
As a TechShift fellow this summer, I helped lay the groundwork for an app that does just that. At my partner organization, Setty & Associates, I worked on the team developing Syyclops. The Syyclops app aims to harness the knowledge of industry-leading engineers, combine it with the power of always-on computing and artificial intelligence, and dramatically drive down excess energy usage–all without anyone noticing.
Take a school building, for example. Many modern educational facilities utilize basic energy-saving tools like motion-activated lights and low-flow toilets, which are a great start in chipping away at the larger problem of resource waste. Our goal, however, is to bring in a centralized system that can intelligently detect anomalies in buildings. If a room is suddenly increasing in temperature while its air conditioning unit is running at full power, for example, the system should be able to deduce where the fault is, and, eventually, repair it.
On the left, a high school cafeteria. On the right, the same cafeteria, as seen in the Syyclops Digital Twin platform. Source: Syyclops.
To me, this is the perfect application of artificial intelligence. Technologies like neural networks, unsupervised learning, and computer vision can find answers to problems that humans may never find. I believe that using A.I. to tackle climate change, the biggest global crisis of my life thus far, will be the key to slowing and, eventually, reversing the root cause of climate change: carbon emissions.
Over the summer, my main contributions were in displaying data collected by different systems throughout the app. We had everything from work orders, to temperature graphs, to classroom numbers. My goal: give facilities managers access to the information they need and package it all in an efficient and pleasing design. For you fellow software engineers out there, I utilized tools like downsampling in graphs, loading & error messages, and optimistic updates to make everything feel faster. On the back end, I studied a bit of graph theory to optimize requests made to our graph-based database. Towards the end of my internship, I focused on building a massive data model for every type of data we have. Eventually this will serve as the basis for training an A.I. model!
A snapshot of Syyclops’ anomalies detection widget. Source: Syyclops.
Going into my internship, I knew that I wanted to make a career out of leveraging artificial intelligence for social good. Never did I imagine, however, that this fellowship would allow me to see myself working at companies outside of “big tech.”
I am so grateful to the TechShift Alliance, my co-fellows, and the guest speakers at events throughout the fellowship for opening my eyes to a new sector of the tech world. Over the course of the summer, I learned that nonprofits and small businesses often cultivate a strong sense of comradery and motivation. Elsa Perakis, one of our fellowship’s guest speakers, shared her experience moving from a big tech company to Schmidt Futures, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing more folks into what she called the “impact” space. My understanding of what she shared was that employees and volunteers at non-profit organizations tend to find extra motivation in the fact that they are working for a social-good cause. This is obviously not the case across the board, but it was eye-opening to hear her insights. This excites me because I would imagine that this motivation is easier to share on smaller teams. Even if this type of motivation did exist at a larger company, it may have a tough time trickling down to everyone. Her description of her experiences at Schmidt Futures, along with my hands-on experience at Syyclops (also a very small company) over the summer, has made me more comfortable with the idea of working at a smaller company in the future.
I also learned that smaller organizations provide unique growth opportunities for everyone from summer interns to lead engineers. In fact, our fellowship was a perfect microcosm to prove it. Every two weeks, us fellows would dedicate time for meetings where we could bounce ideas off of each other, ask for feedback, and discuss any challenges we were facing. During this time, I really appreciated how easygoing and free-flowing our conversation was. We were all working on projects that were vastly different from one another, and yet, because we were all motivated by our visions for how beneficial technology could be to our society, we understood each other’s questions and brought unique viewpoints to each discussion. I asked about everything from UX design decisions to questions on preventing bias in data sets when training A.I., and my cohort was always happy to offer their insights. The variety that existed in fellows’ projects combined with the small size of our cohort group made the environment conducive to this kind of friendly back and forth, and I am willing to bet the same applies to nonprofits and smaller, mission-driven businesses.
My work at Setty also highlighted the value of working with small organizations. The small size of the development team for Syyclops meant that I was working directly on the app’s code, and my contributions were published for the world to see in a manner of days, hours, or even minutes. The fast-paced environment forced me to keep up–in a good way. Supported by my extremely-accessible supervisors and mentors, I learned programming languages and familiarized myself with frameworks at speeds that were previously unimaginable.
Most importantly, I learned that I want to work in this sector of the industry. As I reached the end of the summer, I realized that I will be able to use my skills to make a strong and positive impact on our society in a different, and possibly even more efficient, way at a smaller organization than in a larger one.
I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to everyone who was a part of making this summer so enriching for me. Thank you to the fellowship’s director Michelle Jakab and to the TechShift Board of Directors for establishing this fellowship and bringing us all together over the past few months. To my fellow cohort members, thank you for taking the time to support me and each other through these months, and I wish you the best in your continued studies and beginnings of careers! Finally, a huge thanks to Anthony Demattos and Raj Setty at Setty & Associates for giving me the opportunity to work on the Syyclops team this summer.
References
“Frequently Asked Questions (Faqs).” U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), 12 May 2022, https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=86&t=1