Recent content in Hi There on Theo Christiaanse, PhD
The reminders app is all you need to track your workouts. Spending money on fitness apps is a waste and it can be overwhelming. Plus it adds friction to getting started - why not use what you already have on your phone? 
 The epiphany I had was to see reminders as exercises. A to-do reminder is an exercise which needs to be completed. A completed reminder is a completed exercise. The next step…

 The following text is an open-ended discussion on interoperable and integrated models of housing delivery. I discuss the use of digital technologies, and barriers faced by industry to improve quality while increasing productivity. 
 
 The meaning of interoperable is that various parties can work together and transition information, materials, and project states to one another without…
Imagine going to the kitchen, opening the fridge and taking what’s there to make a three-course dinner meal. Many would struggle, outcomes would be poor, and you would be misrable during the process. 
 Now, imagine you plan ahead. You find recipes online, make a shopping list, buy all the ingredients, and organize them in the fridge. You pre-chop some ingredients, plan the timing of each dish,…
Going through the literature and exploring the world of BIM. I keep running into various uses of the BIM acronym. My sense is that its makes learning about BIM and understanding what BIM is so much harder. My goal with this article is to inform: provide context on the use of the BIM acronym and, resolve some issues for some. A second goal with this article is also to get feedback what other…
I was asked, “How do we communicate projects that contain lots of technical terms and language?” 
 The use of technical language is useful when communicating with experts. There is a certain efficiency when we use this language as each word captures lots of background knowledge, and you can communicate with the speed of a hammer gun, instead of a hammer and nail. It’s much…
Functional programming is a programming paradym that works by reducing the program to set of functions that ideally only have inputs and outputs and don’t have any internal state that changes the outcomes. 
 The simplist function would look something like this: 
 def add ( a , b ): 
 	 return a + b 
 How on earth would you be able to create complex programs using…
Run these commands step by step in the terminal. 
 1. Brew install LLM 
 brew install llm
 2. Install llm-gpt4all 
 llm install llm-gpt4all
 3. List the models 
 llm models list
 You should see an output like this: 
 OpenAI Chat: gpt-3.5-turbo (aliases: 3.5, chatgpt)
OpenAI Chat: gpt-3.5-turbo-16k (aliases: chatgpt-16k, 3.5-16k)
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4 (aliases:…
After a recent interview while hunting for jobs, an interesting topic came up, which was the difference between project and product managers. We spent a bit of time going around on the topic and I wanted to write down my thoughts here as well. 
 The project manager understands everything in terms of process and boundary conditions – meaning the goals and resources of the project. They…
A.I. can help humans. 
 In my search to see where AI can improve our lives, I came across the “A.I. for social good” movement. It seeks to apply A.I. techniques to the benefit of 17 of the UN’s sustainable development goals. 
 During my research, I came across some great resources: 
 
 Nature paper on Social Good here . 
 Google’s list of social good projects that involve…
Learnings 
 Links 
 
 Anna Montoya, DataCanary. (2016). House Prices - Advanced Regression Techniques. Kaggle. https://kaggle.com/competitions/house-prices-advanced-regression-technique 
 
 Intro 
 The problem at hand is to predict the home prices for various homes. In the current housing market of fall 2023, we are witnessing a significant decline in home prices. It seems…
Run these commands step by step in the terminal. 
 1. Get XCODE 
 xcode-select --install
 2. Install homebrew 
 /bin/bash -c '$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)'
 3. Install Python 
 brew install python
 4. Setup the Virtual Environment 
 python3 -m venv ~/venv-metal
source ~/venv-metal/bin/activate
python -m pip…
Learnings: 
 
 Setting a learning goal 
 Writing a preprocessor (binary and linear) 
 Checking what an upper limit of accuracy should be 
 Checking what a simple model is in terms of accuracy 
 
 links: 
 
 Setting up TensorFlow on M1 
 Github files: https://github.com/TheoChristiaanse/Titanic/blob/main/new_version.ipynb (it’s a mess!) 
 Will…
Here is a list of various Machine Learning Projects that I worked on to solidify my learnings. 
 
 Predicting Home Prices 
 Predicting Titanic Survivors 

For the past couple of days, I’ve been thinking about pathways-to-net-zero and the role of public data. A deceptively simple question: 
 
 “can public data inform pathways to net zero?” 
 
 So, does the data published enable the creation of a clear pathway-to-net-zero? And, are there reliable timely metrics to adjust those plans as actions are taken? 
 Is there a…
The idea of being hyper-productive every day might seem like a good thing, but it can actually lead to “negative work”. 
 
 Negative work is when you think you are doing great work, but actually, it’s setting you back because you lack the clarity of mind to realize that the work you are doing will not get you closer to your goals. 
 
 Often in the past, I would…
Today, I will be returning to the topic of active learning. In my last post on active learning I discussed some techniques and technological solutions to incorporate active learning in the classroom. I didn’t write about how to structure active learning, an order of operations as it were. I was inspired to write about this after seeing a video from Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings website by…

 At the end of this blog post I will give you a time table that – if you keep to it – you most certainly will pass any course, and have a high chance of acing any course in the science and engineering fields. It will work best with courses that use the lecture-assignment-exam form. 
 
 
 Acknowledgement; I’d like to acknowledge the youtuber Ali Abdaal 
 
…
In a recent study some early impacts on COVID-19 have been revealed. This works key findings related to impacts and concerns reflects many aspects that I have personally experienced in the last couple of months. However, in this blog post I would like to highlight some of the key recommendations that were made by the study. Furthermore, please review my previous blog post on various resources we…
2021 (4) 
 T.V. Christiaanse, R.C.G.M. Loonen, and R. Evins (2021) Techno-economic optimization for grid-friendly rooftop PV systems – A case study of commercial buildings in British Columbia. Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments, 47, 101320, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.seta.2021.101320 
 P. Westermann, T. V. Christiaanse, W. Beckett, P. Kovacs, and R. Evins (2021). besos:…
First, I would like to preface this piece by saying that most of our work is related to simulation and data science. This allows us to work mostly from computers, which makes us particularly suited for remote work. If your work is mostly experimental, some of these tips might not work, however it is worth thinking about the long term. Moreover, experimental work needs design of experiments,…
In past month I had the opportunity to go to two workshops at the learning and teaching center UVic on the teaching dossier - also called a teaching portfolio. The first was on the teaching narrative statement and the second was on the attachments - or data and evidence - that support the teaching narrative statement. 
 The teaching narrative statement is a description of what makes the writer…
We have obtained a teaching grant to build and test new teaching materials for a second year civil engineering physics class. In the class, students learn deterministic and well understood physics based laws that are fundamental to doing energy and thermal comfort analysis for buildings. The class is taught using traditional means such as lectures and assignments, with a three tests and a final…
During a workshop facilitated by Marty Wall, we learned about the art and craft of lecturing. The workshop was centered around enhancing student learning through lecturing. The students spend most of their time learning outside of the lectures given. Therefore, the lectures should be seen as a tool to enhance their learning outside of the classroom. 
 The craft of lecturing consists of…
Intended Learning Outcomes (ILO) should be at the heart of each course. They describe exactly what the student will be able to do after taking the course. Doing is implied by an active verb. Bloom’s taxonomy of verbs provides us with a list of verbs that are sorted by cognitive domain. Below is a table with several examples of verbs. Creating is the highest cognitive domain, while…
As part of increasing my teaching competencies I will do several workshops. The first workshop I attended was on Active learning. Active learning is about activating the student to learn. The basics involve creating the exercise in such a way the students will have to be active. The activity might involve limiting the amount of time or limit the amount of resources. Part of the process is to allow…