Kiril Derkach, 14, has two passions: space, and information technology. He dreams of developing neural networks in Ukraine and wishes that specialists who have obtained degrees abroad would return to their homeland. Spending a part of his summer break at the children’s Eurocamp in Mezhyhirya, he thought a lot about how to reform the system of education in Ukraine.
“I love reading encyclopedias about space. I’m translating one of them from English.
It is exciting to find new information about some planet, where, for example, glass falls from the sky instead of rain.
I’ve realized how unique our galaxy is. Every planet is unique. I read that space is expanding and it will soon expand to the maximum, and will then start to compress. And it will continue for eternity like that. The Big Bang will happen an infinite number of times.
We had an astronomy lesson in the 8th grade, and the information we were told hadn’t been updated maybe for 10 years. And when I protested, the teacher first said that I was wrong. And then we went and looked and realized that the textbook contained outdated information and that the system needed to be changed. He started to buy new books himself and hand them out to the students.
The school textbook, for instance, did not have information about the heaviest star being discovered. It should have been updated.
I don’t like our education also because many children don’t know, for example, who discovered penicillin. I walk around in school and everybody’s talking about people like Leonardo DiCaprio. Why talk about them, when they are ordinary people who haven’t done anything useful? Why doesn’t anyone on TV talk about the outstanding personalities who really have done something for humankind?
I’d like to go abroad to get a better education, but come back home. This is a principle.
If nobody wants to live in Ukraine, there will be no Ukraine.
When I grow up and go to study, I will develop neural networks in Ukraine.
My mom traveled to Sweden and told me how they actively use neural networks there. Even refrigerators there can talk. You can walk in the street there and simply use your phone, for example, to instruct the refrigerator to turn off the freezing chamber for the meat to defrost by the time everybody gets home.
At first I was interested in traditional artificial intelligence, but then I realized that it’s already outdated technology. Traditional artificial intelligence is simply code written by a programmer, and it cannot think. Neural networks are networks of code that are modeled on the brain. These networks, like networks of neurons in our brains, can react to different inputs and respond to them. I believe that these technologies are our future.
I once had a toy robot. My uncle, who used to work for Google, helped me install a microchip into it that I could program. I wrote the code for this robot in Pascal and my uncle saw that I did everything correctly. The robot could walk and I could control his hands and the laser pointer.
Robots are actively entering our lives. They will be needed in space, because at times astronauts aren’t able to perform some complex tasks. It is very dangerous to go into space – 18 people have died. Robots should do all this dangerous work and there will be fewer fatalities.”
