As the Summer of 2017 comes to a seemingly abrupt halt, my time at AndPlus is over... for now at least! For the past three months I have been an Intern working on machine learning, computer vision and artificial intelligence research. Throughout this experience I’ve had the chance to work on various machine learning projects with a number of full time employees here at AndPlus.
My initiation to the Innovation Labs team was an exciting step in my career. I was given any resources and tools needed to conduct research, create software and even tinker with half-baked ideas that may never come to fruition. The experience I’ve had here at AndPlus has improved my technical skills in many areas from front end app design to complex machine learning techniques. Working with and learning from the experienced engineers here has given me insight into the software development and production process, which is invaluable for a computer science student. However, with more reflection on my experience, I can appreciate the amount of personal development that my time here has led to over the past few months.
The culmination of my time at AndPlus was to contribute in the company's very first published academic paper. A grueling research and development process was capped off by finally getting my name on a real-life peer reviewed paper. I can't even begin to explain the excitement our team had when we finally pressed 'send' on the final draft. The Paper, titled "Tensor-Based Backpropagation in Neural Networks with Non-Sequential Input" was achieved due to AndPlus' dedication to providing the Innovation team with any resources necessary to create new software.
Any opportunity to get real world experience forces a university student to learn and grow in a unique environment. Without the structure and rigidity of academia, with budgets and deadlines to consider, the real world of software development vastly differs from how it is portrayed to us in school. Being at AndPlus accentuates the internship experience due to a few unique factors. The warmth and openness of the company meant that on my first day I felt comfortable approaching anybody for help, advice, or just for a friendly conversation. This environment not only made it easier to jump into the work, but also made me feel free creatively. I was immediately given huge responsibilities in projects and the opportunity to shape and develop them. I immediately had an invigorating feeling of ownership over the work I was doing. When I thought projects were going in the wrong direction my opinions would be heard, discussed, and often used to help redirect the objectives. Not only did I learn a lot, but I was happy that any unique experiences that I brought were used to help improve the projects.
There are few places where an intern can be given the freedom, resources and responsibility that I had this summer. I look forward to watching the future development of the projects that I was working on and I hope to return in the future!
