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2019 Summer Undergraduate Research Program Student of the Week

 

Name: Rylan Boothman

Hometown: Victoria, B.C.

Program: Going into 4^th year Computer Science at the University of Victoria

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You’re studying Computer Science – so what was it that first piqued your interest about the SURP program?

The co-op office at UVic sent out an email about the SURP program, and I saw a project related to machine learning that I thought was interesting, so I applied.

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How did you first become interested in machine learning?

I guess I wanted to help scientists and researchers better understand their data – that would be the main thing. I think that it has a lot of interesting applications. On a basic level, it’s also just interesting in itself that you can feed a bunch of images of cats and dogs to a computer and then it can tell you which ones are cats and which ones are dogs.

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Can you tell us about your research project?

I’m building and writing a program that will hopefully be able to detect Fast Radio Bursts in real time, using machine learning. A Fast Radio Burst is a high intensity radio signal, likely from beyond the galaxy, and we don’t know what causes them.

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Can you explain what you do on a day-to-day basis?

I sit at a computer and write code all day, for the most part. I have a model that I put data through, and that kind of works, so usually I’m making small changes to that, and then testing it to see how well those changes worked, and then updating based on that.

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Tell us about your future plans.

The plan at the moment is to go to grad school for something related to artificial intelligence – probably a Master’s, to start.

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