RCC has sponsored two UQ undergraduate students to undertake research internships with the US National Centre for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign over the Australian summer break.
Aviral Kailash Jain and Edward Davis will spend eight weeks across January and February 2020 at NCSA working on data mining projects as part of RCC’s Queensland Undergraduate Research Projects Abroad (QURPA) program.
Aviral, who has recently completed the fourth year of his Bachelor of Engineering (Hons) in software engineering and his Bachelor of Mathematics, will work at NCSA on building a machine learning system to help with human activity recognition—specifically, to detect falls.
“This is important since during old age, falls can be dangerous and even life threatening,” said Aviral.
“Machine learning models have been built and I will be working on incorporating these models into an end-to-end system, meaning that it works with real-time video feeds and using it to detect falls in real time”
Edward, who will start his Honours next year in a Bachelor of Mathematics, majoring in statistics and computer science, will work on a NCSA project using deep learning to analyse gravitational wave data coming from America’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors.
“The gravitational waves that are measured can be used to infer details of some event, such as the collision of two black holes,” said Edward.
Both Edward and Aviral are excited about working with NCSA researchers on their projects.
“I'm looking forward to working on this fun topic, using NCSA's cutting-edge technology in quite a high-profile research area,” said Edward.
Aviral added: “I am very interested in the field of machine learning and the potential applications of it to the real world. Being given a chance to work on such a project is very useful to me since I am hoping to work in a similar field after I graduate.
“This opportunity gives me a chance to work as a researcher at the University of Illinois and further improve my skills in research. I also have the chance to meet students and staff and form connections.
“I also value travelling and meeting different people as a way of learning to be a global citizen and so getting a chance to travel to America is extremely valuable to me.”
