{"id":56393,"date":"2019-09-12T04:00:17","date_gmt":"2019-09-12T08:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/?p=56393"},"modified":"2019-09-10T11:28:46","modified_gmt":"2019-09-10T15:28:46","slug":"making-connections-engineering-student-interns-in-silicon-valley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/09_12_2019\/making-connections-engineering-student-interns-in-silicon-valley","title":{"rendered":"Making Connections: Engineering Student Interns in Silicon Valley"},"content":{"rendered":"

Naba Rizvi is one of nine students selected from more than 1,000 applicants to receive the Adobe Research Women-in-Technology Scholarship.<\/p>\n

In addition to that $10,000 award that honors women students who show great promise in the field of computer science, The University of Toledo junior landed an internship on Adobe Research\u2019s team in San Jose, Calif.<\/p>\n

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Naba Rizvi was an intern at Adobe Research in San Jose, Calif., this summer.<\/p><\/div>\u201cI worked on two projects,\u201d said Rizvi, who is majoring in information technology in the College of Engineering. \u201cThey both focused on natural language processing and human-computer interaction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her Adobe Research mentor was Dr. Franck Dernoncourt, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who specializes in natural language processing. <\/p>\n

\u201cMy first project involved research engineering. I used my experience as a web developer to develop a visualization for a sentence compressor and text summarizer,\u201d Rizvi said. \u201cFor the second project, I worked on making the output of latent Dirichlet allocation models for automatic document topic classification more human readable.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, Rizvi\u2019s research is focusing on topic modeling \u2014 training the computer to recognize topics in written text with an algorithm.<\/p>\n

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Naba Rizvi, left, posed for a photo with Lisa Wang, a student at Westmont High School in California. Rizvi mentored Wang during the Girls Who Code Camp run by Adobe Research.<\/p><\/div>\u201cI learned so much about natural language processing, particularly text summarization. I even submitted my first paper to a conference.\u201d<\/p>\n

That paper, \u201cMargin Call,\u201d which she wrote with Dernoncourt and Sebastian Gehrmann, a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, was accepted by the International Conference on Natural Language Generation. That conference will be held in Tokyo this fall.<\/p>\n

“My colleagues and myself were delighted to host Naba this summer at Adobe Research,\u201d Dernoncourt said. “Naba is a fast learner and highly motivated. She made a great impact on our research projects.”<\/p>\n

What was a typical day like?<\/p>\n

\u201cI read a lot of research papers, wrote code, tested the output, and turned to Stack Overflow, my co-workers or my mentor for help if I got stuck,\u201d Rizvi said. \u201cI met with my mentor every week to discuss my projects, progress toward my goals, and any roadblocks.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cWe are proud of Naba Rizvi and all that she continues to accomplish,\u201d Dr. Michael Toole, dean of the UToledo College of Engineering, said. \u201cHer success is well-earned and spotlights the strength of our Engineering Technology Department in the College of Engineering.\u201d<\/p>\n

The student in the Jesup Scott Honors College made the most of her time in Silicon Valley, home to many global technology and startup companies.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo receive such a competitive internship as a first-generation college student really motivates me to work harder and take advantage of all the opportunities available to me,\u201d Rizvi said. \u201cI embrace the growth mindset and believe it is the key to success.\u201d<\/p>\n

And she is familiar with success: Last year, Rizvi won the $10,000 Google Women Techmakers Scholarship, which included a scholar retreat with Google scholars from around the world on Google campuses, including the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif.<\/p>\n

She is taking her momentum and launching a nonprofit organization called Nontraditional Techies. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe already have 600-plus members and a job board,\u201d Rizvi said. \u201cI will be creating a mentoring program and an interview series featuring people who have overcome great obstacles on their path to a technical career to inspire others to pursue a career in technology.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Naba Rizvi, a junior in the College of Engineering, spent her summer in in San Jose, Calif., where she interned at Adobe Research.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":848,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,6,36,7],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56393"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/848"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56393"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56481,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56393\/revisions\/56481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}