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CDRC Interns 2016

We welcomed the first cohort of CDRC Interns earlier this month, we met with them on their first day to find out all about them and will be providing regular updates on each of their internships as they progress.

Dr Ilan Fridman Rojas

Ilan

Education: University of Manchester (MPhys Physics), Durham University (PhD Theoretical Particle Physics)

How I became interested in data: Towards the end of my PhD I attended the Science 2 Data Science (S2DS) workshop and this piqued my interest in data analysis and machine learning algorithms.

What I hope to get out of the internship: More experience and expertise, and interesting new data sets to work with.

Where I hope to be in 3 years: Continuing to do research at increasingly higher levels into applying established data analysis methods to new data sets, or new methods to both old and new data sets, with an outcome which either improves the method or provides new insights from the data.

Rebecca Atkinson

Rebecca Atkinson

Education: I have just finished my 3rd year of a 4 year integrated masters studying maths and physics at Durham University.

How I became interested in data: Last year I did an internship in industry at a company that provides personal credit to the non-standard market. I became aware there that there is a growing interest within businesses in the masses of data that is produced about everyone and its power to help make business decisions and inform businesses of customer trends. I found this very interesting and did some reading about machine learning and its potential use in attempting to analyse the huge volumes of data produced in our information age.

What I hope to get of the internship: I hope to gain some experience and understanding of some machine learning techniques and their advantages and disadvantages when compared to more traditional methods of data analysis. I hope to gain experience working in an academic team and contributing to a research paper and I hope to discover whether this is the area I would like to do a PhD in.

Where I hope to be in three years: In three years’ time I hope to be doing a PhD potentially on a data related project.

 

Samuel Sheen

Sam Sheen

Education: I’ve just completed an Integrated Masters in Maths at the University of Leeds.

How I became interested in data:    I became interested in data through studying for my integrated masters degree in mathematics at the University of Leeds. I specialized in statistics modules and particularly enjoyed studying linear regression, generalized linear models, Time Series etc. I found the practical components to these modules really interesting and was able to apply the techniques studied in these modules  to real data sets.

What I hope to get out of this Internship: I hope to gain experience in working with Big Data, which is something I have been interested in for a while. I also hope to gain skills in machine learning and further develop my knowledge and understanding of statistics. These are all relevant skills which will help me with my PhD starting later this year.

Where I hope to be in three years time: In three years time I hope to be coming towards the end of my PhD project (titled Extracting knowledge from Longitudinal Data.) Following the PhD, I have not yet decided whether I would like to pursue a career in academia or in industry (e.g as a data scientist).

 

Dr Jen-Hsien (Lucas)

Lukas

Education: I have just completed a PhD in Marketing at Leeds University Business School

How I became interested in data: As a consumer behaviour researcher, I am highly interested in the behavioural data and am eager to learn the analytic skills to get consumer insights.

What I hope to get out of the internship: I am aiming to learn the basic analytic skills for Big Data during the internship as well as advanced data mining and screening skills for big data sets.

Where I hope to be in three years: I aim to be an experienced consumer behaviour researcher either in the academia or in the industry.

 

We currently have a number of internship opportunities available, find out more.