Internship Series: Systems & Technology Research

Benjamin Lawson
CAS’17 | Computer Science
Video and Image Understanding Group Intern

CCD: Tell us about your experience. What were your responsibilities?

Benjamin: I was responsible for creating an app that utilized the face recognition capabilities that the group is developing. I adapted the current paradigm of a static database of images to a streaming real-time concept. Development depended on a solid understanding of object-oriented programming in Python.

CCD: How did you find the position?

Benjamin: BU computer science career connections; two members from the technical team at STR came to campus and spoke.

CCD: What was the best thing about the experience?

Benjamin: One of the best things about the experience was the opportunity to work in such a great environment. I sat with four other interns in my office, three of whom were in grad school. It was very eye-opening to see the interesting work that they we doing as well as the help they gave to me on my project.

CCD: How has this experience changed your future plans?

Benjamin: Before interning this summer, I was hesitant about going to graduate school. Now, I that I have industry experience, I really want to get the most out of my undergraduate experience as well as go to graduate school.

CCD: What are the benefits of the type of summer experience you did?

Benjamin: There are many different research groups at STR. I worked in the Video and Image Understanding group, but my current research at BU is more focused on social media data analytics. Each week at STR, the interns were provided with a seminar from each of the vice presidents, who each head a research group. Another intern and I were about to participate in another project that was social media data driven after talking to one of the vice presidents at these seminars. In addition to hearing about internal research, STR invites leading scholars to speak about their research, including leading researchers in the computer vision field, like Stan Sclaroff from BU and Octavia Camps from Northeastern University.