News
ACI Computing Seminar Series
February 10, 2023
Last Fall Dr. Rahat Rafiq launched the Computing Seminar Series through the Applied Computing Institute, and he has big dreams for its impact on our students, faculty, and community.
His first goal is for the series to be an opportunity for students to see real-world applications of what they’re learning in the classroom
“In academia, we teach all these concepts by having the students take quizzes and exams, and work on labs. Students study, and learn, and maybe they get good grades. That’s great but it’s very academic and abstract. What if someone from Facebook comes here to talk about what they’re doing right now in augmented reality? Some of our students may think, ‘Wow! This is what Professor Carrier talked about in CIS 378!’ Perhaps they didn’t really enjoy that concept previously, but once they see how it’s applied, they may be motivated to make sure they learn the subject thoroughly and even take more courses on the area of AI and ML.”
He also wants to open the seminars to guests from the community with the hope of creating opportunities for what he calls “serendipitous collisions.”
“I have a friend who worked at Samsung, in health where he did cutting-edge wearable-health research. Some of it was used in earbuds. They have smart earbuds that can track your breathing and determine breathings phases, breathing exercises’ efficiency, cough detections etc. When my friend comes here to talk about his research and innovations in healthcare, and machine learning, maybe someone from Corewell, or Trinity Health attends and realizes, ‘Hey, we can do this; or collaborate with this research! We had no idea these things were happening/can be done, but we can use this in our use-cases.’”
He also wants to continue to build relationships with and magnify smaller companies and places in industry that our students may never otherwise hear about.
“For example, I work with Array of Engineers, a small local company and they’re doing cool work using AI to automate software testing. I want them and other small companies, preferably based in West Michigan to come so the students can learn about what they’re doing, network, and make a connection for an internship, or permanent work. It’s a win-win: students get to learn about cool projects taking place locally and these industry people come in and get the visibility.”
There are a few local corporations that tend to provide internships for our students, but Dr. Rafiq wants to widen the net.
“Some of our students aren’t going to fit in clearly defined roles that larger companies require. We want to expose them to smaller companies that might be more innovative and agile, where they can wear a lot of hats, learn a ton, evolve fast, and maybe then get out and start their own companies.“
Additionally, he sees the seminar series as an opportunity for our faculty to make connections to fuel their own research.
“Maybe a faculty member is doing some research on cybersecurity, and we have a cybersecurity expert from industry come in and describe the work they’re doing, and our faculty member realizes they can help with it and they collaborate. They’ll probably hire a couple of students who will get real-world experience. It’s a win-win-win for everyone involved.”
Past speakers in the series have been the creator of technologies that underlie products like cloud, blockchain, etc., who spoke on The Visible Embryo Project; following the connections from chick embryos to Bitcoin, as well as a defensive cyber operations engineer who talked about the capabilities of artificial intelligence and machine learning across the spectrum of cyber operations.
The next speaker is Dr. Joshua Engelsma, a GVSU undergrad alumnus who earned his Ph.D. at MSU in pattern recognition and image processing under Dr. Anil Jain whose fingerprinting lab is the best in the U.S. and possibly the world.
“Josh recently joined a relatively small, Denver-based company called Rank One Computing. Using his research, they built a fingerprinting algorithm that recently crushed every other competitor in NIST’s Proprietary Fingerprint Template Test; 10,000 times faster than the nearest vendor. In several categories it performed number one and ROC is now the only viable provider of 100% America-developed fingerprint algorithms. They are building a second office here in Grand Rapids, and Josh has already hired one of our graduate students. Students interested in computer vision, encryption, machine learning, and software development should attend his seminar.”
Dr. Engelsma's seminar is Friday, February 24 from 2:30-5:00 pm in DCIH 445. The room is always open, so anyone can drop in at any time.