UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN River Falls
Internships
Brady Lange-Featured Intern 2019
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Majors: Computer Science, Data Science and Predictive Analytics |
“We [Travelers] are an insurance company that cares. Travelers takes on the risk and provides the coverage you need to protect the things that are important to you — your home, your car, your valuables and your business — so you don’t have to worry. We have been around for more than 160 years and have earned a reputation as one of the best property casualty insurers in the industry because we take care of our customers. Our expertise and focus on innovation have made us a leader in personal, business and specialty insurance and the only property casualty company in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Every day, our approximately 30,000 employees and 13,500 independent agents and brokers in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Brazil help provide peace of mind to our customers.” – travelers.com
As an Artificial Intelligence Technology Intern, I was responsible for preprocessing data and training models. I learned many different Machine Learning algorithms and processes such as: Autoencoding, K-Means, t-SNE, Neural Networks, Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, and K-Nearest Neighbors. I successfully trained an Autoencoder for data dimensionality reduction and fitted the latent layer to a K-Means clustering model. This allowed me to build a recommendation engine that would suggest data that was similar to the input given based upon Euclidean Distance and Cosine Similarity (these algorithms measure how close each data point is to a clusters centroid or center).
I learned a lot during this internship, such as to ask questions all the time and to take calculated risks. My project was experimental and I had no idea if Machine Learning would work for my analysis of it and it turned out to yield some promising results.
This internship has heightened my interest in roles utilizing Artificial Intelligence even more!
My advice to others is to put the hours in the library, it will pay off one day. Ask questions and never stop learning! Fail fast, and don’t have a static mindset.
