When I read the job posting of this position at first, I thought this is more like a UX/UI track position even though I’m perfectly qualified (I’m actually in the data track). But after my first online meeting with my supervisor, I knew this internship was a perfect job to my further career in data science, to be more specific, machine learning. This internship is a perfect opportunity for me to develop this area and practice my coding, communication, and writing skills at the same time.

Our team is working on something really meaningful. Due to the COVID-19, a lot of industries are suffering and making changes, the academic field is experiencing the same. Publication is no longer time-consuming and has strict and high standards in order to quickly spread knowledge and information. But what comes along is poor quality of papers/articles and huge amounts of information, which means lots of researchers have to waste time filtering information and distinguishing right and wrong. There are some other issues, as well. In general, what we are trying to do is figure out and help COVID-19 researchers to collaboratively research and communicate their study design, ideas, analysis, results and concerns with each other. And my job is to improve the performance and utility of a shared-knowledge platform used by researchers through NLP and machine learning methods. I’m glad to contribute to the researcher community while learning new techniques.