We have interns working with us each summer at Adarga, but what’s it really like to go from University to working at an AI company?
During my time as a Computer Science student at Bristol University, I’d spent a fair amount of time programming and studying machine learning, and Adarga’s focus on weaving state-of-the-art research into practical applications appealed to me. So, in the summer of 2018, I spent three months as an intern at Adarga’s Bristol office.
It was clear to me from the beginning that this was an opportunity to develop the skills that I wanted to learn and the Adarga team gave me an enormous amount of freedom to choose what I worked on.
I settled on investigating modern approaches to robust optical character recognition (OCR) using deep learning. The growth of deep learning within machine learning has revolutionised the field of computer vision with tasks that were intractable several years ago becoming trivial.
The 15-strong development team encouraged me to work independently but there was support when needed. I was encouraged to research and learn to the point I was comfortable, and I spent the first few weeks of my internship becoming acquainted with deep learning and optical character recognition.
A surprise to me throughout my internship was the robustness to which industry standard software needed to comply. Testing was something that had been mentioned in my course, but not covered in any serious depth.
After getting several OCR models running, I was tasked with building tooling and frameworks to make the machine learning useful in an industrial setting. This involved learning to use Docker, Kubernetes and React: all modern development tools which are ubiquitous in a workplace setting but something that I had barely touched on in my degree. Whilst on the face of it not quite as exciting as some machine learning, this work proved to be an invaluable experience during my final year projects at university.
The staff of Adarga were excellent at making me feel like a full member of the team and I learnt an incredible amount about the difficulty and practice of taking research and making it usable.
Working in an office was vastly different to everything I had experienced, but the level of professionalism and focus from everyone around me encouraged me to focus and achieve. I felt like a valued and trusted member of staff and I look forward to working alongside the Adarga team in the future.
