STEM Student Spotlight: Abhigyan Dabla, The University of British Columbia
Welcome to our STEM Student Spotlight series, where we highlight the incredible initiatives and achievements led by STEM students in Canada. Our mission is to empower and inspire the next generation of engineers and innovators by celebrating the achievements of student leaders. In today’s spotlight, we’re excited to showcase Abhigyan Dabla! Abhigyan is a student from the the University of British Columbia who participated in our Work-Integrated Learning opportunity.
In the program, he’s been diving into the world of AI and Machine Learning. This blog post takes a closer look at Abhigyan’s journey, uncovering the challenges that fueled his learning and propelled him toward exciting career opportunities.
In his first project, Abhigyan faced some hurdles, but he quickly picked up a bunch of effective tools. He broke down the basics of feedforward neural network models and explained how the directed and weighted nature of neural graphs allows small neurons to talk to each other, building a bigger model.
As Abhigyan got more comfortable with the material, he started creating his own functions.
“I created a function to preprocess regular image data into an acceptable format for our neural network model”
After tweaking his function, he gave the model a re-run and checked the results.
“[I] Re-trained and evaluated the results, concluding that the model did improve by seeing more familiar pictures but would need more training data to perform better with these kinds of images.”
Throughout the course, Abhigyan not only learned about AI and Machine Learning but also applied them to some real research. He dove deep into gradient descent, broke down the formula, and threw in practice problems to explain.
As the course wrapped up, Abhigyan had a couple more wins. He designed a function to predict a full sentence based on a prompt using an auto-suggestion model. And he showed how we can evaluate a bot using classification techniques, using its outputs as examples.
By leveraging the power of robust data processing and visualization tools, coupled with the magic of AI and machine learning, Abhigyan has harnessed the ability to make informed, data-driven decisions that spark innovation and bring about impactful change. Stay tuned for more inspiring stories in our STEM Student Spotlight series!
