Driven by Data: Tech-Focused Coursework Lays the Foundation for Career Opportunity

TRANSCRIPT

Maggie Barclay (AI/M.A.S. AI 4th Year): One of the things that I find most thrilling is if you’re given a bunch of data, what can you do with it? You can transform that data. You can put it into a model to get some intuition out of that model.

I interned at IBM. My responsibility was processing a large amount of data into something understandable and creating a predictive model.

At Illinois Tech, learning the capabilities of what you can do with data has prepared me for the internship.

Artificial intelligence can be applied to so many things. Fake news detection—is this headline  truthful? Is it exaggerated? You can detect fake news not just by the content of the title but also by the rate of clicks that it gets, the type of people who interact with it.

Especially in social network analysis, which I’m learning about right now, models can predict   something that’ll happen in ways that you would never think about. This ethical part of artificial   intelligence—how do these models actually affect people? To what extent can we trust their output?

I really like a smaller school. In every class that I take, technology is at the forefront. I found it easy to connect with my peers over similar interests in artificial intelligence.

At Illinois Tech there’s a lot of professors that are willing to help you, willing to talk to you about research that you might want to get involved in.

After school I’m going to be starting full-time at IBM in New York as a data scientist.