Tell us a bit about yourself!

I was born in Canada, raised in Hong Kong by Chinese parents, and went to high school back in Canada. I am 20 this year and I am currently in between my 3rd and 4th year at Imperial College London where I am on the Joint Maths and Computing Masters degree.

Why did you choose to intern at Artificial?

I was looking for a Machine Learning and data science position for my industrial placement, having experienced software engineering the summer before. I was also looking to join a startup as I spent last summer in a large corporate environment.

A lot of listed data science positions were targeting applicants that were doing post-graduate studies, which lowered my initial confidence in getting the job. But, after I received my offer, I asked a previous intern about their experience and received positive reviews so I accepted.

How have you found it so far?

So far I have really enjoyed my experience at Artificial. Everyone in the office is very friendly and helpful. I've always got something to do, whether it be working on my assigned projects, or making meaningful contributions to data science discussions within my team.

Can you tell us a bit about your main project?

My main project for now is creating a platform for Monte-Carlo simulations and projections of the performance of different insurance pricing models on existing data.

What is your favourite part about working for Artificial so far?

I really enjoy getting to be a part of the process of a startup building a data team from scratch. Having the freedom to research different solutions for a problem, reading papers, and choosing your own technologies to implement them is a really enjoyable process. I have developed a much larger appreciation for ML research and its applications in industrial research.

What is something unexpected that you have learned while at the company?

The more research code that I look at and try to implement, the more I appreciate research that has been implemented with a software engineering mindset. Clean, reusable code is so important when you are trying out ten different ways to model the same problem.

What do you hope to do when your internship finishes?

I hope to learn more about the role of academic research in financial and insurance markets.