By Christian Stafford

Several Northeastern students had the recent honor of attending the Google Machine Learning Crash Course at Google’s Cambridge office.

“The crash course was a two-day interactive exploration into the uses of machine learning and the tools used by Google engineers (many of which are available to other engineers, too.) Machine learning, at a high level, is enabling a computer to make inferences about new data based on past data,” Matthew Singer said.

Singer, who is on track to graduate this year with a BS/MS combined major for Computer Science and Mathematics. Singer has a record of software development experience, holding software developer co-op positions at Placester, InsightSquared and HubSpot, and he has been offered a full time position from his 3^rd co-op employer, HubSpot.

Students at the crash course wrote models to predict information about the real estate market, as example, based on given sample data. Throughout the weekend, students applied increasingly sophisticated methods to improve the accuracy of their predictions, according to Singer.

Having a prior interest in machine learning and robotics, Nicholas Jones, who is studying computer science with a focus on cyber operations, said the crash course was a great way of showing students the development side of how code is actually written. Jones, who is set to graduate this year also commented on the growth Northeastern has made as a nationally-recognized university in regards to the Crash Course being offered to students.

Also in attendance at the Crash Course was fifth-year computer science major and mathematics minor, Kaila Corrington, who noted that before coming to Northeastern she had barely written a line of code, and she is now preparing to dive straight into the industry as a software engineer upon graduation.

“For two days, we studied the basic mathematical and programming concepts that drive the world of machine learning, getting hands on experience with TensorFlow, an open-source machine learning library,” Corrington said. “As someone who had been exposed to a variety of the covered topics through various statistics and data science courses, as well as on co-op, I found that seeing everything synthesized and understanding how the various concepts interacted was especially eye opening and interesting.”

Both Corrington and Singer said they were very proud to represent Northeastern as one of three universities invited to attend such an interesting opportunity hosted by one of the most innovating and well-known tech companies in the industry.

“Northeastern’s CCIS program has a consistent reputation for its hard-working and knowledge-hungry students, which was part of what attracted me to the university in the first place. I am glad to see other organizations acknowledging this reputation and extending invitations to participate in opportunities such as this, knowing that CCIS students will make an inquisitive and receptive audience,” said Corrington.

As she approaches her final months as a Northeastern student, Shivanjali Singh took time to reflect upon the many experiences she has been given the opportunity to engage in, the Google Crash Course being one of them.

“I have been able to come in as someone who has never programmed and become someone who has worked full-time as a software engineer, partook in leadership activities that have led me to places like New Orleans, Santiago, Rio De Janeiro and experience new parts of the world through a Dialogue in Spain and a study abroad semester in Edinburgh, Scotland,” she said.

Singh said that Google’s invitation to Northeastern was flattering and it showed that the company is willing to invest in fostering future relationships with Northeastern students.