By: Toni Beaton (MI Student)

Sakshi Jeswani is a second-year student in the Master of Information program here at SIM. This past summer, Sakshi completed a three-month internship with DeepSense. I had the pleasure of interviewing Sakshi to share more about her internship experience, her roles and responsibilities, and her tips for first-year students contemplating their own internships.

Please tell us a bit about your internship with DeepSense. What drew you to choose an internship with this company? What were your main responsibilities?

I applied for the Data Readiness program offered by DeepSense. They have a student pool in which they invite students to submit their resumes, and they have different companies with different projects which are assigned to students according to their capabilities and interest. I applied in that program, and I went home because I had given up on getting an internship in the summer! When I was at home, I ended up getting a call for the interview, and I gave the interview from my home. I was selected for the AI and Machine Learning intern position and flew back to Halifax to start the internship. I got to see my family, and I also got to do the internship!

It was an internship with a company called Global Spatial Technology Solutions. It was machine-learning work; the project was predicting the estimated time of arrival for the vessels considering weather variables. The vessels coming to the port need to have an assigned place on the port. Some vessels book their port in advance by entering the incorrect time of arrival. The project was an extension to the current ETA model the company has. I used different machine-learning models to predict the time of arrival. Most of the work was exploratory data analysis (EDA). I was new to the ocean sector and didn’t know anything about it! My supervisors were really helpful, and helped me throughout the project. We found many things that needed to be removed from the data sets, so there was a lot of data filtering that needed to happen to make the model more accurate. The models that I used were Linear Regression, GLM, Random Forest, and XGBoost (different machine learning models) to understand which model fits best with the data.

How did the work in your internship connect to what you learned in the first year of your MI degree?

One day, the CEO of the company (Global Spatial Technology Solutions) called me, and I had a meeting with him. I told him about all the courses I’m taking and planning to take at SIM. I think that was a major contributor to getting the part-time work that I have with the company. I also think I got the internship because of the Data Science course that I took with Dr. Philippe Mongeon. There was a final project in that course that I did, and that’s the project that I showed them in the interview. I think they were really impressed, because they were also using R (a programming language), which was what I learned from my course.

INFO5590 was also helpful. I took the Business Analytics course (INFO6513 with Dr. Colin Conrad) and it has a bunch of helpful technologies that we learned throughout the course. I learned Tableau in that course; because of which, I got a practicum with Dal Analytics! In my resume, I added all of technologies I learned in INFO6513, which was very helpful [in gaining my internship].

What would you say was the most rewarding part of your internship?

I cannot describe how helpful the supervisors were, and are now as well! I got to learn a lot from them, because they have been working in the industry for so long. I am getting transferred to a GIS project and it will be very helpful for me to gain practical industry knowledge along with taking the GIS course with Jennifer Grek Martin.

Congratulations on your offer of employment with DeepSense! What will your main roles and responsibilities be?

Right now, I am still completing the project that I started in my internship. The internship time was three months which was less according to the project requirements. It will go until the end of October; in November, they will transfer me to another project. The company deals with spatial data and the project involves building maps. One of my supervisors is a GIS data scientist, so I am learning from the course and then applying it as well.

Looking forward after graduation, are you hoping to stay in Halifax and find full-time work? What would be your ideal job after graduation?

I think I’ll stay in Halifax, but it also depends on the job profile that I get. I might also move, but I’m not sure about it yet. I want to work in the data science field. But, taking the GIS course, I’m building my interest towards GIS! I’d love to do a combination of both.

Lastly, what advice would you offer first-year MI students considering a potential summer internship?

I would suggest starting early and building connections. LinkedIn helps a lot in connecting with people working in the same industry. Janet helps in getting the practicum which could help build connections for your internship. I would like to say to anyone considering an internship: I believe that things fall in place.

SIM sends congratulations to Sakshi on the successful completion of her internship, and subsequent job offer from Global Spatial Technology Solutions!

The SIM spring convocation ceremony is taking place on Thursday, June 2nd. Six of our Master of Information (MI) graduates completed a thesis. The breadth and variety of topics illustrate the interdisciplinary nature of the MI degree, and of the information science field in general. Read more about three of the theses below.

Jordan Audas: “The price of glass slippers: Folklore, intellectual property, and neoliberalism” (full details)

This research presents a theoretical framework to illustrate the way that individualism facilitates the exploitation of communal goods, particularly in connection with the commodification of folklore present in neoliberal society. Although contemporary folklorists understand folklore as the product of mutually sharing traditions – a peer-to-peer and collaborative process which continuously evolves through community participation – the insertion and prioritization of the individual by historical folklore collectors, copyright law, and neoliberal ideology functions to transform the creation and dissemination of folklore into an individual’s intellectual property. Historical folktale collectors made it possible to copyright folklore, to fix these tales and songs to a singular author figure; what started with a desire to protect national heritage by “saving” the last remaining products of the folk was quickly transformed by the copyright industry into an income generation tool. The positioning of the individual above the community in the folklore process serves the purpose of copyright, a system designed to reward the author figure, the solitary and individual genius, and coincides with the ideology of neoliberalism, which places further emphasis on the individual, validating the increase of protection of physical and intellectual property through privatization and commodification. The prioritization of the individual makes it possible for folklore to be bought, sold, or traded – just as any other commodity. This research was made possible through a generous grant of $17,500 by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), based on a successful application to the 2021 Canada Graduate Scholarships-Master’s competition (CGS M).

Poppy Riddle: “Visualizing Keyword Co-occurrence from Two Queries to Aid Exploratory Search” (full details)

Click here to read a full profile about Poppy

I have been researching the intersection of bibliometrics and information visualization as I am interested in how searching for information can be improved and if visualization provides a better way to search through and find what you are looking for. My thesis investigated a method of information visualization comparing keyword co-occurrence between two database queries to address the challenges of current discovery systems in academic settings. Its purpose was to illustrate how search terms have keyword exclusions that are unique to each and may inform the user of work might be missed or what might refine future searches. Results suggest that while some keywords are co-occurring and linked, there are exclusive keywords that may impact an information seeker’s desired topic and may provide valuable information to support decision making in their exploratory search process. Interpretation of results using heuristic analysis suggests this visualization would present more benefits to the information seeker as an interactive visualization than a static one. The outcomes of my thesis may be implemented by an academic librarian with beginner level Python programming experience. Future work will include advancing this concept to an interactive visualization for evaluation, and exploring other ways to visually map information, including using 3D and VR. My goal is to continue researching and developing ways in which we interact with large amounts of diverse information, which is easy to us, and might even be fun. This research received funding from Coalition Publica ($5500) for support of this work.

Lisa Olson: “Plague Discourse: Political, Religious, and Medical Publications in England, 1603–1666” (full details)

The plague pandemic known as the Black Death reached the shores of England in 1348 and went on to kill around 30–40 percent of England’s citizens. Following the Black Death, the disease became endemic in England, and continued to bedevil the country for another three hundred years. While the seventeenth century saw England’s last plague epidemic, it also saw some of its worst, experiencing major outbreaks in 1603, 1625, 1636, and 1665. During this time, citizens looked to the political, religious, and medical realms for answers to their questions and various authoritative figures answered through print. The century also saw an increase in the quantity, popularity, and accessibility of printed texts in England and society became increasingly equipped to process the influx of texts concerning the illness. These texts, therefore, likely shaped many citizens understanding of the plague. Using qualitative discourse analysis and historical research, as well as quantitative content analysis, this thesis examines a sample of texts from the political, religious, and medical spheres to gain insight into the information being conveyed to the public about the plague at this time and discover how the discourse of these three spheres coexisted. The findings of this study offer insight into the relationships between the political, religious, and medical spheres and how they were affected by plague between 1603 and 1666. They also provide timely insight into responses to widespread health emergencies, such as the current (2019­–2022) coronavirus pandemic.