Posted: 29/07/16
This summer, the ADAPT Centre welcomed 28 interns for an eight-week period. The internships offered undergraduate students the chance to gain experience in the areas of research and development, intellectual property, communications, marketing, and education and outreach.
Each student worked on a challenging project within their chosen field during their time in the Centre. In July the interns had an opportunity to showcase and discuss the projects they worked on throughout their internship.
Speaking about her time within ADAPT, Rebecca Wilson, an undergraduate student working towards a BSc in Marketing, Innovation and Technology in DCU said: “The Marketing and Communications internship with the ADAPT Centre has opened a huge door for me; the hands on experience has helped me solidify and clarify my plans for the future. I was involved in many aspects of the marketing function of the Centre, working mainly on the development of a Social Media Strategy that complements ADAPT’s digital presence and uses social media platforms as a tool for generating leads and connecting with industry partners. I was also fortunate enough to work on the re-development of the ADAPT website, developing content and assisting in the design stages.”
Another intern, Thomas Dowling worked with Gabriel Hogan on Intellectual Property. His duties included the preparation of patent applications, licencing agreements, Non-Disclosure Agreements and commercial contracts. Thomas said: “Intellectual Property is recognised as one of the most significant growth areas within the legal profession. The experience I have gained while undertaking this internship has offered me the opportunity to grow in a way that only serve to benefit my long term career prospects.” Thomas has recently completed his Bachelor of Laws in NUI Galway.
Peru Bhardwaj, an undergraduate student of Trinity worked with Professor Declan O’Sullivan and Trinity’s digital library collection. Her project focused on linking the vast digital resources from the Trinity Library about Harry Clarke, Ireland’s greatest stained glass artist. She developed a web application that focuses on linking the collection with the churches where the windows are housed. The app uses linked data that will show the user were the church is on Google maps based on their location. Speaking about the project, Peru said: “The apps that are being developed these days focus on user experience and the project that I have been working on while at ADAPT gave me the experience of developing a web application from scratch with real data and real users.”
Computer Science, Linguistics, and French student in Trinity, Dave Woods, worked as part of a research team to create an expressive voice for text-to-speech synthesis tool, which will be put to use in emerging applications such as audiobooks and spoken dialogue systems. He also developed a web-interface to evaluate and improve what we produce. They used a large corpus of children’s stories and fairy-tales in audiobook format as the foundation which they built on, tagging sentences semi-automatically with certain labels, such as emotion and phonemes, using a variety of NLP tools. Speaking about why he applied for the internship, Dave said: “I applied to work with the ADAPT Centre as a summer intern to develop my research skills and to try to learn something new, a bit outside my comfort zone.”
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