Student Spotlight: Walt Williams

Posted on 2022-01-11

An undergraduate student in the UofM Computer Science program, Walt Williams has been accepted into Google’s Computer Science Research Mentorship program and will also be a Research Scientist Intern at Adobe Research over Summer 2022.

Walt has a strong interest in machine learning (ML) research and during his first year in the CS program actively participated in ML competitions hosted on Kaggle, finishing one in the top 11% from 1300 competitors.  After his first semester, Walt worked in the Center for Information Assurance for one year, where he published a research paper discussing recent trends in social engineering attacks and how ML can be used to mitigate and prevent them.  He also presented workshops for CS and ROTC students discussing ML and its uses in cybersecurity and the military.

After his third semester, Walt was hired as a Research Intern with the AutoML (Automated Machine Learning) team at Microsoft Research over Summer 2021.  He was responsible for building a ML model that could locate and classify mitotic and non-mitotic cells in images of breast cancer tissue and published a research paper on his work.  Called AMDet, his model was used to provide suggestions to pathologists who were trying to label a new dataset of breast cancer images for digital pathology research.

Walt was accepted to Google’s Computer Science Research Mentorship program, where he is being advised by Dr. Susanna Ricco.  He also received offers from research and ML engineering teams at Adobe and IBM and accepted a Research Scientist Internship with Adobe for Summer 2022.  After graduating from UofM, Walt plans to get his master’s degree in Computer Science and has been awarded the prestigious National GEM Fellowship.  He plans to engage in more research as a graduate student while deciding whether to pursue a PhD or finish his master’s degree and immediately enter industry.