Natalija Radić testimonial

Natalija Radić

Hi, I am Natalija and I was a participant in second iteration of PSIML, in 2016.

I have heard of the seminar from people who attended it the year before, and their stories made a great impression on me. I have been on second year of Software Engineering studies when I applied. To be honest, I didn’t feel that confident about my chances of getting invited since I didn’t have any ML background and from what I’ve heard participants of the first seminar were all really skilled and their final project sounded complex. But that also made it sound even more appealing. I enjoyed working on the homework I was given, it was different from problems I’ve had worked on in college and I had fun learning and solving it.

The seminar itself was beyond my expectations. It was an amazing environment to learn. Lecturers were passionate about the mater, they encouraged questions and discussions, had great stories from work they’ve done – stories about real projects, anecdotes, problems, setbacks, and tips for our future work. I loved learning about ML and applying the knowledge in the workshops.

My project was Kinect Gestures Recognition – fellow participant Boris and I worked on training the model to recognize different gestures used with some phrases in Italian (kaggle challenge https://www.kaggle.com/c/multi-modal-gesture-recognition). It was the best time, as we learned that it’s not just about the theoretical knowledge, we had to work on preparing and preprocessing our data set (and learning some Italian along the way, tanto tempo fa).

After the seminar I had a chance to work a bit on Natural Language Processing as part of my internship in Devana Labs.

Now I am a part of Evoke team in Microsoft Development Center Serbia, where I am seeing first hand how ML is used every day for improving products and user experience.

I would encourage everyone to apply and would like to point out that you don’t have to have previous ML background – the courses are designed to teach you the very basics, and homework is there just to test your creativity and resourcefulness.