What students said about their HPCC Systems experience

As part of the program, we ask students to complete an evaluation form so we can keep a record of their time with us. We ask them to comment on their experience in their own words. Here are some from the students who have worked alongside us. 

Ryan Rao, Accepted Student 2023
Project completed: HPCC Systems Storage Support With Container Storage Interface (CSI)

"I very much enjoyed working on my project. My mentors were both very helpful, and they communicated often with me. I also appreciated the very supportive atmosphere."

Sarah Nash, Accepted Student 2023
Project completed: Causal Discovery and Validation with Categorical Data

"Overall, I enjoyed working on this project and have a positive attitude about it. This project helped me to solidify some of the feelings I have about research, and I ended up really enjoying coding and testing a new implementation."

Jack Del Vecchio, Accepted Student 2022
Project completed: Interfacing MongoDB into ECL

"I had an amazing working on my project and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I learned more than I thought was possible from working with HPCC and would definitely recommend the internship program to everyone."

Ananya Gupta, Accepted Student 2022
Project completed: Nepali NLP Initiative

"I feel very happy and satisfied with my experience. This is because I could able to learn a lot throughout this summer internship. I learned coding in NLP++ and ECL. I also learned to write blog and develop website. Not only that, I learned to write a press release and learned marketing skill to recruit participants for this project."

Achinthya Sreedhar, Accepted Student 2021
Project completed: Improving conditional probability calculations using kernel methods in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS) as a part of the Causality Project

"I had a great time working on this big project with so many moving parts. It was great working with Roger (Dev) and the team, collaborating and communicating back and forth to achieve something that’s greater than the sum of its parts."

Alexander Parra, Accepted Student 2021
Project Completed: Implement a PMML Processor

"Seeing the first output of my converter was a special moment for me. It really came together and it was cool to see...learning that timelines can change so drastically so quickly is something I took away from this. Also a lot of learning about ML, which was somewhat cool."

Amy Ma, Accepted Student 2021
Project Completed: Ingress Configuration

"Being in a working environment different from my school allowed me to develop skills with communication, and for learning the information needed for this project, I managed this by adding to the curve every day, by learning new information and trying it myself."

Atreya Bain, Accepted Student 2021
Project Completed: Improvements on HSQL: A SQL-like language for HPCC Systems

"I feel that this is a project that can help people get into HPCC Systems, which is a really great. The project has been rather engaging and interesting for me, and involves working with compilers and IDEs, both of which are really interesting tools to learn about and work on."

Carina Wang, Accepted Student 2021
Project Completed: Processing Student Images with Kubernetes on HPCC Systems Cloud Native Platform

"Through this internship, I have extended my knowledge and experience by working with new platforms and tutorials that I previously did not come into contact with. I have developed a deeper understanding of machine learning, Jupyter Notebook, and the process of developing an image dataset."

Christopher Connelly, Accepted Student 2021 and 2019
Project Completed: 2021 - Ingestion and Analysis of Collegiate Women's Baskteball GPS Data in HPCC Systems and RealBI
"Once again it has been a wonderful experience getting to work with this team. They are always very helpful when I run into issues and have really helped improve my understanding of all parts of what plays into the system we have created. I would love nothing more than  to continue working with this team."

Project Completed: 2019 - Cleaning and Analysis of Collegiate Soccer GPS Data in HPCC Systems 

Eleanor Carl, Accepted Students 2021
Project Completed: Continue Novel COVID-19 Tracker and Global Map Using HPCC Systems ECL Watch

"I love my project and I feel attached to it. My experiences were both demanding and rewarding.I do not think my learning outcomes could have been better."

Jefferson Mao, Accepted Student 2021 and 2020
Project Completed: 2021 - Toxicity Detection 
"As always, the HPCC Systems internship has provided an intriguing and mentally stimulating few months. The project that I chose was the most difficult one yet and I was constantly presented with challenges to overcome. These challenges were extremely welcome and helped me become a better student and developer. I learned python and ML skills in a very short amount of time..."

Project Completed: 2020 - HPCC Systems on Google Anthos 

"I had an amazing experience and I could not be more grateful for this internship opportunity. It opened my eyes to how professional developers perform their tasks and how the entire process works."

Mara Hubelbank, Accepted Student 2021
Project Completed: Causal Inference in Machine Learning

Although some parts of this project were challenging, overall, it was a very valuable and enriching intellectual and professional experience. I have never worked in such a new and complex field before...The learning curve was initially quite tough to deal with, but Roger Dev’s guidance and the time I put into research made it manageable."

Mayank Agarwal, Accepted Student 2021
Project Completed: Independence Testing with RCoT : Causal Validation and Discovery for HPCC System Causal Toolkit

"It was an honour to be a part of this project and work with people familiar with the industry of my area of work like Roger Dev and Lorraine Chapman. The project was very informative and new in this area of research, so working on it will surely help me in achieving my goals."

Nikita Jha, Accepted Student 2021
Project Completed: Apply Docker Image Build and Kubernetes Security Principles

"I found this project extremely enjoyable and overall, very fulfilling. Ming Wang and Michael Gardner, my two mentors, have helped me tremendously all throughout and made sure I left feeling confident in my abilities as a software developer. They were also more than willing to give me feedback, walk me through the steps to correct errors, and help me overcome certain obstacles."

Roshan Bhandari, Accepted Student 2021
Project Completed: Use Azure Spot Instance with HPCC Systems for Cost Optimization

"I learnt a lot about HPCC Systems and Azure. Thank you for providing this wonderful opportunity. I also enjoyed sessions with the other interns and the other team members. They were full of learning."

Jack Fields, Accepted Student 2020
Project Completed: Using HPCC Systems GNN Bundle with TensorFlow to Train a Model to Find Known Faces Leveraging the Robotics API

"This was my first real experience in a real Job. Everyone was very nice and welcoming while also being very professional. Even though the job was remote, communication was great. I definitely had a huge learning curve in the beginning of the internship but I was provided with endless recourses to help me in anyway needed. I now feel confident in HPCC SYSTEMS and motivated to share my project with others.:

Matthias Murray, Accepted Student 2020
Project Completed: Applying HPCC Systems TextVector to SEC Filings

"The topic of the project allows me to apply the skills I learned in graduate school to a subject matter of great interest to me, while simultaneously building something that could potentially have real and immediate value as a product offering to LexisNexis Risk Solutions. I feel that I am gaining invaluable practical data engineering/software engineering experience in the process."

Nathan Halliday, Accepted Student 2020
Project Completed: The Parallel Workflow Engine

"My experience was very valuable. I think the project was challenging and filled with a good variety of tasks. I have found it useful to participate as part of a development team, and to learn the work processes that come with it (JIRA, tech talk, team meetings…)."

Robert Kennedy, Accepted Student 2020, 2019 and 2018
Project Completed: 2020 - Distributed GPU Accelerated Neural Networks with GNN
"The internship experience was of course great. I really enjoy working with Tim Humphrey and the rest of the team at HPCC Systems. This year the work with a maintained bundle, (GNN) only adds to it. Hopefully, the work I have done will eventually be able to have a larger impact for the HPCC Systems open source community."

Project Completed 2019 - Create HPCC Systems VM on Hyper V
"My mentor is very knowledgeable of HPCC Systems/ECL, AWS, and other HPCC Systems team members. This is due to his many years working for the company and allowed him to quickly answer my questions directly, or instantly knew who the best person to ask if a specific question was better answered by them."

Project Completed 2018 - Begin development of a software library (consisting of ECL and Python code) that would provide HPCC Systems distributed neural network training

"I am working on my own project so I feel very positive about it. I know it has relevance to not only me but also to LexisNexis Risk Solution and the tech community in general. Since it was my idea, I obviously am very motiviated and excited to see it fully working and have a sense of ownership that might be more difficult to feel working on other projects. Since HPCC is open source, my gain experience in working with and contributing to a large publicly visible project is immense."

Vannel Zeufack, Accepted Student 2020
Project Completed: Preprocessing Bundle for HPCC Systems Machine Learning Library

"Amazing experience! Even though remote, the weekly meetings with the mentors and other interns helped installing the “team working” atmosphere. I am very honoured and blessed to have participated in this experience as it greatly developed my skills for my target career."

Yash Mishra, Accepted Student 2020
Project Completed: Leveraging and Evaluating Kubernetes Support on Microsoft Azure

"The project had me working on bleeding-edge technology. While working remotely has been a challenge for someone in their early career stages, the constant support from my mentor and help from colleagues made the experience enriching."  

Don Kushan Saminda Wijeratne, Accepted Student 2018
Project Completed: MPI Proof of Concept (See poster / Listen to a presentation)

“Even when some challenging issues came along, the existing system was fairly flexible enough to work with alternate solutions, and the mentors were well experienced to guide me to solve the problem.”  

Aramis Tanelus, Accepted Student 2018
Project Completed: HPCC Systems Robotics Data Ingestion (See poster / Listen to a presentation)

“I gained the experience of being in a real workplace, which will help me prepare for the future.”

Farah Alshanik, Accepted Student 2018
Project Completed: Equivalence terms of the Text Search Bundle (See poster / Listen to a presentation)

“This project was very helpful for me. I am interested in applying HPCC [Systems] to solve machine learning problems, and I was able to do that in this project by using machine learning algorithms inside the ECL. This helped me to learn new methods and allow me to utilize the HPCC to enhance the performance and runtime for solving the problems.”

Lily Xu, Accepted Student 2018
Project Completed: Using HPCC Systems machine learning to map public records data descriptions to standard categories (See poster / Watch Lili present at our 2018 Community Day Summit / View Slides)

“I like my current project very much. It’s very practical and also very interesting. It gives me way more opportunities than I expected to learn both soft skills and hard skills from my internship.” 

Matt Butler, Accepted Student 2018
Project Completed:  

“My experience has been incredible. I originally chose this project because it seemed intimidating. It was a challenge and that is what excited me most about it. … I would rate this experience as a 10/10! 

I have only positive things to say about LexisNexis and HPCC Systems. I look forward to our paths crossing again in the future!”

Nicole Navarro, Accepted Student 2018
Project Completed:  Measuring the geo social distribution of Opioid Prescriptions (See poster / Listen to a presentation)

“I have enjoyed my internship quite a lot so far! I am working on a very interesting project which has kept me consistently engaged and wanting to dive deeper into the data. During my time here I have learned a lot about using the existing pieces of a dataset to build new features that give a deeper understanding of the data. The work I am doing is helping me learn to look at a dataset and determine the best ways to visualize that data and build dashboards that provide the most insight to the user. I have also learned how to use the internal tools here at LexisNexis to do these things.”

Robert Kennedy, Accepted Student 2018
Project Completed: Distributed deep learning with TensorFlow (See poster / Watch Robert present at our 2018 Community Day Summit / View Slides)

“Working on real tools designed for practical applications on big data is a very positive experience. Working with my mentor has also been a very positive experience since he has given the freedom and flexibility to work on my project in the ways I feel are best. The guidance and autonomy in my project has definitely improved upon the quality of work and the speed of my progress.”

Shah Muhammad Hamdi, Accepted Student 2018
Project Completed: Dimensionality reduction using PBblas (See poster / Listen to a presentation)                                                                                                                         

“It takes some time to learn ECL and know about HPCC Systems in the beginning. Later, when we are used to it, coding in such declarative language becomes fun. Running the codes in cluster is very exciting. Throughout my project duration I was properly guided by an experienced and friendly mentor. It really encouraged me to work hard towards the goal.”

Soukaina Filali, Accepted Student 2018
Project Completed:  (See poster / Listen to a presentation)

“I have an excellent mentor who is encouraging and helpful, he usually brings new ideas to the solution we are building. We communicate via email and Skype meetings. It has been a very pleasant experience… “

Sarthak Jain - GSoC Accepted Student 2015/Internship 2016/2017
Project completed - Add new statistics to the Linear and Logistic Regression Modules

'It was an excellent way to implement basic ML primitives while taking in account the problems to implement these in Distributed Architectures.  [The] Main learning point I will take from this project is how to dig deep into an existing code base to understand why a new piece of code is not working as you expected.'

Anmol Jagetia - GSoC Accepted Student 2015
Project completed - Expand the HPCC Systems Visualization Framework (Web Based)

'I [was] really happy to work with HPCC Systems as a GSoC student. It was one of the most rewarding and learning times of my life. I had very basic experience with a d3 project in the past, and it helped in getting started. The framework was totally new, but the idea, and how the problem is tackled was quite similar. I also benefited from learning JavaScript OOP before the GSoC period.'

Syed Rahman - HPCC Systems Summer Internship 2015/2016
Project completed (2015) - Implement the CONCORD algorithm 

‘Implementing concord in a data-intensive environment was exciting not only because of my interest in covariance estimation, but also because it presents an opportunity to learn about distributed computing and [my mentor] has been especially helpful explaining the challenges…and how to overcome them.'

Project Completed (2016) - Implement the Convex Sparse Cholesky Selection (CSCS) machine learning algorithm
Anshu Ranjan - HPCC Systems Summer Internship 2015
Project completed - Improve child query processing

'I sure feel that this is a valuable experience. The fact that HPCC systems manage a huge amount of data is exciting and any kind of contribution that I will make to it would be very satisfying. My mentor has played an excellent role in guiding me...'

Evan Sheridan - Intern partnership between HPCC Systems and ICHEC in 2015
Project completed - Integrate visualizations into the Eclipse IDE driven by HIPIE

'The project is quite interesting, despite the initial stages of figuring everything out I feel that I am learning a huge amount in a field that I have done no formal work in before. I am learning a lot about the current state of the art and how the HPCC Systems are integrating this into their work...' 

Michael Tierney - Intern partnership between HPCC Systems and ICHEC in 2015
Project completed - Add support to Eclipse for the HIPIE language

'I think the internship is quite challenging... I had zero experience with grammars, plugins and making text editors before this. So far I have learned a great deal about Java, Antlr and the eclipse plugin API. The working relationship with [my mentor] is quite friendly even though he pushes us hard. I feel the quality of the work while starting out a bit iffy has become progressively more clean. I feel that it will be built upon when my  internship ends.'