exchange year · amsterdam university college · 2022–2023
My exchange year at Amsterdam University College was where my focus moved clearly toward NLP and machine learning.
The two most important courses were modelling real-world problems and text mining. The modelling course introduced computational modelling, dynamic systems, and simulation as tools for representing real-world processes. The text mining course introduced NLP, word vectors, neural networks, and the idea that co-occurrence structure can be compressed into useful learned representations.
That idea connected directly with my biology background. Distributional methods used for language suggested analogous ways to reason about genes, proteins, and other biological sequences: define elements by their contexts, learn structured representations, and use those representations to study relationships in the underlying system.
Amsterdam made the direction clearer. The central interest became representation learning across domains: how similar mathematical tools can be used for text, speech, images, and biological data, provided the structure is rich enough to learn from.
← Birmingham · Edinburgh →