Computer science student Younes Slaoui has always been interested in AI. And last spring, thanks to an opportunity he received from UNM’s Engineering Student Success Center, he was able to work on a project for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and gain a deeper understanding of machine learning and its realities. I did. It is applied all over the world to problems such as criminal behavior.
After participating in a summer internship with the DHS Criminal Investigation Network Analysis (CINA) Division at George Mason University in Virginia, Mr. Slaoui gained a wide range of skills, both personal and professional, and felt career ready. He said he felt he was ready.
Younes Slaoui
Slaoui, a third-year computer science student, worked on a team led by mechanical engineering professor Francesco Sorrentino to develop software tools that use artificial intelligence to model, predict and detect criminal activity. The findings could help law enforcement and investigators at all levels predict when and where crimes are likely to occur, as well as uncover evidence of past crimes that have yet to be solved. This may help you decide where to look.
His final project, titled “Reservoir Computing: Navigating Crime’s Depths with AI,” utilized publicly available crime data in the Washington, DC area from 2015 to 2019. He started by inputting data into “crime observation” software to learn the correlations between 25 different crimes. He said one of the most highly correlated crime series is “release violation/fugitive” versus “theft from a motor vehicle.”
His final paper for his internship project investigated the capabilities and applications of reservoir computing. Reservoir computing is a machine learning model that is fast to train and has been successfully used to process both temporal and spatiotemporal data.
Through a lot of programming and data science work, the team is able to understand when and where crimes are likely to occur in the future, what types of crimes are likely to occur, and what has happened in the past in a given area. We were able to estimate where to look for evidence of a crime. date.
Although the project had an overall goal, as the internship progressed from June to August, Slaoui realized that it offered considerable freedom, creativity, and growth potential.
“It gave me the opportunity to think for myself and do things on my own. I learned a lot about training and testing machine learning models and became familiar with MATLAB, a software I had never used before,” he said. Ta.
One of the highlights of working with government officials was hearing former FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole speak. Mary Ellen O’Toole is an expert on the criminal mind who uses psychology to extract the truth (and confessions) from serial killers.
In addition to his project work, he said he enjoyed the opportunity to return to the Washington area (where he was born and spent his childhood in Maryland) and catch up with friends from elementary school.
Although he is still an undergraduate student, this internship has given him more clarity on what he wants to do after graduation.
Slaoui, who lived in Morocco from the age of 9 to 18, speaks four languages: English, Arabic, French and Dariha (Moroccan dialect). He realized that in addition to his technical background, he had unique skills that allowed him to qualify to work for the U.S. government (he had previously taken a summer internship working with the Moroccan government’s online database). ).
“I had great networking opportunities at CINA. It opened a whole new door to working in government,” he said. “I didn’t think much of it until I took the internship. I invited CINA’s director and education and workforce development leaders to lunch. We had a great conversation and learned a lot from them. said I was a good fit for the CIA.”
For a student who began his higher education journey at the University of Denver before transferring to the University of New Mexico, he is pleased with the experience UNM has provided him since transferring here. He is especially grateful to his Engineering Student Success Center for first informing him about this internship and his internship at Indica Labs this semester. There, he plans to apply his software engineering skills to pathology and healthcare.
“I feel like I learned a lot of general research skills and technical skills,” he said. “That was a big kick.”
