As summer ends and school begins, I am finishing up an integral part of my Ciliopathy diagnosis project at The Goldenberg Lab, creating a cell counting algorithm. For most Pathologists and Researchers who work with cell images, an important and useful piece of information gathered is the cell count, which acts as the basis for many other important decisions. Many pathology images contain hundreds or even thousands of cells and the currently used method, counting by hand, is inefficient and prone to human error. Using Computer Vision algorithms and neural networks, I have built a system to automatically count the number of cells within seconds. The system will speed up the diagnostic process and will soon be ready for deployment!

Over the summer, I have been spending increasingly more time at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence; a leading, world-class center for AI and Deep Learning research. It has been great meeting the amazing AI Researchers at Vector and attending many of the offered seminars. The Institute amazes me with their open research environment that feels more like a startup than a lab and having so many Machine Learning experts in one place shows the power that is unleashed when we bring together AI talent from across the globe.

Towards the beginning of August, I visited the largest trading floor in Canada at RBC. It was exciting to learn how RBC leverages AI and Reinforcement Learning to create amazing trading algorithms. Additionally, speaking with the team behind the algorithms gave me insight on how AI is revolutionizing the banking and brokerage industry. Special thank you to Shary and Kharthick for inviting me over. Hope to be back soon!

Towards the end of August, the University of Waterloo showed me a whole new world where both software and hardware integrate with Artificial Intelligence. After meeting with the Co-Director of the Vision and Image Processing (VIP) Lab, I realized the opportunity of merging AI software and hardware. The VIP Lab leverages this ideology to invent machines that will change the world. Such innovations include technology that can detect your blood flow from a live camera feed as well as a small and cheap microscope better than current high-end microscopes that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Big thank you to the VIP Lab for having me over and showing me around!

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Email me at lifshitz.shalev@gmail.com.