Student builds AI image recognition model for final project
Siddhant Karki applied what he was learning in class and followed the blueprint of an academic paper to create and train a vision transformer
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Siddhant Karki is a Computer Science and Mathematics double major.
“That's the best thing about computer science – you can just be in your room and try to build something out and look it up (in a research paper) if you're stuck somewhere,” Karki said.
And that’s exactly what he did. Karki was taking an “Intro to AI” course, and decided his final project would be to make a vision transformer. A vision transformer is an AI model that uses machine learning to recognize images. He fed the program a small dataset of images to train the model for image recognition.
When Karki began researching with John Femiani – associate professor in the Computer Science and Software Engineering department – he didn’t fully understand what computer vision was. Now, he’s made one, and he plans to continue research on the model.
Beyond his vision transformer, Karki said he is excited to see how AI has and continues to be developed and applied in computer science and beyond.
“It's very exciting to get to work on these sorts of things early on in my career,” Karki said. “I want to get to work with AI as much as possible, because I feel like AI is getting big now, but it's going to get even bigger later on.”
Moving forward, Karki said he wants to explore all of his career options while in college, starting with an upcoming summer internship at the Microsoft headquarters in Seattle. He will be working as a technical program manager to assist software engineers at one of the largest tech companies in the world.
When he returns to Oxford for his senior year in the fall, he said he’s looking forward to continuing his research ventures. Karki will then decide which passion wins out – research or industry – which will guide him to either a graduate program or a job at a big-name tech company. His dream job, however, is to land a role working with an AI company.
Established in 1809, Miami University is located in Oxford, Ohio, with regional campuses in Hamilton and Middletown, a learning center in West Chester, and a European study center in Luxembourg.
