Report on 20-week professional internship (PI)

• Main Author: Chee, Glenn Jun Yuan
• Other Authors: Chng Eng Siong
• Format: Professional Internship (PI)
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2020
• Subjects: Engineering::General::Careers and profession; Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Computing methodologies::Artificial intelligence
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/136743
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Internship is a learning process in which students get to experience out-of-school real working-life under the supervision of workplace professionals. Students can link and put their knowledge to practice, and simultaneously attain new knowledge from real-work exposure. Engineering students in Nanyang Technological University (NTU), in the curriculum structure, must successfully complete one internship programme before their graduation. [1] This report provides a summary of the 20-week Professional Internship (PI) industrial training experience at Ministry of Home Affairs (HQ) with highlights on specific aspects of the training which was found to be the most enriching [2] [3]. The salient aspect of this 20-week internship is “Development and Training of ML Model”, where a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model is developed to explore and attempt classifying objects in X-Ray images by training the model with pictures of the objects in real-life, e.g. training with real-life images of batteries to supplement the lack of real X-Ray images (about 100). The idea is very bold as there are no prior studies of such kind. Hence, it was considered to be purely exploratory, and negative results are to be expected. In conclusion, the overall experience of this internship was a humbling and enriching one. Despite the primary task being unsuccessful as foreseen, achieving ~20% accuracy plateauing after 10,000 epochs, the work lays the foundation for future work. There were also unique learning experiences such as participating in an X-Ray scanner trial where test objects, including explosive simulants, were used to evaluate the performance of the scanner. This internship provided, for future careers, a good experience and exposure to real working life.