Posted on June 18, 2024 by UTSA School of Data Science
School of Data Science to host immersive international summer program
The UTSA School of Data Science (SDS) will host 12 international students from June 24-July 27 as part of the first annual SDS Summer Immersion Experience. The students hail from two private Mexican universities – Tecnológico de Monterrey (TEC) and the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) – and will spend a month in San Antonio assisting SDS core faculty in research and exploring the city of San Antonio and its culture.
The summer program builds off of UTSA President Taylor Eighmy’s 2023 visit to TEC to expand collaborative efforts between the two schools, and presents opportunities for all three institutions, says Peyman Najafirad (Paul Rad), SDS associate director of research.
“These are the MITs of Mexico,” Rad said, “and with UTSA being a Tier One Research University, this is a great opportunity for collaboration. We hope to give students a glimpse of this ongoing partnership so they can give us feedback and help us optimize these kinds of joint projects for future students.”
The goal, according to Rad, is to integrate the twelve participating students into existing research projects underway at the School of Data Science. To this end, core faculty furnished a list of ongoing projects and students were allowed to choose which labs they wanted to work in to research a variety of subjects such as artificial intelligence, smart cities, and virtual reality. Students will also have opportunities to engage with the San Antonio community and learn about its culture – both technological and historical. Scheduled field trips will allow them to tour the “startup hotspot” Geekdom, The Alamo, and tech campus Port San Antonio. At the end of their monthlong stay, students will have the chance to present on their work in a final showcase.
“I look forward to seeing what students present to us: the experiences they had and the things they learned during this month of research,” Rad said. “I also look forward to them helping us learn to conduct this type of program and determine what we need to establish in the future and, hopefully, seeing them make San Antonio, UTSA, and the School of Data Science their home for their graduate studies.”
For more information on the SDS Summer Immersion Experience, visit https://sds.utsa.edu/immersion_experience/.
— UTSA School of Data Science
