In his final year studying Artificial Intelligence at Radboud University, Nijmegen, Robin de Heer needed an internship where he could work on his thesis. After finding the opening he wanted at SIDN Labs, he started his research in September 2019. A year on, we asked him about the experience.
Did you know about SIDN Labs before your internship?
"No, SIDN and SIDN Labs were new to me, really. The university gave me a list of organisations offering undergraduate research opportunities in my field, and SIDN Labs was on the list. It just so happened that, about the time I was considering my options, SIDN Labs' Research Engineer Thymen wrote a blog identifying four key AI challenges and inviting people to help find solutions. The idea appealed to me straight away, so I wrote to info@sidnlabs telling them about myself and my interests. Thymen got back to me shortly afterwards and we had a chat about possible research projects."
How did you define your research assignment?
"In his blog, Thymen identified four concrete AI challenges that SIDN Labs were concerned with. I picked the one that appealed to me most and used it as the basis for an interesting thesis research assignment."
So what was your research about?
"In a nutshell, if you visit a website expecting it to be a car dealer's, you can often see immediately whether it actually is a car dealer's site. But assessing the sites linked to all six million .nl domain names that way would be very tedious, time-consuming and impractical. So I developed a system that automatically determines what economic activity is associated with a domain by analysing the text on the website. You can then build up a picture of the make-up of the .nl zone. Which in turn makes it easier to do things such as monitor the adoption of internet standards in various sectors of the economy."
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What was it like doing your internship at SIDN Labs?
"Fun! When I wasn't working, I got totally hooked on the office table football tournament. The Labs team like to play, but they're all very dedicated and helpful as well. They gave me a lot of freedom and showed a lot of confidence in me, which I really appreciated. For example, I was able to integrate my tooling into DMAP, SIDN Labs' data crawler. I also got to build a web page to go with the project, although that wasn't part of the original plan." Visit the website and try the system out!
What about the guidance and supervision you received?
"It was good. I had a weekly progress chat with Thymen, my thesis supervisor, who gave me lots of useful feedback. At the end of the project, we presented my findings at a 'bring-your-own-lunch' event. Various people from other departments came along and showed a real interest in my research, which was nice."
Some of the time during your internship, coronavirus restrictions were in place. How did that affect you?
"SIDN Labs took all the restrictions in their stride very well. It's weird, of course, not seeing your colleagues face-to-face, but we had a lot of informal digital contact as well."
Is your thesis available to read anywhere?
"Yes, sure. Anyone who wants a copy can mail me. It's robin.deheer@gmail.com"
Fancy doing your thesis at SIDN Labs, like Robin?
Read about the possibilities here.