The New York State Center of Excellence in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence connected 10 local businesses with student interns.
Rochester By Water, a small nonprofit that offers boat tours of the Erie Canal and Genesee River, was swimming in data. With just two employees and a network of volunteers, Executive Director Patrick Russell-Walsh had no easy way to sort through the flood of sales, marketing, and passenger details to understand how a weekday afternoon canal cruise compared with a weekend sunset ride on the river.
But this summer, Sherry Wang, a data science master’s student at the University of Rochester, put the power of data in Russell-Walsh’s hands by creating a database with more than 400,000 entries from seven different data sources and a dashboard to analyze the information in real time.
“It’s incredible,” says Russell-Walsh. “We’ve been using it in all of our committee meetings, looking at a whole range of questions that would have taken me a whole day to answer before that I can now answer in like 30 seconds.”
Wang was one of 10 interns paired with New York–based startups, small businesses, and nonprofits through the University of Rochester’s Center of Excellence in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence’s summer internship program. The internships provide students real-world experience working with data and AI to help local businesses improve their bottom lines.
“The most interesting part for me is that I built the project from scratch,” Wang says of her work with Rochester By Water. “I got to work not only as a data scientist but also serve as a data engineer and a data analyst. And with AI developing so rapidly, I was able to leverage AI to speed my project up.”
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Embracing the opportunity
The internship was an immersive experience for Maryame Kouram, a business analytics and applied AI master’s student at the Simon Business School. Kouram worked with Kids Out and About, which runs family-events websites and sells advertising to local businesses like schools, museums, and summer camps.
“I felt included by the team from day one,” says Kouram. “The first week, I got to meet with the content and sales teams, learn what they do on a daily basis, and also learn about their pain points to understand the purpose of my internship.”
Kouram had a strong champion in Debra Ross, the company’s founder and chief executive. After Kouram developed an AI-powered tool that combined data from several sources—including customer records, Google Analytics, an ad server, and others—Ross saw how the tool transformed her sales team’s work and had applications beyond her business.
“For less than $100 a year in tokens, she’s revolutionized how my staff can query our database and provide beautiful and actionable reports to our clients.”
“There are so many contexts in which businesspeople get data from all kinds of sources and need a way to put it together,” says Ross. “I realized that this is publishable and something that people throughout industry would find of interest.”
Ross encouraged Kouram to present the model she developed, Vera, at the AI Tinkerers Demo Day in New York City. Before the internship ended, Kouram further refined the tool to cut its cost by 80 percent.
“For less than $100 a year in tokens, she’s revolutionized how my staff can query our database and provide beautiful and actionable reports to our clients,” Ross says.
Developing industry experience
Data science master’s student Naman Bhagat interned with D3 Embedded, a Rochester company that develops intelligent imaging and radar products for performance-critical edge AI systems. Working with radar datasets to detect motion, he was stuck by the difference between developing real-world production systems and working on class or research projects.
“You have to think about trade-offs instead of always chasing metrics,” says Bhagat. “Those numbers matter, but in the end, it is mostly about meeting the requirements and making it deliverable with the lowest cost.”
“What employers really care about, more than your coding skills or your grades, is your ability to stand alone and figure things out,” Bhagat adds.
“What employers really care about, more than your coding skills or your grades, is your ability to stand alone and figure things out.”
At Phlotonics, a photonic biosensing startup in Rochester (cofounded by URochester Medicine faculty member Benjamin Miller and two of his graduate students), optical engineering major Zihan “Frannie” Zheng ’27 helped the company build data pipelines and use analytical tools that transform raw photonic and microscopy data into meaningful biomarker insights, dashboards, and automated reports.
“I learned that improving a data pipeline isn’t just about fixing one bug at a time,” says Zheng. “Every step affects what comes next, so I first had to understand the workflow as a whole and identify where different parts were conflicting. That helped me simplify the process, fix the underlying problems, and make the analysis more reliable and automated.”
The Center of Excellence in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence will begin accepting applications in December from New York companies that want to offer internships.
