{"id":719752,"date":"2026-09-23T16:08:34","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T20:08:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=719752"},"modified":"2026-09-23T16:08:34","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T20:08:34","slug":"internships-new-york-small-businesses-data-ai-719752","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/internships-new-york-small-businesses-data-ai-719752\/","title":{"rendered":"URochester students help New York small businesses harness data and AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York State Center of Excellence in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence connected 10 local businesses with student interns.<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Rochester By Water<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

But this summer, Sherry Wang, a data science master\u2019s<\/a> student at the University of Rochester<\/a>, put the power of data in Russell-Walsh\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s incredible,\u201d says Russell-Walsh. \u201cWe\u2019ve 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wang was one of 10 interns paired with New York\u2013based startups, small businesses, and nonprofits through the University of Rochester<\/a>\u2019s Center of Excellence in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence<\/a>\u2019s summer internship program<\/a>. The internships provide students real-world experience working with data and AI to help local businesses improve their bottom lines.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe most interesting part for me is that I built the project from scratch,\u201d Wang says of her work with Rochester By Water. \u201cI 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.\u201d\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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A post shared by Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences (@ur_engineeringandcs)<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n