Fujitsu Laboratories of America helped advance TDAI’s twin priorities of workforce development and data science research on an individual level when it hosted two Ohio State computer scientists earlier this year.

Ziyu Yao, a PhD candidate in computer science, completed an internship at the Silicon Valley technology company that provided hands-on experience putting data science skills to practical use. During her four-month stint there, Yao used data mining techniques to help build a knowledge base with a comprehensive schema for describing RESTful APIs. The knowledge base will help developers combine APIs from different providers, regardless of their physical interfaces.

“It was a great opportunity to learn new things and work with a team of top researchers and engineers,” she says. “The project has many practical problems to solve.”

Huan Sun

Yao’s advisor, TDAI affiliate Huan Sun, PhD, helped orchestrate the internship to enable Yao to explore some of the many career options in data science. “She learned what it’s like to work in a company in the early stage of her PhD program, which can help her figure out what she wants to do after graduation,” says Sun, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering.

For her own work, Sun was awarded a grant by Fujitsu Laboratories of America to work on data mining documentations of IoT devices and building natural language interfaces for them. In June, she gave two talks at the company’s Sunnyvale, Calif., offices—one discussing her research on question-answering using various data sources including knowledge bases, tables, texts, and online forums, and a second on text mining techniques and their applications to mining IoT-related API documentations.

“The opportunities that Fujitsu Labs offers for our faculty and students to collaborate are invaluable,” says TDAI Managing Director David Mongeau. “They fit so well with TDAI’s drive to use science to deliver solutions. Fujitsu’s vision of leading-edge, data-rich technologies as a means to create business and social value is a perfect match for TDAI.”