13 September 2022
by Ipshita Roy Chowdhury, University of Stirling
I am a current PhD student in the division of Computing science at the University of Stirling. I have attended the Analytics, Data Science & Decision Making Summer School at the Institute for Analytics and Data Science, University of Essex from 25th July-29th July, 2022 funded by SICSA.
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) for their contribution to my summer school visit this year. The funding from SICSA really helped me out to take part in the summer school and provided a great opportunity to experience a wide area of Computing and Data Science research. I got the chance to meet wonderful peers to exchange ideas and attended courses lead by well known academics and researchers of the field.
My current research interest focuses on working with malware behaviour capturing using ontology-driven knowledge-graphs and malware detection using Deep Learning based models. During my PhD, I’ve explored 1) use of image processing in describing the malware and their classifications using convolutional neural network models and 2) malware classification using their behaviours as features to machine learning models.
The summer school, organized by the Institute for Analytics and Data Science at University of Essex was a great opportunity to gain knowledge about the Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Analytics and Decision Making. This was an immense help to learn about advanced techniques of Data Science and AI and establish a connection with the academics and industrial partners also to connect with peers for sharing knowledge.
Being a PhD student in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence field this program was very much aligned with my research from all its activities.
As a PhD student in Computing Science, I want to explore new fields of research and connect with other researchers. The summer school organized by IADS, University of Essex has provided me the opportunity to attend cutting-edge courses in Data Science field. This was a blending of teaching courses and research techniques related to Deep Learning, Analytics, Security and Machine Learning.
From the schedule of course topics I found that the courses like Data Protection and Security, Deep Learning for images, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning will be extremely beneficial for me as I am working on malware behaviour capturing using API calls and detection using malware image processing. This program has provided me the practical experiences of the coursework.
Attending all these sessions was very much beneficial to me and it was a great pleasure to have keynotes from the experts of the field also having knowledge about the Data Science technology landscape and building a network with the peers.
I am immensely grateful to SICSA for the generous support to expand my knowledge and experience in the Data Science and AI-related fields. The fund was very important to me not only financially but to strengthen my experience and have an exposure to the wide array research community.