We are proud to announce that our very own Theodore Patsis (Athens College) had his paper “Computing Movie Script Similarity with Neural Word Embeddings” accepted to the highly prestigious 2021 IEEE MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference (URTC).
The URTC is a prestigious peer-reviewed undergraduate conference sponsored by MIT that brings together students from around the world to present and share technological solutions for the betterment of humanity. Theodore, who is currently a rising senior, was one of the select high school students whose papers were accepted to URTC. In his paper, Theodore presents a novel computer algorithm that was able to compute thematic similarities in film using natural language processing techniques. He completed this project over a 14-week 1-on-1 Research Mentorship on AI and Machine Learning under the guidance of Dr Advait Sarkar (Cambridge, Computer Science).
When asked to reflect on his experience at CCIR, Theodore said, “I had a great relationship with my mentor and gained a lot of insight from it. I came in having no idea about what kind of project I wished to undertake, but through his valuable input, we steered in a very interesting direction by combining two of my passions: AI and film. The end result was impressive and we have kept in touch looking to find additional ways of taking advantage of our research.” Currently, Theodore and Dr Sakar are exploring ways to commercialize their final product, so that it may be put to actual use in the film industry.
If you want to learn more about Theordore’s project, and his experiences at CCIR, you can watch his student spotlight interview here.
