Transcript for International Students are Discovering Opportunities
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- [Abdullah] From the day I was born to 2007,
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I was living in Iraq. It was a turbulent time.
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My school was hit from like bombings.
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I've had loads of time where I had no education.
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My parents didn't see a future in that type of education.
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So they wanted to move somewhere where
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the education would be consistent.
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They first think of education and then everything else.
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Before coming to Canada, their main concern was
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which country would offer the best
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tertiary education to our children.
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When I asked my parents, the first advice
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they told me is keep doing well in school,
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and then the careers that you want, would come to you.
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I started working with a few professors
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and I found machine learning and I decided, oh,
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this is something I actually want to pursue.
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Luckily from all the universities that I applied to,
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I got my acceptances. And then I,
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it was just a matter of comparison
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and Guelph was on top of the list,
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and then the more I researched into Guelph,
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the more it appealed to me.
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- When I first met Abdullah when he must've been
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in his very first week here.
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During our orientation week in engineering,
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we do a it's called meetings for majors,
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where we have a few faculty come and speak to the incoming
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class of biological and biomedical engineering students.
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I did a little spiel on some of the research that I was
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doing at the time, he approached me afterwards,
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he was really interested and very first day,
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asked about volunteer opportunities in my lab.
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You don't normally get quite that much enthusiasm
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from brand new first year students,
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but that is typical as I've learned
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over the years of Abdullah.
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- I was just scrolling by one day
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and then I found a post complaining about
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bad infrastructure in schools.
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- Or sending the students out
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to different cities or overcrowding existing schools
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I helped with managing a campaign
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that would gather donations.
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And then with the amount of money that we raised
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was around $2,000 US.
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- I wanted to pay back because
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I know how fortunate education is fundamental
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to anything you do. The University of Guelph
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is very important to me, and I think it's shaped
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me personally because you learn new things
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and you build connections which led me
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to have great opportunities.
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The decision to stay on my masters project was the
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flexibility and the amount of opportunities.
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I had offers from several universities,
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but no other university offered me as good of an
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opportunity as Guelph.
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- [Eran] The first time I met Abdullah was at design three.
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I remember Abdullah very well,
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because the way he asked questions with
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such enthusiastic voice.
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- He laid out a few projects that he was working on.
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And I just mentioned prostate cancer,
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if he has any projects related to that,
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because that was why my grandfather died of.
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I felt an obligation to do something in
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that field to hopefully help the science advance.
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- What impresses most about Abdullah
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is his initiative. I told him that I had a large group,
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so I was running out of funding.
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So Abdullah initiated this industry collaborations.
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And in total, his initiatives helped me
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in bringing up about $80,000 worth of industry,
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plus my tax funding, to my research team.
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- He offered me a project where
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I would be detecting the quality of prostate MRI scans
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automatically within like 30 seconds or one hour out of a
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one hour to an hour and a half sequence of scans.
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- In his work one of the problems is that
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some of those images that are acquired are of poor quality,
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so they will need to follow up again.
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So then they will need to be rescanned.
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- And if it was to be caught in stage one,
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it would be curable and will be treatable.
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- So Abdullah will develop AI technologies
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to predict the quality of the images before they acquired.
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- And AI would help in detecting that cancer.
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And it will be universal throughout.
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My ultimate hope in completing this research project
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is to improve the state of cancer detection as a whole.
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(piano music)