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)