By Siena Giljum

Post graduation, every Terrier chooses a different career path. Some scatter across the country (and the world), some move back home, and some stay in the Boston area. And some, of course, don’t cut their ties to Boston University just yet.

Ben Lawson graduated from the College of Arts & Sciences in January 2018 with his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Science degrees in computer science through the CAS/GRS combo program. As a student at BU, he was heavily involved in the BU Spark! program at the Hariri Institute for Computing, completing projects alongside industry professionals associated with organizations such as NASA and Microsoft who mentored him and his classmates. Since graduating and landing a job at WarnerMedia Applied Analytics, Lawson has returned to Spark! as a mentor for current students in the program. Here, Ben talks about what made his time with Spark! so special and how he tries to recreate that experience for current CAS students.

Q: What was your involvement with Spark! while you were a student at BU?

A: I did two of the different paths they had at the time. One of them involved working on a course project sponsored by an affiliated company, and the other one was an independent study I did during the summer, where I was also working for one of the companies on a project they needed help with.

Q: Can you tell me about the first project?

A: There were a few different companies that came in and pitched projects for a machine-learning course, and we worked on one of them throughout the entire semester. My team choose to work with a company called Windows to the Universe, and the goal of the project was to tag images from NASA with relevant tags like “volcano” or “hurricane.” They wanted us to make a program that would automatically attach around 25 labels onto thousands of images. We used different machine-learning methods we thought would be able to analyze this problem, and then at the end of the semester, we presented our work to the mentor who came in for our poster presentation.

Q: Did your experience in the NASA project affect what you did in the future?

A: Yes, because it definitely helped set up a commercial, real-world problem and got us thinking of all the different ways to get around it. Our first approach was to use one of the popular frameworks we learned in class and then apply it directly. But we realized this solution wouldn’t work with some of the labels. We had to think pretty critically about how to break down these smaller problems before we tackled the bigger problem of trying to label everything. 

Q: And what about your second project at Spark!?

A: This one was also really awesome. It was sponsored by Microsoft. A classmate and I worked on exploring chatbots and how they could be deployed and used in a few different business settings. We explored some of the frameworks that were open source or readily available through Microsoft and Facebook.

Throughout the summer, we regularly spoke over the phone with a group of software engineers and project managers from Microsoft, some who were fairly high up in their leadership structure, so it was valuable to have that kind of exposure. The project was related tangentially to one the team mentors were working on for Microsoft’s annual one-week hackathon, “Hack for Good.” The results from our Spark! project helped inform the use of chatbots to help stop human trafficking and forced prostitution. I was flown out to attend that hackathon and help them with the project, and being able to work on a project the Microsoft group was also working on was a rewarding and eye-opening opportunity.

Q: Can you tell me more about your full-time job?

A: I currently work at WarnerMedia Applied Analytics. We are a company within WarnerMedia, and we work on data-driven decisions for big entertainment properties such as Warner Brothers, Turner, and HBO. I am a senior quantitative analyst on the data science team, and I help build tools that will ingest a lot of the data we have access to, summarize that, and produce insights we can then pass along to our marketing analytics team. A specific project I’ve worked on is meta-tagging: generating metadata about movie trailers, capturing information about them, and summarizing them in an easily digestible format so we can compare a lot at once instead of having to watch them all.

Q: What kinds of things do you do with Spark! post grad?

A: I’m helping a group of students who are in the startup incubator course. It’s a group of students who are working on a term project, but unlike the two projects I participated in, they come up with the idea independently rather than an outside company sponsoring it. We met weekly and I helped them with debug issues and brainstorm ways to solve some of their problems.

Q: What made you want to come back to Spark! and help?

A: A logistical reason is I’m close by, which makes it easy for me to coordinate! But more importantly, I really enjoyed my time in the program and I wanted to give back. Given the opportunity I’ve had at BU and after, I felt I was in a position that I could help out and mentor. I also like the idea of being able to meet a lot of people who are motivated to solve interesting problems. 

Q: How does your post-grad work relate to your involvement with Spark!?

A: I definitely needed to pull on that previous experience for some of the projects I’ve been working on at my current job. Just like the Windows to the Universe project, where we had to reformulate our strategy, I’ve had tasks at work where I needed to solve a smaller, easier task first to make the overall task much easier. Having that exposure early on as a student definitely helps now.

Q: How does your liberal arts education relate to your current job and to Spark!?

A: I do value the liberal arts portion of my education because I think if I graduated without any writing experience, I’d be a much less competitive candidate in the job market. The communication skills I learned from liberal classes come into use every day as I interact with people my team and other teams. These courses tended to develop my creative thinking and research skills through essay writing. I rely on these skills to imagine new solutions and research them for my current job and Spark! projects.

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Siena Giljum studies journalism in the College of Communication (’22) with a Spanish minor in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is from Southern California and hopes to one day write for The Atlantic. She loves podcasts and avocados, in no particular order.

(Photos: Ben Lawson)