TRU computer science students helping BCLC develop innovative technology

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Sachin Akula is one of four TRU students working out of the Kamloops Innovation Centre. He’s finding a way for people to communicate with Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant, inquiring about last Friday’s lottery numbers. 

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Akula is a third-year computer science student who’s interning with BCLC, presented with a unique opportunity to show his smarts and learn more about voice-based assistance. 

“It’s definitely a great experience because I never actually worked on any voice-based assistance before,” he said. “So BCLC has given me an opportunity to work with more high-end tech using Cloud services like Amazon.”

The four computer science students have working on their own projects since the beginning of the school year. Matthew MacKay, who’s from Penticton, is working to allow the corporation, through artificial intelligence, to identify demographics on platforms like Twitter. 

“It gives a better way to provide better customer experience by providing, say, better games or a better customer experience because you’re able to target certain things,” said MacKay. “Not all games will be able to be focused on certain audiences, but it can also be for if you want to have more marketing material or you want to communicate better with a certain group of people.”

While BCLC has hosted TRU students before, this year it’s allowing the students to work on meaningful projects. They are projects the lottery corporation otherwise doesn’t have time to pursue. 

“As a digitally-enabled business at BCLC, we could see these trends out there in the market around emerging technologies like artificial intelligence or analytics or social and mobile,” said BCLC’s Vice-President of Technology and Chief Information Pat Davis. “The challenge that we had is, we didn’t have a lot of extra capacity and time in order to investigate them and find specific uses for our business.”

The students hope this hands-on internship is a launching point for their careers in the ever-growing tech sector in Kamloops, whether it’s with BCLC or another company. 

“Truthfully, I’ve loved this experience. The Kamloops Innovation Centre is an incredible place to work,” noted MacKay. “There are so many places for networking. You just go for coffee and you meet a new person or you go and have a chance to go and do more different things.”

For Akula, he would like to experiment more with artificial intelligence, hoping one day to help in the development of voice-based assistance on computers.