3 Questions: Caleb Harris (Computation and Cognition, '22) and Christian Charity (CTO, Mindpool)

During the fall semester of 2020, Caleb Harris, a Junior in Course 6-9, Computation and Cognition, participated in a remote internship with Mindpool, a startup based in Copenhagen. As a data science intern, Caleb was responsible for implementing a variety of natural language processing (NLP) models to take in response data, clean and format it for use, sort it into malleable topics and themes, and identify similarities. This will be used or extended by Mindpool to help analyze company response data and generate NLP insights which will be used to inform decision makers about the employee-view state of the company. Throughout his internship, Caleb was supervised by Mindpool CTO, Christian Charity.

At the conclusion of the internship, both Christian and Caleb answered a series of questions about the internship and experience as a whole. Here are their answers:

Q: What was the scope of the internship and what were some of the project outcomes?      

Christian: Mindpool focuses on collecting employee predictions on company performance. Our tool facilitates collection, processing of data, and presentation of insights in a SaaS platform. The scope of the internship was for Caleb to apply his NLP capabilities in Mindpool-data enabling a more automated and advanced tool that can categorize qualitative data into themes, remarkably increasing business value for Mindpool and its clients. Caleb did exactly that and more, as he created a number of NLP algorithms (LDA, LSI, and others) in Python that can be used plug-and-play in our codebase.

Caleb: I was tasked with implementing natural language processing on the Mindpool data, and creating some models which could be used in the future with new data. Since I didn't have much natural language processing experience beforehand, this involved me learning about different model types and trying them out on my own. Ultimately, I selected the best performers and built them out entirely, which allowed me to group and analyze the data in various ways.

Q: Were there any unanticipated or non-project related benefits of this internship?

Caleb: In the current world, learning to effectively work remotely is important, especially as a software engineer, which likely will stay remote for some time. At Mindpool, by my regular check-ins with Christian, daily Slack usage, and occasional team meetings, I learned how to be an effective team member while being remote. This also helped me stay on track with the project and not get distracted. Furthermore, I was able to extend my skills in natural language processing and learn about the Danish workplace culture.

Christian: Caleb succeeded with building more algorithms and functionality than anticipated in a period of just two months.

Q: Would you recommend MIT-Denmark to others?

Christian: I would definitely recommend it! Even though it was a fully remote experience due to COVID, it was a great internship with positive outcomes for both Mindpool and Caleb.

Caleb: I certainly recommend the MIT-Denmark program. It was a great opportunity to extend what I had learned in classes to the real world and interesting problems, while learning about a foreign culture that interested me. I also would recommend Mindpool as a company. Even as someone remote and in a different time zone, I was treated very well and everyone was friendly.

Mindpool works to enable a future of combined human intelligence and computers for efficient, inclusive, and smarter decision-making.

Companies interested in hosting an MIT-Denmark intern should complete the project description form.