WIMTACH Student Profile: Vincent Tu

A recent graduate from Centennial College’s Software Engineering Artificial Intelligence program, Vincent Tu is proving that it never hurts to seek more education to refine your skills. Although he had already been working in the software engineering industry, he found an interest in AI when he joined a start-up with a friend and gained exposure to Natural Language Processing models. Joining WIMTACH enabled him to challenge himself and gain a holistic approach to build on his knowledge. “When I [learned]… about the opportunity I thought it was quite good and exciting because I have to design things from zero and not only do I get to design and implement stuff …. I help them to kind of shape the expectations of what the product looks like,” he said. “That’s the impact that I [felt] I would love to do.”

Since joining WIMTACH, Vincent has had the opportunity to assist with a collaboration with Workforce Wellness. The project centers on the development of an AI based employee wellness coach and workforce management solution. The platform enables employers to use a chatbot to gain insights on employee burnout, retention, recruitment, absenteeism and engagement to empower them to effectively address a range of well-being and health challenges. As a student machine learning engineer for this project, Vincent took a proactive role in assisting the WIMTACH research team with building this platform. Initially, Vincent and the other student researchers for the project were primarily tasked with only building a chatbot tool but since the Workforce Wellness team was pleased with their work, the project was expanded to enable them to develop an AI LLM (Large Language Model) integrated system, requiring the use of new AI libraries.

Working on this project has strengthened his understanding of machine learning as he overcomes challenges throughout development. One example of this was when he developed a solution to deploy the AI systems with a cloud library LLM workflow builder framework like Flowise. He performed research on the use of new open-source resources, but he found that the results he was looking for were failing, so he had to develop a strategy to ensure that he was able to successfully deploy the systems. Since finding the solution required a lot of trial and error, it required him to build a strong foundation in cloud deployment. “It’s not like you can just Google the answer,” he explained. “You have to have a larger knowledge and hands-on experience in Cloud Deployment … in order to make it happen and constantly ask for resources and support from the client as well.” This process has been instrumental to his training and particularly, in teaching him how to navigate client relations. “That part is actually crucial to my work,” he said.

As well, since the WIMTACH research team is using new cutting-edge technologies and libraries in the production of the wellness platform, he regularly refers to his education from Centennial College to do things like reading the code for new libraries in such a way that would allow him to integrate his work to the Workforce Wellness product systems. He explained this is largely due to the fact that currently most AI language learning models are still in their early stages of development so they lack technical document resources for users. So, to complete his work, he often reads the programming code of libraries line by line to see how he might be able to integrate them into the wellness platform. “When you sit down and get your hands dirty to make these things apply to your system, you’ll encounter a lot of frustrations,” he said. “That’s the thing I’m facing right now.”

For Vincent, an added benefit of the internship was the opportunity to participate in weekly technical development meetings that helped him to learn from the expertise of other Student Researchers who were working on other projects. It was especially useful for him to understand how to apply machine learning models to his work. “I get to understand what they are doing and learn from them,” he explained. “It’s quite valuable to me.”
With such expansive practical experience from his studies at Centennial College and work at WIMTACH, Vincent is able to transfer that education to his current role as Chief Technology Officer for Next Inc., a SaaS company based in Toronto. The company aims to assist small and medium sized businesses with streamlining digitization processes with the integration of Artificial Intelligence. He has found his work at WIMTACH valuable and useful for enhancing his skills for this role. “If I had just taken a normal internship from any company, I wouldn’t have had this kind of chance to be able to build systems with deep learning models, and Back-end and Front-end,” he said. “I definitely recommend WIMTACH … because you get hands-on experience on every project and the harder you work the more value you gain from the experience.”

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