In the summer of 2024, David Carciente began an experiment. He gave disposable cameras to two groups of students at the University of Waterloo (one Canadian, one from Ukraine), and asked them to photograph what they saw. Once developed, he began to compare the results, and ended up setting the tone for his summer of research in Waterloo. He spent the months that followed building a bridge between two ways of seeing the same thing.
Carciente was part of the first cohort of Waterloo Engineering's Rising Stars Fellowship, a paid summer research program for undergraduates, now in its third year. Carciente is one of many who have returned to Waterloo for graduate school, now enrolled in a master’s program in the Department of Systems Design Engineering. Working in Waterloo's Vision and Image Processing Lab, he built a tool that lets marine researchers use a computer vision model to help identify whales in satellite imagery, without the need for any background in computer science.
The fellowship happened to run alongside a second Waterloo program hosting students from Ukraine, and Carciente — drawn to questions about how people see the world — spent as much time documenting that overlap as he did his research, describing his time at Waterloo as, "probably the best summer I've ever experienced."
Carciente is one of three Rising Stars fellows currently enrolled in a Waterloo master's program. In total, seven of the 45 students who've come through the fellowship since 2024 have chosen to return to Waterloo for graduate studies. What ultimately brought him back to Waterloo for graduate studies was the chance to get to know his supervisors before committing to them. During the fellowship, he worked alongside Dr. David Clausi, a Systems Design Engineering professor, and Dr. Linlin Xu, and is now co-supervised by Clausi and Xu in the Department of Systems Design Engineering. He has just completed his first research term, building a data pipeline that pairs two kinds of satellite imagery with sea ice charts — groundwork for a model that could eventually help predict sea ice conditions.