Linda Wang, a SYDE Masters student, was featured in a research story about rethinking research during the pandemic that highlights her research in artificial intelligence and computer vision.
When she started her engineering master’s degree in 2018, Linda Wang had no idea her research would be used to help detect a potentially deadly global virus less than two years later.
After
COVID-19
became
a
pandemic
last
spring,
Wang
and
her
graduate
supervisor
Alexander
Wong,
as
well
as
DarwinAI,
a
Canadian
artificial
intelligence
startup
with
strong
ties
to
the
University
of
Waterloo,
developed
technology
that
may
be
used
to
screen
and
assess
the
severity
of
infected
patients.
The open-source tool, dubbed COVID-Net, is designed to automatically screen COVID-19 infections from chest X-rays and help guide medical professionals on how seriously the infection has taken hold.
Wang, who graduates this week with her master’s degree in systems design engineering, built one of the first neural networks to predict if a person’s X-ray contains COVID and how far has the disease progressed.