Alumni

Anna Michalska, MS
SURF 2006
International University Bremen, Germany
now at Google, Switzerland

"My name is Anna Michalska and I am a Computer Science student from the International University in Bremen, Germany. In summer 2006 I undertook research under the guidance of Wolfgang Fink, Ph.D., a seasoned mentor at the California Institute of Technology and Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, USA. My personal project involved: 'Comprehensive Web Page Design for the General Public and Domain Experts'. From the very beginning I knew that my experience at Caltech would be unique, which was definitely a merit of my mentor - Prof. Wolfgang Fink. It was he who always provided me with an invaluable atmosphere that encouraged creativity and innovation. Our "never-ending" meetings to consult the progress of the research project were stimulating and mind-expanding. We worked hard on designing and implementing accessible templates of a web page. In the end I felt great satisfaction from the finished project under the supervision of Wolfgang Fink, Ph.D., who empowered me to take on that challenge."

Daniel Micol, PhD
SURF 2005
University of Alicante, Spain
now at Telefonica R&D, Spain

"My name is Daniel Micol, I am a Computer Science student from Spain and Wolfgang Fink was my SURF mentor in Summer 2005, on a project entitled 'SIMEYE: Computer Based Simulation of Visual Perception Under Various Eye Defects'. During the whole term of the SURF project Wolfgang Fink demonstrated to be very committed to me and my project, with several weekly meetings that could last for hours. Hence, I always felt supported and guided by him, and this was a determining factor to make our project finally successful. In fact, we presented a poster at an International Congress and have published a paper in a peer-reviewed journal, which is a tremendous success for a project that only lasted about two months. In addition, he always welcomes students not only from Caltech, but in particular also international students and from other US universities, in contrast to the majority of SURF mentors, that only accept Caltech students. Thus, I would strongly encourage any SURF applicant to consider Wolfgang Fink as his future mentor and I am sure he won't feel unattended in any moment."

Ankur Datta, PhD
SURF 2003
University of Central Florida
now at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center

"My name is Ankur Datta and I am currently a PhD student at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. I had the pleasure of working with Dr. Fink during my summer internship at Caltech in 2003. Dr. Fink at that time had an idea about extracting geologically valuable features from images of rock terrain and the goal for me was to utilize my computer vision knowledge to make it a working system. During the course of 3 months that I was there, he served as a capable mentor and more importantly a really nice person to interact with. Though I was technically under a JPL project, there were numerous occasions when he traveled to Caltech to have project discussions with me, which obviously saved me the trouble of going to JPL. We had quite a fruitful collaboration with 2 conference papers published and a journal paper currently under preparation. Now that I look back, it was quite easily the most productive and fun internship that I had done during my undergraduate years. The discussions with him are always lively and his ability to create a positive outlook on the mentor-mentee relationship is quite valuable for any student. I would highly recommend Dr. Fink as a mentor."

 

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