MS Students Build Tech Skills at AI Immersion Week
A group of 28 graduate students from Northeastern’s Seattle campus visited the university’s Silicon Valley campus and vice versa for AI Immersion week held during spring break. Students attended workshops, industry panels, and a hackathon. Surya Shivam, MS’26, information systems, led a team that designed an AI-integrated invoice fraud detection system.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Kate Rix. Main photo: Master’s students from Northeastern’s Silicon Valley campus visited the Seattle campus for a week of immersion in AI, including a stop at Microsoft’s Xbox room. Courtesy Photo
Northeastern students build tech skills while taking AI challenge
Surya Shivam learned two big lessons over spring break: document your journey and don’t hesitate to reach out for help—takeaways that had nothing to do with traveling to a beach for a relaxing vacation.
Shivam was one of 28 Northeastern University graduate students who spent spring break digging deep into all aspects of AI— from its impact on business to prompt engineering and building their own AI-powered agents.
Students on the Seattle campus traveled to the Silicon Valley campus and vice versa to attend industry panels and participate in a hackathon.
But AI Immersion week was mostly about skill-building. Especially the hackathon, which challenged students in Silicon Valley to develop an artificial intelligence agent using Agentforce, a new software developed by Salesforce. An AI agent is a system that can process information and take actions autonomously.
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Students from the Silicon Valley campus visited industry partners in Seattle as part of a week of immersion in AI, while students from the Seattle campus visited Silicon Valley. Courtesy Photo
“It was all learning, nothing else,” said Harshika Santoshi, a master’s student in data science at the Silicon Valley campus. “For someone who has never touched that application to figure it out, that was a learning experience.”
Santoshi, who stayed in Silicon Valley and hosted Seattle-based graduate students, worked on Shivam’s team designing an AI-integrated invoice fraud detection system. But they didn’t head into the hackathon unprepared.
Before beginning their work, students attended a workshop with Curt Carlson, Northeastern business professor of practice, who shared strategies to hone a product idea before beginning to build it.
“That helped us think about coming up with an idea that is valuable to customers,” said Silicon Valley computer science master’s student Aisha Abdur Rahim. “Because if we are creating something that’s not valuable, then it’s basically a waste of time.”
Working with Agentforce wasn’t easy at first, students said. As representatives from Salesforce roamed the room to answer questions, students began building their projects only to find that some features, like loading images and PDFs, didn’t work. Other students found themselves spending the majority of their time stuck and wished it were easier to back up to an earlier version.
Which is how Surya Shivam learned it is important to always document your work and don’t hesitate to ask for help.
“If our team had done that, our teams would have been able to submit the project well before time,” Shivam said. “When I asked for help, we had a very clear idea of how to proceed.”
Read full story at Northeastern Global News