A machine learning model to read restaurant receipts. Data science on mobile devices. A sprinkler system that detects squirrels eating vegetables. These are a few of the real-world applications to data science problems that Dr. Everaldo Aguiar encourages his students to examine. A Khoury College lecturer at Northeastern University’s Seattle campus and principal data scientist for business expense management software company SAP Concur, Aguiar has worked with Northeastern students both in the classroom and on co-ops at SAP Concur.

Some of the Northeastern co-op students he has supervised at SAP Concur have developed whole new projects themselves. Yan Luo (MSCS ’18) initiated a project to use machine learning to look at millions of images and to develop models based on that data. This algorithm scans business expense receipt images and determines in which language the receipts were written, which allows the company’s software to categorize the receipts.

Luo’s research laid the groundwork for Aguiar’s team to work on a current project to extract vendor names, locations, and expense amounts from receipt images. For his work, Luo received the prestigious SAP Concur Best Internship Project of the Year award out of over 500 interns and co-ops.

When Aguiar brought this project into his classes as a point of discussion, a student took the image-based learning model in a whole new direction. Caroline Harbitz (Align MSCS ‘18) developed a system to detect squirrels in her garden – and then spray them with water from the sprinkler. For Aguiar, this was “one of the most interesting and out-of-the-box projects he’s ever had in his class.”

Another co-op, Yudong Wang (Align MSCS ’18), helped move complex machine learning models from expensive back-end servers onto the mobile devices of SAP Concur users. Feedback from customers who rely on SAP Concur’s software to track business expenses has been overwhelmingly positive. These projects lead to real-world jobs, too. Aguiar remarks, “Northeastern students have been successful finding jobs through their co-ops. They add to their portfolio.” Wang and Harbitz now work at Amazon, while Luo works at Facebook.

Aguiar earned his PhD in computer science from Notre Dame University with a specialization in machine learning. At SAP Concur, he divides his time between providing other team members with guidance on their tasks and developing machine learning models to improve SAP Concur’s products. He teaches data science and analytics at the Seattle campus.

For him, Northeastern students stand out from others with the amount of real-world experience they bring to problem-solving. “There’s a difference between people who have only taken theory classes and those who have participated in industry projects through programs like co-op.” He continues, “Students really like the exposure to the industry-based examples which I bring into class.”