This summer, I am a software engineering intern at Microsoft Advanced Technology Lab in Cairo, Egypt. I have just finished my first week there, here are my experience and imperessions so far.

The Lab

Microsoft ATL Cairo specializes in developing research areas at Microsoft. Projects like LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service), parts of QnAMaker, Bing custom search, and machine translation services for other microsoft projects are built here at Microsoft ATL Cairo. The three teams currently working at the lab are the LUIS team, the NLP team (the one I am working at), and the Bing Search team.

My NLP team

My team is the NLP team. We are currently working on a project for QnAMaker.ai. The project is about creating chat bots from FAQ pages, manuals, or pdf documents.

Engineers and Interns

We are 24 interns from universities in Alexandria and Cairo, with my university alone taking one third of the spots. Even most full timers in the lab are from Alexandria University. My university has a very good popularity in the job market and is famous for producing some of the best software engineers in the country. I really like the people who work here and I am very lucky to network and from relations with such people, interns and full time engineers.

My task

We create chat bots from FAQ pages, manuals, and other pdf documents. In simple words, my task is to add support for images and tables in pdf manuals by making them searchable so that they can appear as answers to questions. I do this by extracting relevant information for each image and table, which could include its caption, nearest heading, and any referencing text. I also evaluate my approach by comparing its results with a labeled dataset. So that’s it basically without going into details.

Talks and Sessions

I love this one alot. We have weekly problem solving sessions where one of the engineers volunteers to teach us a topic in problem solving, algorithms, or data structures. We had 2 sessions so far. We discussed Knuth-Morris-Pratt string matching and Tries with application on bit strings. We also had an introductory talk on machine learning and we will be having a session on what comes after graduation next week.

My experience so far

I have been working for 2 weeks now. I am certainly enjoying my time here. I like the work, my teammates, my fellow interns also alot. The lab has some of the best engineers you can work with. I am co-mentored by two mentors in my team and I can also approach my manager directly if I have questions. I like the office, the things they have for fun like ping pong tables and XBox. I like the sessions and tech talks held at the lab.s