2024 MISTI Excellence Award Winner - Kinan Martin

Kinan Martin ‘24 is a recipient of this year’s MISTI Excellence Award. By summer’s end, Kinan will have completed five MISTI programs. His global experiences include teaching and empowering students in Kazakhstan and Jordan through MISTI Global Teaching Labs programs. While Kinan was in Jordan he taught Python and web development to 18–35 year old Jordanians at INJAZ. He applied natural language processing and his AI know-how during his MISTI internships in Chile and Taiwan. 

Read more about Kinan’s MIT and MISTI journey in this Q&A. 

MISTI: Briefly tell us what MISTI country programs you did and what were your projects on? 

Kinan: In Chile, I interned at the natural language processing lab at the University of Chile, where I worked on multiple ongoing projects—developing a model for detecting disease mentions in Spanish language tweets and developing Spanish biomedical word embeddings. 

WATCH: Kinan’s experience at the University of Chile 

In Taiwan, I worked at the Foxconn Research Institute implementing multimodal, AI models, of both natural language processing and computer vision models for driving applications.

During the summer of 2024, I'm going to intern at a company called Reazon Holdings in Japan. I'll be doing natural language processing research as well as spoken language processing research and speech in various languages.

MISTI: What are your plans for the future?

Kinan: I'm thinking of going to work in industry applications for research and development of natural language processing systems. I may come back to academia to do a Ph.D.

MISTI: How did your internship experiences in different countries help you understand the global landscape of your field of study or work?

My international internship experiences have really been helpful to better understand the research space I'm working in. It has given me a broader perspective on how the main research popular in the English-speaking world does not always apply to different countries and languages. For example, there's a big focus on building language models for English or linguistic theories that work well with English but not with other languages. Often these differences are overlooked and not considered in the most cutting-edge research at international conferences. Because of that, I think it's really important to expand your perspective when you're thinking about research questions and consider how the theories that you're positing can be applied not just to English but to all languages

MISTI: One thing you’ve gained from your international MISTI experiences.

Kinan: What I've learned abroad during these internships is the ability to apply the theoretical skills that I've learned at MIT in various challenges. For example, while working on a Spanish clinical use case, like applications of NLP, it is a totally different application of NLP when building a smart driving assistant for autonomous vehicles. This sort of wide range of possibilities for what you can apply your skills and knowledge to in different projects is something that I think is really valuable from doing international internships.

MISTI: How important is it for MIT students to have international exposure? What will your advice be to students considering an internship abroad?

Kinan: I think that it's definitely very valuable to have international internship experiences. It allows you to learn about both the ways people may conduct research differently in different countries and the different use cases. 

I learned about the challenges faced by the Spanish language and clinical use cases for natural language processing. However, it really showed me how valuable my own experiences have been—coming from MIT and having this cutting-edge education in data science and other natural language processing. It revealed to me how I could also bring a lot to the table to international universities and companies.