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Print Edition StoriesFriday, June 5, 2009
Whiz Kids
College senior Fred Smith eyes artificial intelligence
By Brendan Lynch
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Fred Smith is one college senior who may not have too much to fear from the recession.
Smith, 21, was one of two technical achievement scholars honored at the Massachusetts Network Communications Council awards ceremony last month. As a scholar, Smith received $2,000 for each of his four years at Wentworth Institute of Technology, where he studies computer science. He graduates this fall — with summer sessions, he crammed five years of college into four years — and he’s already secured a job at Lexington-based online printer VistaPrint Ltd., performing quality assurance and making plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop.
Smith plans to go to graduate school to study artificial intelligence after about a year paying down student loans — hopefully at MIT, Stanford University or the University of California at Berkeley.
Down the road, Smith has his sights on designing a better chat box for the Turing test, in which a person communicates online with another person and with an artificial intelligence program, trying to distinguish the two. If the person can’t tell the difference, the AI has passed the test.
In the same vein, Smith said he’d like to work for Kirkland, Wash.-based Bungie LLC, the developer of video games such as the popular Halo series. Playing Bungie games inspired his interest in AI, Smith said.
Each year MassNetComms gives scholarships to 12 to 15 students. The awards are intended to encourage students entering the science, technology, engineering and math fields, help them get a technical degree from a Massachusetts university, college or technical school, and keep them in the state after they graduate. To keep the scholarship, Smith had to keep his GPA above a 3.2 and attend the occasional event.
The Quincy native said he fell into the scholarship “completely by chance.” While attending Quincy High School, he worked for the school’s IT department, and his boss happened to spot the application for the scholarship grant and passed it along. The grant was especially helpful because it didn’t go directly to the school, but instead went to Smith in the form of a check.
“We could use it for rent, books or any other expenses that might come up,” Smith said.
Smith enjoys traveling and boating, though he hasn’t had time for either with school. He also tinkers on the side, building an IRC-style chat server and designing an artificial intelligence project.
Smith thinks it’s important for software engineers to stay current with hardware, so he does some tinkering on the side, as well. He recently brought home about 20 free, broken LCD monitors Harvard University was throwing out. So far, he has two of them working.
“My mother kind of hates me for it,” he said.
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