Now based in the Netherlands and looking to improve the techniques of Dutch athletes through artificial intelligence, the French engineer Mathilde Verlyck shares her year of experience at Universidad de los Andes and assures that, without hesitation, she would recommend this experience to anyone.his colleagues from IMT Atlantique.
Mathilde Verlyck has a hint of French in her Spanish accent, but she claims that when she speaks it, is happier than when she expresses herself in her native language or even English. Mathilde misses speaking Spanish almost as much as the empanadas, arepas and 'corrientazos' that went along with her during her exchange year at Universidad de los Andes, in Bogotá, Colombia. And she misses that experience, mostly now that she has returned to the winter on her continent and the Latin American warmth no longer surprises her on the street.
Mathilde became the first student from France in October 2022 to receive her double degree with the IMT Atlantique-Uniandes agreement. This institution is recognized internationally for its academic quality and for its different centers of specialization, according to the interest of the student. The agreement, in force since 2017, allows engineering students to complete their last semesters at the partner university and receive two diplomas upon graduation. Colombians receive the degree at the undergraduate level from Uniandes and the undergraduate and master's degree from IMT Atlantique. The French, for their part, receive both diplomas at the undergraduate and master's levels, due to the length of the programs in that country.
When Mathilde discovered the agreement, there was not much "competition" among her peers to come to Colombia. When evaluating the more than 50 options they have to do double degrees at her institution, she was able to narrow them down to two universities that offered the possibility of applying engineering to the health area: a Canadian one and Uniandes. She was surprised by Uniandes and the it's good position in international rankings and, she confesses, was her adventurous spirit what made her took the decision: "I had already lived in Bolivia for a year and I was looking for an experience beyond academics, I wanted a cultural exchange".
Despite some insecurities about her new destination, Mathilde chose Los Andes and, in January 2021, she began her last year classes in the Biomedical Engineering Department. “Due to the pandemic, I had some virtual courses during the first semester, but later, when working on my thesis, I joined the Biomedical Computer Vision research group and the Center for Artificial Intelligence (CinfonIA), led by Professor Pablo Arbeláez. I learned a lot from him and he always cared about me”. In the laboratories of the Mario Laserna Building, she met her first Colombian friends, with whom she developed her thesis: an artificial intelligence method to support robot-assisted surgeries. Mathilde analyzed videos of real surgeries and was able to identify the instruments used, as well as the moment and type of intervention. These discoveries she captured in a paper that was published at MICCAI 2022, the international conference on Medical Imaging Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention that recently took place in Singapore.
And although Mathilde was challenged academically at Uniandes, not everything was study. She also fulfilled her dream of making new friends and traveling through Colombia. With the group of international students from Uniandes called Hermanos Sin Fronteras and her fellow students, she discovered landscapes such as Tayrona Park, the Tatacoa desert, the eastern plains and the Coffee Zone.
She sees all those photos again from her new home, in Amsterdam, where she is finishing her internship at a company that uses artificial intelligence to predict and improve athletes' movements. About the next destination, Mathilde, adventurer, is still not clear. She only knows that at Uniandes she had an experience that prepared her for the next level: "I want to continue with my doctorate and apply artificial intelligence to the area of biomedical imaging for cancer treatment".
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For more information on double degrees for Uniandinos at IMT Atlantique, visit this link. The calls are open between August and October of each year.
If you are an IMT Atlantique student and would like to come to Uniandes, find more information here.
