StatusGator Women in Tech Scholarship

A short walk from my grandmother’s house in Bosnia sits a bright red warning sign reading “Zabranjeno Prolaz. Mine!” (Do Not Enter. Land Mines!). A weapon engineered for mass destruction that continues to hold back my community even thirty years after the war. This contamination is a barrier to socio-economic development for many Bosnians, leading to the country being one of the poorest in Europe. With many mines still undetected and causing casualties annually, the question I am to answer is: How do I stop this? During a CS Club meeting my sophomore year, I was introduced to a new concept – Machine Learning. We can teach computers to recognize patterns and adapt without explicitly being programmed, essentially teaching computers to learn just like humans. This is the solution that I was looking for. I want to use AI and machine learning for landmine detection in Bosnia. By training machine learning models to detect patterns in soil composition and terrain maps, these systems can be used to accelerate landmine detection. I want to pursue a Bachelor's and Master's in computer science to build an understanding of AI and Machine Learning to use to help my community, especially in my parents’ home country of Bosnia, where war remnants plague the local communities. My main goal is to become an AI Engineer and establish a company based in Bosnia that focuses on using AI, Machine Learning, robotics, and technology to help local communities contaminated by the landmine crisis. Hearing the horror stories from my parents and grandparents of locals accidentally stepping on landmines while doing everyday tasks like picking fruit, I realized that this is a problem that I wanted to dedicate my education to solving. I dream of developing advanced AI technologies to pinpoint the locations of landmines and leftover explosives in Bosnia while making this information accessible to citizens through public websites. I want to program robots to disarm the mines instead of sending Bosnian bomb technicians who suffer casualties annually. In my English 102 class, I’m currently writing a research paper on how AI and Machine Learning can be used to solve the landmine crisis in Bosnia. In college, I hope to dive deeper into this research and start creating prototypes of these systems. I dream of walking back to the forest near my grandma’s house without seeing any bright red warning signs again. AI is the future, and I want to use it to help people.