Kellan McIntosh

I grew up in South Africa, spending most of my free time on computers and gaming. Eventually I started building my own PCs, and I became more interested in how the machine worked than in the games running on it. That curiosity led me to take computer courses in high school that went deeper into how hardware and software actually work, and by the end of them I knew I wanted to study computer science.

I was lucky to be able to pursue that in the United States. I started at a small liberal arts college and transferred to UMass Amherst, where I'm now in the accelerated BS/MS program in Computer Science.

Machine learning is where it all came together for me. In the summer of 2025 I started training my own models, and the process felt familiar: tweak something, run it again, check the score, and try to beat it. Spending hours training and evaluating models felt a lot like working through levels in a game, except each level taught me something real, something I could take out of the screen and use to help people. That's when I knew ML was what I wanted to do.

Since then, I've gotten to apply it outside the classroom. At AI for the Commonwealth, I built an AI assistant that cut a typical HR policy search from 15 minutes to 15 seconds for a 6,300-person organization. That's the kind of work I want to keep doing: specializing in ML and data science, and applying it to real problems for businesses and the people who work in them.