As a data scientist at U.S. Steel, Pitt alumnus Abish Pius, ‘20, is inspired by anything new and up and coming in the world of technology.
The Computational Biomedicine and Biotechnology (CoBB) MS program honed Pius’ critical thinking and coding skills, helping him succeed in his new fast-paced technology role.
Pius landed his job as a data scientist right after graduation. In this role, he builds models, analyzes data and drives business value through large-scale process optimization.
“My favorite part of the job is that I always get to explore and try something new,” he said.
One of his latest projects was creating a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system using Google Cloud Platform large language models (LLMs). RAG is a technique for enhancing the accuracy of generative AI models. Pius and his team adapted Gemini, Google’s generative AI tool, to fulfill the maintenance and operations needs of U.S. Steel’s engineers.
For this project, he earned a ticket to the Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco last year.
“Google CEO Sundar Pichai mentioned our work in his keynote address at the conference in San Franscisco,” Pius said. “That was really cool!”
Remarkably, he entered the CoBB program with no experience in coding. He had studied neuroscience as an undergraduate student and wanted to transition into the computer science world. During his time at Pitt, Pius learned the skills to help him land his dream career.
“CoBB prepared me really well,” he said. “The main thing of course is the programming; that’s pretty much a prerequisite for tech. Critical thinking and statistics are other big skills that helped me understand and explain to others what’s actually driving model predictions.”
The professional development aspects of the CoBB program also assisted him with this career change. While earning his master’s degree, he learned how to craft a winning resume, enhance his presence on LinkedIn, and build a strong portfolio on GitHub.
The hard work paid off. Pius loves having a job that allows him to be creative and explore emerging technology.
“It’s like a game in a sense that you’re given all these numbers, and you have to try and figure out how this is connected to increased steel production in my case or some other profitable outcome that you’re looking for in a business,” he said.
Pius’ advice to emerging students is to practice often. Learning to code may be challenging at first, but the rewards will be worth it in the end.
“I don’t think you’ll ever have a boring day with data science,” he said. “I’ve yet to have one of those.”
Read Pius’ data science blog on Medium: https://abishpius.medium.com/