Labs Summer Intern Discovers a Passion for Physics

[Labs_Editorial]

This is the first in a series of blogs about recent Hewlett Packard Labs summer interns. They discuss what they learned and how the experience set the course for their future.

While some students arrive at college with career paths fully sketched out, most take a much more circuitous route before they arrive at their destination. More often than not, they discover a hidden passion for a subject when they least expect it.

This is the case with doctoral student Josue Rivera. Entering the second of his two internships with Hewlett Packard Labs, Rivera signed on as a research associate in an area that was new to him – physics. He decided to try it out because it gave him a chance to expand on the work he’d done during his first internship on optimizing light coupling devices.

“I wanted a chance to work on the project again, but didn’t know much about the physics that goes into photonics,” Rivera said, recalling his Labs internships in 2021 and 2022. “I thought I should give it a chance. They said that’s completely normal, and that I’d get the chance to learn the skills on the job.”

Rivera said, dating back to high school, he was always curious and willing to try new and challenging experiences.

“I was one of those guys who wanted to study a bit of everything when it came to engineering,” said Rivera. “But I knew I had to pick a field to focus in on when I went to college.”

When it came time to pick a concentration, he followed that passion for engineering, obtaining bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

He began his first internship with Labs in 2021, working alongside a team developing periodically patterned devices that can couple light on and off optical chips known as grating couplers. On the project he helped build the devices’ underlying architecture and contributed to the machine learning models that optimized the performance of these devices. Rivera’s first internship gave him the ability to apply his knowledge of ML in a practical way. Seeing that his work led to a tangible impact encouraged him to return to Hewlett Packard Labs for a second time. 

“I like to be challenged and to explore new things,” said Rivera. “So when I applied, I didn’t know much about photonics. But I thought I should give it a chance. I wanted the challenge.”

Rivera’s second internship, in 2022, steered him right back to the same grating couplers. But this time he took on a new challenge: integrating the physics of photonics into the ML models. His role saw him tasked to develop novel machine learning models that could be utilized to design these complicated extremely low-loss versions of grating couplers. Showing a willingness to learn, Rivera impressed the team and got the job done.

Rivera said Labs colleagues Sean Hooten’s and Thomas Van Vaerenbergh’s willingness to teach him the basics of photonics motivated him to explore the subject further. Without the internship, Rivera said he never would’ve opened up the world that he’s now heavily involved with from a research perspective, which is building neural network-based controllers for dynamic systems.

The internship experience benefited Rivera beyond just introducing him to a field of study. He says that Hewlett Packard Labs’ commitment to work-life balance gave him the flexibility he needed to be an integral part of his team, while working remotely.

Rivera’s advice for future Labs interns?

“Don’t be afraid to apply for an internship if you don’t have all the right skills,” Rivera said. “Employers appreciate if they see you’re willing to learn and go the extra mile to gain those skills you need.”

Rivera is currently pursuing a doctorate at Purdue University in aeronautical and astronautical engineering. He’s developing his thesis around a machine learning model that integrates the laws of physics into the devices that they’re controlling, such as a drone being able to correct itself when experiencing wind or other gravitational factors knocking them off course. He plans to work in research and development after obtaining his PhD.

To learn more about internship opportunities, please visit hpe.com/us/en/about/jobs/students.html