Ark Deliev: An enriching journey with Sopra Steria

Last year, Sopra Steria launched a competition across the Benelux for students who visited our booth at job fairs. Ark Deliev, presently interning at Sopra Steria in Nieuwegein, emerged as the winner in the Netherlands. We sat down with him to find out how his journey with Sopra Steria has been so far.

You won a travel voucher by participating in our job fair competition. You visited our office in Nieuwegein and met some of our colleagues. After this visit, did you already spend your travel voucher?

I also visited the Sopra Steria office in Hamburg and met some of the German colleagues. As for my future travel plans, I haven't yet used the travel voucher, but I’m pretty certain I’ll visit the Pacific Northwest of the US.

Now you’re here at Sopra Steria, what happened in the meantime? What inspired you to join Sopra Steria as an intern?

When I visited the office in Nieuwegein, it was my first time navigating a corporate structure like that. I really liked it and wanted to experience it myself. I reached out and got connected to Paul Heijmans to have a brief interview. Later, I spoke to Paul Verhaar, the head of the Data Science division, who gave me a few pointers regarding what they were working on. I later visited the Nieuwegein office again and spoke to Pauline (who manages the project I’m working on now, and on February 3rd, I officially joined Sopra Steria.

What is your role/what will you work on?

I am working as an AI research and development intern on a project extension related to Smart Search in the Data Science division. Specifically, I will work on an attributed question-answering system for the Dutch law. We do this by using a retrieval augmented generation system, which is slightly different from the traditional generative AI systems which are prone to hallucinations. Law itself is a very sensitive domain and those who operate within it cannot afford hallucinations. Therefore, you really need very concrete citations are unlikely to have been hallucinated, and that's what I'm working on. There is already a lot of research in this area, which we are updating and enhancing. Though the latest research pertaining to our use case was released sometime in mid-2024, you can imagine with AI, it has moved quite far ahead from where it was half a year ago. So, we must get it up to date.

What's been the most surprising thing you've learned during your brief time here?

I was surprised by how broad the scope of my internship is and the freedom I have to approach it the way I want. This allows me to really make the project my own and show my skills and abilities at full capacity. The last weeks have slowly but surely helped me figure out the flow and what to do exactly. Everyone is open to helping me out, and I have a huge list of people to contact in case of any inquiries. Do you feel your internship will help you grow personally and professionally? I think it fits and complements my studies perfectly. Coming from a research university, University of Groningen where we really focus on research. Here, I'm actually getting the experience that I unfortunately did not get in my programme and since my plan is to also continue in artificial intelligence or cognitive science for my master's, going through a project like this prepares me very well to continue with my master's education.

What advice would you give to future interns considering joining Sopra Steria?

As a data science and artificial intelligence intern at Sopra Steria, you will get a lot of freedom and you can even negotiate about what kind of project you want to work on. The organisation has a huge bank of intelligent individuals you can consult regarding different aspects of your project, and there is always someone able to answer your question. In addition to that, it's a very welcoming environment and it feels very cosy to operate particularly within the data science team.

If your internship had a theme song, what would it be and why?

"Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!!" by the Vengaboys, because since I walked into the office, everyone has been talking about the Vengaboys as they were our special guest at Shape it up – the company some time ago.