October 27, 2020

Name
Caleb Heinzman

Major
PhD, Computer Science

Faculty Advisor
Ye Duan

Where did you complete your undergraduate study?
Florida Gulf Coast University

Why did you choose Mizzou for your graduate program?
I chose Mizzou for it’s incredible breadth of opportunities. From the great students organizations, to the widespread research in Artificial Intelligence.

Tell us about your graduate research.  What are some potential outcomes or applications?

For my research for my PhD, I am working in applying computer vision to digital pathology. When you go and have blood taken, or a skin biopsy, this specimen is usually sent to a pathology lab to be examined on a slide under a microscope. This field is slowly becoming more and more digital. The slides are scanned so that a pathologist can look at them on their computer instead of a microscope. My research focuses in taking these whole slide images and training a deep learning model to understand the image and help pathologists make a diagnosis.

Deeptector is actually slightly outside of our research for our graduate degree. With deeptector.io we have developed a website that can predict if a video is real or fake. It’s becoming increasingly easy to create hyper-realistic fake videos with AI. They are so realistic that most humans can’t even tell if they are fake. This is a huge problem for people who rely on video content to be authentic. In a world where information is spread so easily, this will be a huge source of misinformation. Deeptector.io’s goal is to prevent this by helping the world know which videos are real or fake.

What are some accomplishments you’ve achieved at Mizzou that you’re especially proud of?
While at Mizzou I have had a few accomplishments that bring me a lot of pride. When I first applied to Mizzou, I received the “Dean’s Fellowship Award” which was awarded to a select few graduate students in all of Mizzou. Recently, we won the RJI Student Innovation competition with Deeptector.io. And then we continued on to make it to the Microsoft World Imagine Cup which was an incredible opportunity.

What do you hope to do after you complete your degree?
My two biggest interests have always been computer science and entrepreneurship. After I have finished working on my degree, I hope to be able to combine the two. I really am interested in bringing my research to the commercial world to help solve a real world problem. I am already beginning to do this with Deeptector. Hopefully, I can continue to grow deeptector and really help solve the problem of deepfakes.