UW-Stout: Students from three Universities of Wisconsin campuses use machine learning to solve problems for Royal Credit Union
Publish Date: 2026-01-26 14:44:00
Source Domain: www.wispolitics.com
Computer science students from UW-Stout, UWEC, UWRF exercise ‘exceptional’ AI acumen for leading financial institution
Menomonie, Wis. – Computer science students from three Universities of Wisconsin campuses leveraged their knowledge of machine learning to address real-world questions for one of the state’s largest credit unions in a unique internship program.
Four students — two from UW-Stout, one from UW-Eau Claire and one from UW-River Falls — honed their professional skills through internships with Royal Credit Union’s AI Innovation Lab last summer. The internship was a pilot program to help Royal implement machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence in which algorithms are used to find patterns in data to make predictions without explicit programming.
Chris Meyer, Royal’s vice president of IT Innovation and Efficiency, said such partnerships with the Universities of Wisconsin provide “immeasurable” value for the credit union, which serves 330,000 members in western Wisconsin and eastern Minnesota.
“This particular program brought about an opportunity for us to try some new, innovative ideas without the risks of derailing existing strategic projects or core work that were going on with our existing teams,” Meyer said.
“The interns we worked with from UW-Stout, UW-River Falls and UW-Eau Claire absolutely exceeded our expectations,” he continued. “Not only did they bring exceptional skills immediately out of school into the workforce, but they brought a perspective that we don’t always see — a younger perspective in how to approach some of the projects we’re looking at.”
The student interns were Matthew Peplinski and Emmett Jaakkola of UW-Stout, Paige Keller of UW-Eau Claire, and Mariah Waslie of UW-River Falls.
“We got to fully make our own data set, run all these machine learning models, analyze the results, present them, double check our own processes, and lay out a foundation for the…
