Catherine Maring and Michael Maring have graduated from the University of Minnesota and and University of Michigan, respectively.

Catherine and Michael are the children of Mr. and Mrs. Steven (Chris) Maring of Columbia and grandchildren of Mr. and Mrs. Robert (Donna) Wilson and Mrs. Patti Maring of Davenport, Iowa.

Catherine graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in genetics and cell development. She studied public health in Thailand her junior year as part of an internship at a local hospital. She volunteered for three years at her local Ronald McDonald House in its school for siblings of patients.

Honors received include the University of Minnesota Gold National, Hubbell Incorporated, Kleffman Memorial and the Twin Cities Study Abroad Diversity scholarships. She was a Dean’s List honoree five times. She plans to work at Steris in Minneapolis in its microbiology department while she applies to medical schools.

Michael graduated with a master’s degree in robotics. His focus was on computer vision, which is the processing of visual information, such as images or video, to obtain environmental understanding.

His research developed a vision language model for video captioning. His work could be used to automatically generate plain-text captions for videos or images and could serve as a better search tool for video keywords.

He received second place in the application track for a machine learning term project. His project implemented two general reinforcement learning algorithm to solve realistic simulations, pertaining to robotics, that did not have any prior knowledge or understanding.

The programs aim for robots to learn through trial and error some objective, such as move the farthest or jump the highest.

Following his graduation, Michael will apply for software engineering positions that focus on computer vision applications.