Timestamps
(01:59) Saishruthi talked about her upbringing, growing up in a rural town in India with no Internet connection and no computers.
(05:50) Saishruthi discussed her undergraduate studying Electrical Engineering at Sri Sairam Engineering College in the early 2010s.
(11:56) Saishruthi mentioned the projects and learnings during her two years working at Tata Consultancy Services as an instrumentation engineer.
(15:57) Saishruthi went over her MS degree in Electrical Engineering at San Jose State University and her journey into data science.
(22:20) Saishruthi shared the initial hurdles she faced transitioning back to school and assimilating to the US culture.
(26:10) Saishruthi touched on her work with San Jose City on disaster management.
(28:20) Saishruthi went over her job search process, eventually landing a data science position at IBM.
(32:16) Saishruthi unpacked lessons learned from public speaking.
(35:20) Saishruthi summarized IBM’s data science and machine learning initiatives.
(37:02) Saishruthi brought up various projects happening at IBM’s Center for Open Source Data and AI Technologies, whose mission is to make open-source AI models dramatically easier to create, deploy, and manage in the enterprise.
(39:40) Saishruthi unpacked the qualities needed to contribute to open-source projects and their role in shaping the development of ML technologies.
(44:50) Saishruthi dissected examples of bias in ML, identified solutions to combat unwanted bias, and presented tools for that (as delivered in her talk titled “Digital Discrimination: Cognitive Bias in Machine Learning”).
(49:12) Saishruthi shared her thoughts on the evolution of research and applications within the Trusted AI landscape.
(54:07) Saishruthi discussed the core value propositions of IBM’s Elyra, a set of AI-centric extensions to JupyterLab that aims to help data practitioners deal with the complexities of the model development lifecycle.
(56:11) Saishruthi briefly shared the challenges with developing Coursera courses on data visualization with Python and with R.
(01:00:47) Saishruthi went over her passion for movements such as Women In Tech and Girls Who Code.
(01:03:27) Saishruthi shared details about her initiative to bring education to rural children.
(01:06:36) Closing segment.
Saishruthi’s Contact Info
Mentioned Content
Talks
“Digital Discrimination: Cognitive Bias in Machine Learning” (All Things Open 2020)
Projects
Courses
About the show
Datacast features long-form, in-depth conversations with practitioners and researchers in the data community to walk through their professional journeys and unpack the lessons learned along the way. I invite guests coming from a wide range of career paths — from scientists and analysts to founders and investors — to analyze the case for using data in the real world and extract their mental models (“the WHY and the HOW”) behind their pursuits. Hopefully, these conversations can serve as valuable tools for early-stage data professionals as they navigate their own careers in the exciting data universe.
Datacast is produced and edited by James Le. Get in touch with feedback or guest suggestions by emailing khanhle.1013@gmail.com.
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