Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and data science are transformational technologies creating an impact on various industries, from healthcare to education, agriculture to security, finance to automation. There is hardly any sector that has been left untouched by AI. There are several brilliant AI scientists and AI researchers who are contributing significantly to the rapid development in AI. We see several women leading in AI having various AI skills. One such woman AI researcher who has turned into an AI influencer driving value to the work that she has done in her field is Prof. Sunita Sarawagi.
The present wave of artificial intelligence and machine learning has produced top women in AI. Prof. Sunita Sarawagi is an AI influencer who has excelled in her field with invincible strength and intensity.
Who is Sunita Sarawagi, the AI Influencer?
- Dr. Sunita Sarawagi is the Institute Chair Professor at IIT Bombay in Computer Science and Engineering.
- She is a woman AI researcher who has several research papers and patents registered on her name.
- She was a visiting AI scientist at Google Research Mount View, Mountain View, California from July 2014 to June 2016.
- From August 1996 to February 1999, she was the research staff member in the QUEST database mining group at the IBM Almaden Research Centre.
- She received the best paper award at the ACM-SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data in 1998.
Educational Qualifications of Prof. Sunita Sarawagi
- Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley in Computer Science
- M.S. from University of California at Berkeley in Computer Science
- B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kharagpur, India
Research Interests of Dr. Sunita Sarawagi
- Data integration
- Databases
- Data Analytics
- Statistics
- Machine Learning
- Structured learning
- Web information extraction
- Domain adaptation
- Human intervention in learning
- Graphical models
Some recent research works of Prof. Sunita Sarawagi
- Human intervenable and modular learning
- Neural models for sequence prediction with applications related to dialogue generation
- Domain Adaptation and Domain Generalization
- Inference algorithms in information extraction from graphical models
Professional activities of Prof. Sunita Sarawagi
- Member of the Board of Directors at ACM SIGKDD (2005 – Present)
- Editorial Board of Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning (2007 – Present)
- Editorial Board of ACM Transactions of KDD (2005 – Present)
- IT subcommittee of the RBI in 2018
- Editorial Board of ACM TODS (2004 – 2007)
- Associate Editor at IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin (2000 – 2001)
- John Von Neumann Medal Committee IEEE (2017)
Sunita Sarawagi – Winner of the Infosys Award in 2019
- Professor Sunita Sarawagi, the AI woman, AI researcher and AI influencer won the Infosys Prize in Engineering and Computer Science in the year 2019.
- She bagged the prestigious Infosys Award for her pioneering work in developing techniques of information extraction for unstructured data.
- Her knowledge in databases, machine learning, data mining, and natural language processing were crucial for her AI research in developing information extraction techniques.
- Sunita Sarawagi along with Manjula Reddy of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad were the two women who were awarded the Infosys Prize in 2019.
Information Extraction Book by Sunita Sarawagi
- Prof. Sunita Sarawagi has written a book titled ‘Information Extraction’ in the year 2008 published by Now Publishers Inc.
- This book deals with information extraction and data cleaning.
- The book has a survey of the information extraction research over the last two decades from different communities of researchers.
- The book covers different techniques from machine learning, databases, computational linguistics, and information retrieval for different aspects of information extraction problems.
Interactive Deduplication using Active Learning by Prof. Sunita Sarawagi and Anuradha Bhamidipaty
- Deduplication is a crucial operation in data integration from multiple resources.
- The main challenge in deduplication is to design a function that can sort out when a pair of data records refer to the same entity in spite of different data inconsistencies.
- In this research paper, Prof. Sunita Sarawagi and Anuradha Bhamidipaty presented a design of a deduplication system based on active learning.
- They performed real-life experiments of datasets to reveal that active learning drastically reduces the number of instances required to achieve high accuracy.
- They examined various design issues that came up in building a system to offer fast, interactive, and interpretable output.
The contribution of women in AI is paramount and the need of the hour. Women AI influencers will reduce the gender gap that exists in the tech world. The contributions made by Sunita Sarawagi, a powerful AI influencer will inspire other women in AI and the youth to not only become AI scientists and AI researchers but become AI influencers in the long run.
