Kaleen Shrestha is a member of the inaugural class of Baskin Engineering’s new M.S. in Natural Language Processing (NLP) program. She is also an undergraduate alumna of UC Santa Cruz, where she majored in computer science.

What made you decide to attend UCSC’s NLP Program?

I attended UCSC as an undergraduate and received my bachelor’s in computer science. I was fascinated by AI and wanted to explore the topics in that field some more, and so I decided to apply to graduate school. I was primarily interested in the ethical use of AI: understanding its implications and using it consciously.

When I applied to UCSC, I actually applied to the computer science and engineering MS program. Professor Marilyn Walker reached out to me through email because I had expressed interest in NLP in my application and talked to me about the NLP program. I got interested because the program was new and I thought it would be flexible and practical, and it showed a lot of room for growth.

Tell us more about your interest in NLP and how it has changed since you started the program.

I was curious about what interesting problems exist in NLP when joining the program. I had read a couple of interesting articles about NLP and had taken an introductory undergraduate course; in particular, an article that helped spark my interest in NLP was about gender bias in data and how it was amplified by the language model that was trained on that data. At that time I was taking Professor Lise Getoor’s new Ethics and Algorithms class and got interested in ethics in AI. I thought to myself, wow, things like this pop up in NLP and I want to work on this.

Now that I am a part of the program, I would say the courses really opened my eyes to the challenges in dealing with natural language. For example, in a linguistics class, we were learning about pragmatics and semantics which helped me realize that natural language is inherently biased on the individual and corpus level. Individually, there can be various styles for communicating a topic. On the corpus level, there are things like reporting bias, where the data available are only generated by certain types of people, for example. So this leads to problems in machine learning where models are dependent on patterns found in the data. So, I’m really glad to have found such an interesting subfield of AI where I can apply my interests in ethical data science.

What do you like about UCSC and the NLP Program?

Something that really stands out to me is my peers and fellow classmates. They have a great attitude towards learning. Everyone is very down to earth and humble when it comes to figuring out a challenging problem. This learning atmosphere is something that I didn’t see during my time in high school, and it was something that I really enjoyed during my time as an undergraduate at UCSC.

The question-asking and humble learning attitude was something that was really important for my learning and so that helped me choose UCSC for graduate school. In the NLP program, the professors are all very eager to help and open to answering questions. Since this is a new program, there are new situations that we have to adapt to and learn from, which I feel prepares us well for future endeavors in research and industry.

What would you like to do after you complete your NLP degree?

I want to ground myself in a practical application, that is something I really want to strive for and focus on. This program is really practical and I want to find a problem in industry to work on. I want to find a job and if I find an interesting problem, I would work on it in a PhD program or research.

What are some hobbies or fun facts about yourself?

I like gardening, and I recently propagated my avocado plant out of a seed. It took a whopping 6 months to get it to sprout, but now it is more than a foot tall! I also love hiking. At the UCSC campus, just walking to class is a hike.

Fun fact: my first name is made up completely, the spelling, everything! However, I found out that my name is the name of a well-established suburb in Australia. My name apparently also means water in an indigenous Australian language.

LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaleen-shrestha

Adam Fidler is a member of the inaugural class of Baskin Engineering’s new M.S. in Natural Language Processing (NLP). He spoke with us about what he likes most about the program so far and his aspirations for a career in NLP.

I grew up with computers, so choosing to go in that direction was pretty easy. But after spending two years in Japan I realized I love languages too and wanted to see if there was an overlap between linguistics and computer science. After doing some research I found natural language processing (NLP) and realized it was something I wanted to do.

Why did you choose UCSC?

One of my NLP professors heard about the program from a linguistics mailing list. I applied on a whim, and I was happy to get in!

My undergrad prepared me pretty well for the things we’re talking about. I managed to essentially combine linguistics, computer science and applied mathematics into one major and it seems like it was good preparation for what I’m studying now.

What do you think of the program?

So far I like it. I think there will be plenty of networking opportunities, which is great because so many of our faculty members are in the industry right now.

My favorite class so far is machine learning. As an applied math student, I did a lot of machine learning. So the class means taking those things I learned about and applying them to linguistics.

I’m really looking forward to doing projects for our classes.

What are your plans after you graduate?

I love digital assistants like Siri and Alexa. Being able to work on something like that would be really neat. Everyone is using them… so I’d love to make them even better. I see them becoming much better at more generalized tasks. This is kind of a silly example, but I think of J.A.R.V.I.S. from The Avengers (Iron Man’s artificial intelligence) as the ideal. It would be wonderful to have something that generalized. We’re still a ways off from something so conversational and human-like. A lot of progress has been made and I’m happy to be pushing the limits of what we can do.

As for a career, academia has always intrigued me. I was a research assistant at BYU. It was a ton of fun and I love teaching, but I also really like the idea of going into industry and working for a startup, big tech company, or really anywhere that I could use the skills I pick up here because NLP is something I love.

What are some hobbies or fun facts about yourself?

I like hanging out with people, so of course these lockdowns have been driving me nuts. I hesitate to call math a hobby, but I think of it as one of my hobbies.

I took a course in Chaos Theory from the professor I worked for. You could say it’s the idea of studying how small perturbations affect something in the end, like the weather. It’s a chaotic, dynamical system we can model, but if you change the input ever so slightly, it can cause totally different results.

I spend more hours than is probably productive watching Youtube videos of math and math lectures.