PES Alumni Spotlight

Abhilasha Ravichander is enrolled for MS Program at the Language Technology Institute of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) where she is currently a Graduate Research Assistant under Dr Eric Nyberg. With a GPA of 4.04/4.00 she has undertaken important assignments at the university. She designed models and methodologies for supervised semantic parsing in domains starting from zero training examples for Bosch Ubiquitous Personal Assistant. She was associated with the development of Data Driven Discovery of Models for DARPA. This involved creating an assistant to help experts interact with datasets and incorporate domain knowledge into Machine Learning models through interactive dialog and visualizations. She contributed to building an open-domain socialbot to engage users in conversation on Amazon’s Alexa platform and retrieval-based models and strategies for dialog from community question answering. Her team was one amongst 12 teams in the world chosen for sponsorship of 100,000 USD stipend by Amazon to compete in the Alexa Prize. Three of the papers written as a graduate student were under the guidance of Dr S.Natarajan. As a student of CMU she has published four papers and was a reviewer of CoNLL, one of the top conferences of Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL). Abhilasha started her career as a Platform Engineer at Sensara after graduating in BE Computer Science and Engineering with distinction from PES Institute of Technology.