Degree Program: Natural Language Processing MS
Hometown: San Jose, CA
Undergraduate Institution: University of California, Santa Cruz
Graduate Institution: University of California, Santa Cruz
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.