Undergraduate major: BE Computer Engineering
Undergraduate Institution: Pune Institute of Computer Technology
Hometown: Mumbai, India
Driven by his interest in NLP, Mridul joined the NLP program after working in the gaming industry for 4 years. He hopes to eventually apply the skills gained in the program to an engineering role in NLP or machine learning. He currently serves as a program Student Ambassador on the social media team.
What led you to your interest in NLP?
After my Bachelors in 2018, I worked with Ubisoft Entertainment. My responsibilities included developing automation tools using Reinforcement learning, computer vision, and natural language processing. I did a project that was related to analyzing sentiments of players on various communities and discussion forums for newly launched games. The number of players in gaming has been on an exponential rise, and analyzing that data has been critical for gaming companies. That project sparked my interest in NLP, and I decided to pursue it for my master’s.
What excites you about NLP development?
Gaming definitely interests me. I am also interested in the field of finance and how NLP is being used in that industry. These are the directions that I would like to take in my career path.
What do you think about the program so far?
It’s been a great learning curve for me. When I came here, I had very little knowledge of NLP, and it was high-level. But after going through the program, I now have a theoretical and mathematical understanding of concepts. As a researcher or working in industry, having that theoretical knowledge really differentiates you. One course in particular–Deep Learning for NLP that I took in Fall–gave a tremendous boost to my learning curve, and that experience was awesome.
Can you tell me about your Student Ambassador experience?
My responsibility as a Student Ambassador is to develop content and promote our NLP program on various social media platforms. I also post about uses of NLP and how it is being applied to industries. I look at the first post I made versus the posts I make now, and I can see growth in the content I am making. There is a huge difference in the way things are framed on various platforms, and every social media platform requires different content.
I currently focus on Reddit and Twitter, simultaneously sometimes creating posts on LinkedIn and Facebook as well. The audience is different. For example, on Reddit, I focus on the NLP seminar, and I go to subreddit groups to talk about technical content like machine translation and transformers. On Twitter, I focus more on events at Silicon Valley Campus like internship fairs or gaming events. Being a Student Ambassador helps me build on my communication skills and grow as a content creator. This experience teaches you to market yourself to the outside world and professionals.
What do you plan to do when you graduate?
I am open to engineering and research roles, but I am more focused on engineering roles in the NLP field around NLP and machine learning. I’m also open to roles in reinforcement learning or computer vision as a data science or machine learning engineer.
Are there technical or societal problems that you hope to solve in the future?
Data in the gaming community has been on an exponential rise. It is important to shape this data so that it can be analyzed by gaming companies for their benefit. I look forward to using the knowledge I have gained in the NLP program and applying it to analyze games.