Undergraduate major: BTech Electrical, Electronics, and Communication Engineering
Undergraduate Institution: Jaypee Institute of Information Technology
Hometown: Kanpur, India
Passionate about NLP research, Shashwat aims to solve problems within NLP, as well as in society, using NLP technology and contribute to the rapid growth of the field. Shashwat also brings to the program interdisciplinary interests in linguistics and ethics in relation to AI/NLP. Read on to find out more about this member of the 2022-2023 cohort.
What led you to your interest in NLP?
I was intrigued by data science in my first year of undergrad. Once I started progressing through the field from data science to machine learning to deep learning, I realized that there is a huge scope in this field.
What excites you about NLP Development?
The most interesting thing about NLP is the current market and new innovations that are happening right now. There is no better time to study NLP like right now. There are all the upcoming large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT (we now have GPT-4), D5, and even Facebook is coming into this market as well. There is a huge scope for development and these models are not only used for NLP—they can be deployed in computer vision and signal processing. These are the key areas in NLP right now, and they are pioneering the future of technology.
What do you think about the program so far?
To be honest, I was a little skeptical when I initially joined because NLP is a very specific field when we talk about AI. But as I’m progressing in this course, I feel that the curriculum offered is absolutely amazing. We started with the initial primer in data science, then moved to Pytorch (which is the technology used for deep learning development), and now we are moving onto transformers (the architecture that GPTs are based on). Progressing onto the Capstone project, I feel it is very important to apply what we are learning on business-use cases. The fact that this course is being offered at very limited universities right now makes it amazing.
What classes are you taking right now?
I am currently taking NLP 244 Advanced Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing where we learn about the latest ventures in NLP and how research has taken place. The fact that developments that we are studying right now did not even exist 5 years ago makes it really exceptional. I am also taking NLP 267 Machine Translation which I feel is a core subject of NLP, and it’s great how we are learning so much about it. NLP 202 is more on linguistics and how language processing works.
Can you expand more on how linguistics plays into NLP?
Most of the time, when we talk about AI and deep learning we only talk about models and technical stuff like Pytorch. To excel in NLP, it is important to get into linguistics, such as understanding Chomsky’s rules on language. These are essential when we are traversing through this field.
What would you like to do after you complete your NLP degree?
Speaking specifically as an engineer, my goals have always been to get into research and work on cutting edge technology, solving pressing problems in NLP as well as in society. There is a huge debate going on about ethics and morality, and I feel this is where I can contribute as an NLP engineer.
Can you elaborate more on the ethics and morality in NLP?
We are going through an age of generative AI in the form of text, image, audio. Current models often hallucinate and give random pieces of information. In this huge pool of data, we have to point out and create a disparity between real and unreal information. On the data side of deep learning, we have to ask how we are getting the data and ensure that the data we are collecting is unbiased. It is important to focus on these issues as an engineer and draw a clear line of ethics and morality to understand whether or not what we are doing is right or wrong.
Aside from NLP, what are your other interests and hobbies?
After I’m done with my academics, I try to work out. I am really into music. Right now I can only listen to it, but usually I would play piano or unwind through composing pieces. Other than that, I am also interested in Formula 1 and football (soccer).