Welcome !
I am a first-year PhD student at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University where I am advised by Fernando Diaz. I work on evaluating language technologies, with a focus on ethical and sociocultral considerations. I broadly interested in how language, technology, and society interact and shape each other, ultimately to develop technology that can create positive impact for diverse user groups.
I am interning at Semantic Scholar, at AI2 this summer, thinking about scientific communities and writing assistance for researchers. Drop me a line if you are in Seattle.
Prior to CMU, I was Predoctoral Researcher working at the NLU Group at Google Research, India where I worked with Partha Talukdar and Vinodkumar Prabhakaran on bias and fairness in multilingual models in the Indian context. Before that I spent a year at Microsoft Research, India. I worked with Sunayana Sitaram and Monojit Choudhary on interpretable evaluation of multilingual NLP models.
I graduated from BITS Pilani with a B.E in Computer Science in 2021. During my undergrad, I worked on multimodal fake news detection, knowledge-based fact verification, and domain adaptation.
News:
[June 2024] Attending NAACL in Mexico City, and co-organizing the Queer in AI workshop and a Bird of Feather session on Cultural Considerations in NLP.
[May 2024] I will be interning at Semantic Scholar at Allen Institute of AI, and looking forward to Seattle this summer! =D
[Aug 2023] I started my PhD at LTI, CMU.
[Oct 2022] Work on fairness in the Indian context from Google Research and on scalable and interpretable multilingual evaluation from my internship at MSR, were accepted to AACL 2022.
[Dec 2021] Paper on limitations and capabilites of LMs paper accepted to ICON 2021.
[Oct 2021] I started a github repo to curate advice related to grad school applications and research. Please contribute!
DEI Efforts and Career Philosophy:
I am an organiser at Queer in AI, where I help run our workshops and other initiatives to promote inclusion in the ACL community. Before that, I was co-organizing for WiNLP (Widening NLP), an organisation that supports underrepresented groups in NLP. I am always looking for opportunities to do my bit to make the ACL, ML, and STeM communities more welcoming to everyone. In my undergrad, I worked for educational and mental health initiatives for underprivileged kids for over three years.
DEI efforts and advocacy have always been an integral part of my life. My volunteer work profoundly shapes my views around access and the impact of technology and social opportunities. The interaction of society and technology is drastically altering how opportunities and margnilasation for underrepresented communities can be, and is being, created. The landscape of AI and NLP for societal applications has a lot of uncharted territories. We need to understand who our technology affects and how to ensure that we do not harm the sections we seek to uplift. In the best case, language technologies and AI can lead to the creation of an ecosystem of equity. But for that, technology can only genuinely benefit society when the people for whom it is being created are included in the process. So, we need to empower and listen to diverse voices in and outside of the research communities.
Contact
Reach me at: shaily@cmu.edu or on one of the following social media, I am typically most active on twitter :)
I am particularly happy to help undergraduate students, especially women interested in NLP/ML, with exploring research, applying for research internships, full-time roles, or graduate studies (MS / PhD). I am open to talking about how I can help DEI efforts in the ACL and ML communities.