Sona Elza Simon
PhD Scholar at C-MInDS, IIT Bombay
Supervisor: Prof. Preethi Jyothi
PhD Scholar at C-MInDS, IIT Bombay
Supervisor: Prof. Preethi Jyothi
EDUCATION
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay [2022 – Present]
Ph.D. at Centre for Machine Intelligence and Data Science (C-MInDS)
Indian Institute of Information Technology Design & Manufacturing (IIITDM), Kancheepuram [2018 – 2022]
B.Tech + Honours in Computer Science and Engineering
Nirmala Matha Central School, Thrissur [2015 – 2017]
Higher Secondary Education (CBSE)
St. Patrick’s Academy, Angamaly [2005 – 2015]
Primary and Secondary Education (ICSE)
EXPERIENCE
Research Scientist Intern | Amazon [May, 2025 – Nov, 2025]
Working on efficient cross-lingual transfer learning approaches for multilingual reasoning.
Developed a unified framework to enhance the multilingual capabilities of pretrained large language models without task-specific supervision.
Research Intern | IIT Kanpur [Jan, 2022 – May, 2022]
Worked on tackling the problem of graph compression in collaboration with Prof. Arnab Bhattacharya (IIT Kanpur), Dr. Oswald C. (IIT Kanpur), Shubhadip Mitra (TCS) and Dr. Arindam Pal (CSIRO). Proposed CGS, a configurable graph summarization framework that supports both lossless and user-controlled lossy compression.
Worked on tackling the problem of efficient translation of code-mixed English-Malayalam text to English under the guidance of Prof. Arnab Bhattacharya and Dr. Oswald C. from IIT Kanpur.
Research Intern | IIT Kanpur [May, 2021 – Oct, 2021]
Worked on the problem of efficient spam detection in SMS messages. Proposed SpotSpam, an efficient spam detection algorithm that uses the intention analysis to detect malicious text.
Research work done under the guidance of Prof. Arnab Bhattacharya and Dr. Oswald C. from IIT Kanpur.
ROLES & RESPONSIBILITIES
Organizer, Conclave on AI for Science: India AI Impact Summit 2026, IIT Bombay (2024)
TechConnect Symposium Organizer, C-MInDS, IIT Bombay (2024)
Department Cultural Secretary, C-MInDS, IIT Bombay (2023 - 2024)
Vice-President, Malayali Cultural Association, IIT Bombay (2023 - 2024)
Placement Co-ordinator, CSE, IIITDM Kancheepuram (2021 - 2022)
Department Placement Volunteer, CSE, IIITDM Kancheepuram (2020 - 2021)
ACHIEVEMENTS
Recipient of TCS Research Scholar Fellowship, IIT Bombay (2024 - 2028).
Recipient of Megan Kacholia Research Fellowship by C-MInDS, IIT Bombay (2023 - 2024).
Received Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) Award for Academic Excellence in 2015.
Represented the school at the ICSE Annual Sports Meet (2013 - 2015).
CONFERENCES & SYMPOSIUMS
Indian Symposium on Machine Learning (IndoML) (December 19-21, 2025)
The 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2025) (November 4 - 9, 2025)
Amazon-IIT Bombay AI/ML Symposium (August 6, 2025)
The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025) (July 27- August 1, 2025)
Google DeepMind Research Symposium (January 27-28, 2025)
Indian Symposium on Machine Learning (IndoML) (December 21-23, 2024)
Amazon Research Days 2024 (November 23-24, 2024)
Indian Symposium on Machine Learning (IndoML) (December 21-23, 2023)
TEACHING ASSISTANT
CS725: Foundations of Machine Learning by Prof. Preethi Jyothi (Autumn 2024, IIT Bombay)
CS753: Automatic Speech Recognition by Prof. Preethi Jyothi (Spring 2024, IIT Bombay)
DS203: Programming for Data Science by Prof. Vinay Kulkarni (Autumn 2023, IIT Bombay)
CL603: Optimization by Prof. Mani Bhushan (Spring 2023, IIT Bombay)