Prof. Sunita Sarawagi is an Indian computer scientist currently as Institute Chair Professor at IIT Bombay. She is best known for her research in machine learning and data mining in India. Being one of the pioneers in the field of computer science for almost 20 years, she has investigated the area of structured information extraction from databases for use in automation and applications.

Her career started with a Bachelor’s degree from IIT Kharagpur, where she was the only female candidate in her batch. She pursued her Master’s and Doctoral degrees from the University of California, Berkeley.

After working as a researcher in IBM at San Jose, California, she worked as an assistant professor at IIT Bombay. Now she heads the Center for Machine Intelligence and Data Science.

In 2019, she won the Infosys Prize on Engineering and Computer Science “for her research in data mining, machine learning and natural language processing and its applications in research techniques. It was a matter of honour in 2020; she was elected as an ACM Fellow ( Association for Computing Machinery) in New york.

Recently, she has been working on ” bowels of machine learning” to reuse deep neural network models that can be used in applications such as translation. Her contribution to the platforms such as youtube is remarkable. With two years in Google headquarters in California as a Visiting Scientist, her expertise improved, and she solved numerous issues.

She believes there has been a change in the number of women leading the computer science field, and anticipates the trend to rise even further.

Image Credit – IIT Bombay.