In this podcast episode, we talked with Lavanya Gupta about Building a Strong Career in Data. About the Speaker: Lavanya is a Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) alumni of the Language Technologies Institute (LTI). She works as a Sr. AI/ML Applied Associate at JPMorgan Chase in their specialized Machine Learning Center of Excellence (MLCOE) vertical. Her latest research on long-context evaluation of LLMs was published in EMNLP 2024.

In addition to having a strong industrial research background of 5+ years, she is also an enthusiastic technical speaker. She has delivered talks at events such as Women in Data Science (WiDS) 2021, PyData, Illuminate AI 2021, TensorFlow User Group (TFUG), and MindHack! Summit. She also serves as a reviewer at top-tier NLP conferences (NeurIPS 2024, ICLR 2025, NAACL 2025). Additionally, through her collaborations with various prestigious organizations, like Anita BOrg and Women in Coding and Data Science (WiCDS), she is committed to mentoring aspiring machine learning enthusiasts.

In this episode, we talk about Lavanya Gupta’s journey from software engineer to AI researcher. She shares how hackathons sparked her passion for machine learning, her transition into NLP, and her current work benchmarking large language models in finance. Tune in for practical insights on building a strong data career and navigating the evolving AI landscape.

🕒 TIMECODES 00:00 Lavanya’s journey from software engineer to AI researcher 10:15 Benchmarking long context language models 12:36 Limitations of large context models in real domains 14:54 Handling large documents and publishing research in industry 19:45 Building a data science career: publications, motivation, and mentorship 25:01 Self-learning, hackathons, and networking 33:24 Community work and Kaggle projects 37:32 Mentorship and open-ended guidance 51:28 Building a strong data science portfolio 🔗 CONNECT WITH LAVANYALinkedIn -   / lgupta18  🔗 CONNECT WITH DataTalksClub Join the community - https://datatalks.club/slack.html Subscribe to our Google calendar to have all our events in your calendar - https://calendar.google.com/calendar/... Check other upcoming events - https://lu.ma/dtc-events LinkedIn -   / datatalks-club   Twitter -   / datatalksclub   Website - https://datatalks.club/

We talked about:

Merve’s background Merve’s first contributions to open source What Merve currently does at Hugging Face (Hub, Spaces) What is means to be a developer advocacy engineer at Hugging Face The best way to get open source experience (Google Summer of Code, Hacktoberfest, and sprints) The peculiarities of hiring as it relates to code contributions Best resources to learn about NLP besides Hugging Face Good first projects for NLP The most important topics in NLP right now NLP ML Engineer vs NLP Data Scientist Project recommendations and other advice to catch the eye of recruiters Merve on Twitch and her podcast Finding Merve online Merve and Mario Kart

Links:

Hugging Face Course: https://hf.co/course Natural Language Processing in TensorFlow: https://www.coursera.org/learn/natural-language-processing-tensorflow Github ML Poetry: https://github.com/merveenoyan/ML-poetry Tackling multiple tasks with a single visual language model: https://www.deepmind.com/blog/tackling-multiple-tasks-with-a-single-visual-language-model Hugging Face big science/TOpp: https://huggingface.co/bigscience/T0pp Pathways Language Model (PaLM) blog: https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/04/pathways-language-model-palm-scaling-to.html

MLOps Zoomcamp: https://github.com/DataTalksClub/mlops-zoomcamp

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