Vaisnavi Nemala: Finding the Perfect AI Match from Day One to Graduation

A bourgeoning interest in AI that began in high school created a serendipitous fast track to success for Vaisnavi Nemala '24, who came to NJIT as a student in the Ying Wu College of Computing and the Albert Dorman Honors College just in time to join the newly launched B.S. in Data Science in fall 2021. After only one week as a newly minted freshman, she was already engaged in a research project with Associate Professor Hai Phan that would ultimately have her presenting a paper as lead author at the 32^nd ACM CIKM 2023 conference in Birmingham, England.

Now, as one of the first to graduate from the B.S. in Data Science program (in only three years), she will join a major post-trade financial services company as an AI/ML engineer for four months prior to beginning the highly competitive M.S. in Artificial Intelligence Engineering at Carnegie Mellon - one of the top institutions for information security in the U.S. She will attend the university as a recipient of their INI Director's Fellowship, which provides $45,000 as a partial-tuition merit scholarship.

Nemala's quest to learn more about AI took shape almost immediately when she met Phan, an expert in trustworthy AI, and began the ongoing research relationship that would produce the paper, Differential Privacy in HyperNetworks for Personalized Learning, on which she served as lead principal investigator and presented in Birmingham as the only undergraduate among Ph.D. candidates from several of the top institutions in the country, including Carnegie Mellon.

She initially entered Phan's lab with little prior programming knowledge and proceeded to learn machine learning from scratch on her own time, which resulted in creating her first algorithm and preparing her to contribute meaningfully to the project over the next two years.

Her passion for exploring the social implications of user privacy in AI systems combined her principal interests in information security and AI and was put into practice in internships and co-ops, including an assignment with Optum, Inc., a healthcare services provider.

Following acceptances into AI and data science programs from UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and Duke Universities, and offers for two programs at Carnegie Mellon, Nemala chose the latter university based not only on the INI Director's Fellowship award, but the opportunity to conduct research on the interpretability and fairness of AI systems. This, she stated, was "the perfect match" of everything she envisioned as part of her life's work.

Upon completion of her master's degree, she would like to build a career in fields related to finance, homeland security or big tech.

Although she is eager to begin the next phase of her education and research, Nemala will always look back with fondness on her time at NJIT, and credits the university with helping to mold and support her ability to make an impact in her life and the world around her.

"I am so grateful for the wealth of opportunities NJIT and YWCC have offered me. Everyone has been so helpful. They really want you to succeed here!" she said.

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