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Older generations remember when artificial intelligence and machine learning were merely theoretical and only in sci-fi movies. Those days are over, as AI and ML are being implemented in industries that include everything from retail to healthcare. One expert at the center of this transition is Mona Mona, an AI/ML Customer Engineer at Google, where she leads organizations to adopt ML and cloud computing in their business practices. Mona is an in-demand panelist at conferences and is the published author of Natural Language Processing with AWS AI Services, 19 blog posts, and numerous technical articles. She is also the upcoming published author of Google Cloud Certified Professional Machine Learning Study Guide, which will help students and professionals who seek a career in ML and cloud computing. Through her efforts to build the AI infrastructure for companies and educate the next generation of AI/ML specialists, Mona is helping society to thrive in the new world of ML.
Before carving out her 10-year career in software design, development, and integration, Mona earned her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science in India. Her dream was to come to the United States and continue her education so that she could go further in AI/ML and cloud technology.
“I knew that artificial intelligence was going to play an exciting role in society, and I wanted to be part of it,” Mona recalls. “So, I came to America and enrolled at Georgia State University, where I earned my master’s degree in Computer Information Systems.”
After graduating from Georgia State University in 2017, Mona joined Amazon in AWS Worldwide Public Sector as an AI/ML Specialist Solutions Architect. Working with peers who shared her passion for natural language processing (NLP) and ML explainability areas was a dream come true for her.
“It was incredible to guide our customers to adopt ML on a large scale using flexible, resilient cloud architecture,” Mona says. “It was also a lot of fun to work with schools to help students to learn more about machine learning. It’s very important to me that every developer, regardless of their background, has the ability to use machine learning. That’s why I developed several courses for AWS AI/ML Certification Speciality Exam Readiness and Google Cloud Certified Professional Machine Learning Study Guide – I wanted future test takers to have the tools they need to be successful.”
In November 2021, Mona was hired by Google to be an AI/ML Customer Engineer for the Google Cloud Platform. She is fascinated by her work, which involves developing the ability of computers to understand natural languages so that common tasks can become automated.
One of Mona’s biggest goals is to simplify AI/ML for anyone who wants to understand it despite having no background in it. “I began writing blogs and articles because I believe deeply in the power of education,” she reveals. “This technology is having a profound impact on our lives, and I want to pass on what I know to other people so that our society will become stronger and more developed.”
In addition to her two books, Mona has written technical articles that include “RAD Lab AlphaFold Module for Researchers,” “Segment Paragraphs and Detect Insights with Amazon Textract and Amazon Comprehend,” Training, Debugging and Running Time Series Forecasting Models with the GluonTS Toolkit on Amazon SageMaker,” and “ML Explainability with Amazon SageMaker Debugger,” among others. During the COVID pandemic, Mona also co-authored a research paper that evaluates AWS CORD-19 Search (ACS), a neural, natural-language-based search engine powered by ML.
Due to her ability to explain complex concepts in easy and engaging ways, Mona has become a sought-after SME/speaker at industry conferences and online. On AWS Power Hour on Twitch, she taught developers how to use NLP, Python APIs, and Amazon Comprehend. Mona spoke on intelligent document processing for financial service companies at AWS re:Invent 2020, and she led the ML Track for AWS DC Summit 2021, where she spoke on optical character recognition and NLP. The summit was attended by 10,000 people. Mona has also given listeners insights into her experiences at Google as an AI/ML Customer Engineer.
While her writing and her work at Google keep her busy, Mona still makes time for mentoring the next generation of female STEM workers. Through the Society for Women Engineers (SWE), she is focused on empowering girls and women to build careers in AI and cloud computing.
“It is so important to me that they believe in themselves and have the ability to go as far as they want to in STEM,” Mona states. “I hope that my own work in AI/ML can open doors for other women to do the same.”
While she has enjoyed her time in the United States and has cultivated deep ties here, part of her heart is still in India, where in 2008 during her undergraduate years, she co-founded and led Koshish KKDK, an NGO for educating poor children.
“I served as its Treasurer and Finance Head,” says Mona. “It was one of my greatest joys to develop its funding so that our programs could be stronger and more children be impacted.”
Her work to advance her industry and society has not gone unnoticed. Recently, Georgia State University named her as an inspiring alumni for undergraduates and graduates. She says that it was a tremendous honor for her alma mater to recognize her achievements.
“As exciting as this was, I am focused on the future of AI/ML, which is generative AI and large language models. I am working to empower students and industry professionals who are planning a career in the AI/ML space,” states Mona. “I also want to solve complex industry problems, such as document processing, searches, text summarization, and question-answering chatbots. I want to help organizations architect highly available, secure, cost-effective, and scalable AI/ML solutions on the cloud platform.”
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