Published on 02, Mar 2023

    Mona Mona Guides Companies into the Future of AI/ML and Cloud Computing

The next time you drive around your city or town, take a really good look at everything around you. The shops, homes, and streets may appear the same as always, but looks can be deceiving. Our society is in the midst of a technological revolution as machine learning and artificial intelligence are implemented on a wide scale. One woman at the middle of this shift is Mona Mona, who as a Google AI/ML Customer Engineer guides companies to adopt ML and cloud computing in their daily operations. She frequently appears at conferences to explain the latest industry advancements and is the prolific author of Natural Language Processing with AWS AI Services, 19 blog posts, and numerous technical articles. Now, with her next book, Google Cloud Certified Professional Machine Learning Study Guide, set to be published, we sat down with Mona to learn more about her background, including how she has emerged as a leader of the next generation of AI/ML specialists.

“I have been in software design, development, and integration for over ten years now, and it is everything I hoped it would be when I was studying Computer Science in India,” says Mona. “Once I graduated, I came to America because I wanted to attend grad school and because I could see that I would have many opportunities for a career in artificial intelligence. I then earned my master’s degree in Computer Information Systems from Georgia State University in 2017.”

After graduating from Georgia State University, Mona joined Amazon in AWS Worldwide Public Sector as an Associate Solutions Architect in the Tech U program, which develops young talent to become an Enterprise Cloud Architect. She transitioned to working as an AI/ML Solution Architect to pursue her passion for AI/ML. In this role, she mentored many associates who were trying to get into the AI/ML side of things. 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. 

Mona began blogging and writing articles because as a solution architect, she wanted to evangelize the cloud and AI technologies to help everything from small startups to big enterprises.

“Artificial intelligence and NLP are highly technical, of course, and there was a lack of quality materials that could explain them,” she says. “I decided to publish what I knew so that anyone who wants to understand AI/ML can easily do so.”

In addition to her two books, Mona has written several technical articles on various use cases and topics such as handwritten document processing, NLP based search, How to augment machine learning with humans in the loop, text classification and image classification. She also writes about Explainable AI and also done a podcast on the same topic, as in today’s world, AI comes with responsibility to implement. She recently created a cloud environment called RAD Lab with DeepMind’s AlphaFold module to help researchers get started with protein folding problems.

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. Last year she spoke at the ISCB (International Society for Computational Biology) Conference, where she presented the RAD Lab platform and explained how it enables researchers to collaborate more efficiently and quickly launch their projects. 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 was also a breakout speaker for a session which talks about how to automate documents using Low code/no Code Cloud AI solutions. The summit was attended by 10,000 people. 

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 early career graduates to build careers in AI and cloud computing. As a recognized subject matter expert (SME), Mona will be doing a talk on “Natural Language Processing in the Cloud” for SWE in March 2023.

“It is so important to me that people interested in STEM believe in themselves and have the ability to go as far as they want,” 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.”

Mona remains committed to helping businesses, students, and the general public to understand how AI/ML are improving our society. “There is tremendous potential with using the cloud to enable AI/ML adoption to reinvent business,” she believes. “It provides low-code and no-code AI solutions that can be implemented by people who are not experts in machine learning. With access to unlimited computations and data storage but minus the heavy lifting of managing the infrastructure, there is nothing our world won’t be able to do.”

To connect with Mona Mona and learn more about AI, natural language processing, and machine learning or to get career guidance, please see her website or follow her on LinkedIn.