Published on 09, Apr 2023

Cloud Computing Expert Mona Mona Helps to Redefine Our World with AI/ML

Incredible though it sometimes seems, we are long past the days when the concept of machine learning was hypothetical. Artificial intelligence is now a reality, and across industries, businesses are grappling with how to implement it into their practices. Assisting them is Mona Mona, who in only a few short years has become a SME in demand at conferences, universities, and companies. At Google, where she works as an AI/ML Customer Engineer, Mona works with companies to seamlessly adopt ML and cloud computing into their operations. She is also passing on her wealth of knowledge to the next generation of AI specialists by publishing her research, tutorials, and guides, including Natural Language Processing with AWS AI Services, which is featured on the list of best natural language processing books of all time and is part of Georgia State University’s curriculum. She has also written 19 blog posts and numerous technical articles. Her next book, Google Cloud Certified Professional Machine Learning Study Guide, will be out in 2023, and she has become a recognized speaker on YouTube and at conferences. Mona is, at heart, a visionary, and she is determined to pave the way for a society empowered by AI/ML.

“I was always very interested in the power of computers, even when I was a child, and I loved participating in hackathons when HTML was the new hot thing,” Mona recalls. “When I graduated from high school and got into college in India, I couldn’t wait to study computer science. It was at the forefront of so many advancements, and I was ready to contribute to the field.”

In the United States, she got her master’s degree in Computer Information Systems at Georgia State University, taking her skills and knowledge to a new level. “That was very rewarding because I learned so much from some of the finest minds in computer science and networked with them,” Mona says. 

After graduating from Georgia State University in 2017, Mona joined Amazon in AWS  Worldwide Public Sector as an Associate Solution Architect. She realized she wanted to do AI/ML and transitioned from a generalist Solution Architect to an AI/ML Specialist Solution Architect. She mentored many associate solution architects looking to transition to AI/ML in her tenure at Amazon. 

“It was wonderful to guide our customers to adopt ML on a large scale using flexible, resilient cloud architecture,” Mona says. “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 solving interesting customer problems in the public sector using Google Cloud AI/ML technology.

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 to help customers implement cloud AI solutions. Each of my blogs focuses on industry problems, such as document processing, NLP-based searches, and chatbots,” she reveals. “Each of these blogs addresses how cloud AI technologies can help solve these problems by providing step-by-step code and implementation. Some of my blogs have been adopted by customers, for example, to do sentiment analysis using cloud AI. 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,” “Custom Document Annotation for Extracting Named Entities in Documents Using Amazon Comprehend,” “Building an NLP-powered Search Index with Amazon Textract and Amazon Comprehend,” 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. At the ISMB Conference 2022, Mona led a session on RAD Lab, which empowers the productivity of researchers, engineers, and staff with cloud-hosted analytics and AI capabilities, and at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference 2022, she presented on cloud AI/ML testing. Mona has also given listeners insights into her experiences at Google as an AI/ML Customer Engineer.  On April 19, 2023, she will be speaking on “How to Become AI/ML Cloud Architect.”

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 acting as a judge for the SWE Scholarship program for graduate students.

“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.

In 2023, Mona is working as a technical reviewer for books on AI/ML and Google Cloud technology from O'Reilly and Packt Publications, due to be published by the end of the year. Mona has been invited to speak by the prestigious Association for Computing Machinery at Boston University to talk on AI and to also present at Georgia State University. She finds it very fulfilling to talk to future AI/ML specialists and with professors about the latest advancements.

“We inspire each other with our ideas for where NLP and cloud computing will take our society,” Mona reveals. “Every day, we are making discoveries and pushing past the limits of artificial intelligence. We are creating a new society, one that is powered by AI. That is unlocking a completely different future for all of us no matter where we live.”

To connect with Mona Mona and learn more about AI, machine learning, natural language processing, and cloud computing, please see her website and LinkedIn.