Published on 02, Mar 2023

Mona Mona Bridges the Gap Between Companies, AI/ML, and Cloud Computing 

While artificial intelligence and machine learning are becoming an integral part of our society, companies and individuals struggle to understand this new technology. They know that AI/ML are no longer theoretical - instead, the future has arrived, fundamentally changing how business is conducted in every industry. Mona Mona, an AI/ML Customer Engineer at Google, is a cloud computing expert who is helping companies and the workforce to capitalize on this technological revolution. Mona is also using her ability to simplify hard concepts to inform audiences at conferences, and she has a long list of publishing credits, including Natural Language Processing with AWS AI Services, 19 blog posts, and many technical articles. She will also soon be releasing Google Cloud Certified Professional Machine Learning Study Guide to empower people who would like to work in ML and cloud computing. Mona ultimately has one goal: to build a solid AI infrastructure for society so that future generations can thrive.

Her path to the top of the software design, development, and integration space began in India, where Mona first earned her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. As she focused on studying artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cloud technology, the United States was never far from her thoughts.

“I wanted to understand everything I could about AI/ML and cloud technology, so I planned on coming here to graduate school,” Mona says. “I eventually enrolled at Georgia State University, and I graduated with my master’s in Computer Information Systems in 2017.”

Mona joined Amazon  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 my dream job to come alongside businesses as they adopted ML on a large scale with the help of flexible, resilient cloud architecture,” Mona says. “While I enjoyed this, I also had the honor of collaborating with universities to teach students about machine learning. I value education, which is not always easy for those interested in ML to attain. 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 developers 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 real  problems in healthcare, life sciences, and the public sector with Google Cloud artificial intelligence (AI/ML) solutions.

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 those articles provide solutions to critical industry problems such as document automation ,” 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 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.. During the COVID pandemic, Mona also co-authored a research paper that evaluates AWS(Amazon Web Services)  CORD-19 Search (ACS), which was created during pandemic to help researchers across the globe get search among thousands of technical documents and get relevant answers to highly technical questions such as “How is smoking related to covid”?. 

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.  

Mona also gave her insights into AI on Analytics Vidhya on Google Cloud AI in Data Power Hour. Analytics Vidhya is one of India's largest communities for Data Science, Machine Learning, and Analytics and has a customer base of more than 1.5 million across the globe. Due to the popularity of her session, she has been invited to speak again at this forum. On March 6, 2023, she will speak on low-code/no-code AI solutions while on April 9, 2023, she will present on how to start a career as an AI/ML Architect. 

While her writing, public speaking, and 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.”

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 will be speaking on AI/ML and career guidance at universities across the United States, including Boston University and Georgia State University. She is a technical reviewer for books on AI/ML and cloud technology by O'Reilly and Packt Publications. 

Mona is thoughtful as she considers the future of AI/ML. “I would say we are only limited by the imagination of those who want to use it to help our society,” she says. “I am inspired by the number of students, including women, who want to understand it and improve how we live and conduct business on a global level. They will be the source of the change that will define who we are for generations to come.”

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.