An alumna from the founding batch of IIIT-H, Soujanya Lanka witnessed the Institute grow from its fledging years to the robust research institute it is today. For the different hats that she wore with grace, as an alumni observer in the Governing Council, as a founding member of the Alumni Foundation, and her mentoring of successive batches of graduating students, she was awarded IIIT-H’s Outstanding Service Award in 2023.
Soujanya has always had a very symbiotic relationship with IIIT-Hyderabad, thanks to her prolonged Ph.D tenure, which witnessed her marriage, an inter-continental shift to the USA, relocation to Singapore and the birth of her baby. After her B. Tech, she continued to complete her Masters and PhD in data mining, under Prof. Kamal Karlapalem. “I used to joke that I’d be the Grand old lady of IIIT” laughs Soujanya who spent thirteen years as a scholar, from 1998 to 2011. “My peer group, batch mates and friends on campus range anywhere up to 10 years younger than me”.
“When I joined IIIT-H, what impressed me most was the industry collaborations with major companies like Microsoft, Satyam, Oracle and IBM and graduating students would have that kind of industry exposure. On the first day of counseling, Prof. Govindarajulu and Ajay Sawhney spoke with such clarity of vision that I was convinced to take the leap” says Soujanya. As a student of the first batch, she spent a good bit of time in helping Prabhakar Sharma set up the library. She was a TA for courses on databases and NLP and as an instructor for Python, she got to build the curriculum for the IT workshop.
“During my Ph.D., I also helped professors with co-advising some of the MS students, and one happy spinoff were the good friends that I made”, recalls Soujanya. “We bagged the Award for data visualization at an international conference. I was part of the Student Disciplinary Committee during my Ph.D and spent a lot of time with Prof. Jayanthi Sivaswamy. As an alumni observer on the Governing Council for 2 terms, I got to share the alumni feedback on courses”.
Soujanya’s specialization is in natural language processing, information retrieval, machine learning and data mining. She began her career in 2008, in the AI domain, focusing on startups with a consultancy role and later moved into natural language processing. “I have actually seen how NLP systems have evolved, from version 0 point 0 of the world to the latest technologies, including generative AI”. For a short while, she even tried her hand at entrepreneurship, building a futuristic fashion-based IT solution. Between 2017-2019, the area of AI, especially NLP had just exploded and “I was managing a very large team of up to 40 members. In 2020, I took a drastic decision to become an individual researcher and get back to coding”, says Soujanya who joined Salesforce R&D as a lead applied scientist. After a couple of years, she moved to PayPal. Earlier this year, she moved to Google in Singapore as a Search & Gen AI Solutions Architect.
“As an alumna, I have always seen myself as a brand ambassador for the Institute” says Soujanya who participated in a panel discussion on AI for governance at last year’s Foundation Day. “Wherever I go, I always have some IIITians in my team, whether it was in Salesforce or the other startups that I worked in. When internship positions opened up, I would share the information with professors and students would start coming in, based on my referrals. I have worked with at least 50-60 students. In fact, some of the language students became full-time employees and we published a couple of papers together. Another core area of her focus is alumni funding and helping candidates with limited resources reach their aspiration for a good education. I know a few people in every batch and I reach out to them when there’s an alumni fund drive happening and get them to contribute. I have attended a few alumni events; one when Vipul was visiting Singapore and a casual get together of first three batches”, she reports.
“Our professors were constantly sharing research papers and encouraging us to punch above our weight. That’s the reason why at undergraduate level itself, the research is quite prominent. We became quite fearless because everything that was being done, we were doing it for the first time, whether it was courses or industry collaboration”, says Soujanya who recalls the thrill of meeting Prof. Raj Reddy when he first came down to IIIT-H, “It was just us from the first batch. IIIT-H attracted a lot of experts and luminaries and I think at a certain subconscious level, it sowed seeds in us that we can also get there, someday, in some way”.