Ottawa-based IIITH Alumnus Sowmya Vajjala, a published author shares her secret on juggling a full-time career at the National Research Council of Canada, along with parenting, blogging and churning out bi-lingual literature in Telugu and English. Here’s how she does it.
Sowmya Vajjala wears her heritage and upbringing like a badge of honour. While a good chunk of her work day is invested in her professional role as a full-time NLP Research officer at NRC, her early mornings nurture her passion in her translation and writing works in Telugu and English on a wide range of topics from NLP, AI and ML to regional literature and movies.
Her primary research as part of NRC’s Multilingual Text Processing team at the Digital Technologies Research Centre lies in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and its relevance to other disciplines and industry practice. Her current research interests are in information extraction, text classification and application-focused projects through NRC’s IRAP program and Digital Analytics Center.
Apart from being a part of the tech publishing ecosystem as a reviewer, Sowmya is a successful author in NLP. She runs pustakam.net, a bi-lingual website that is packed with interesting reviews of novels and films, short stories and interviews of famous Indian and global personalities. Her Telugu short stories and translations have featured in various print/web magazines and anthologies, and she has two translated works to her name, with a third at the editing stage.
IIIT Hyderabad leaves a lasting imprint
After B. tech in Electronics and Communications from Osmania University (2005), Sowmya did a stint at TCS, Hyderabad. As she had a keen interest in language technologies and machine translation, her brother Halley Kalyan who was a student at IIITH at the time, recommended that she join the Institute. “I took NLP related courses in computational linguistics, information retrieval etc and worked with Prof. Vasudev Varma in the Language Technologies Research Center (LTRC) and Information Retrieval and Extraction Lab (iREL)”, she explains. It was not really established back in the day but IIITH was already one of the pioneers within India in that kind of research. “What’s pretty rare is that, as an NLP researcher, I am still using what I learnt 15 years back in Prof. Rajeev Sangal’s class! Prof. Krishna Reddy, Prof. Yegnanarayana and Prof P J Narayanan too had an abiding influence on me”, she adds.
It was an eventful tenure for her and she made some good friends. Some throwback memories revolve around the wholesome fare at the Yuktahar Mess and the small tea stall near the basketball court. “I was a student volunteer at two international conferences – IJCAI-2007, IJCNLP-2008, co-organized by the Institute, that helped me understand the expected standards of research. It would be very useful for me much later during my PhD. IIITH has been a big part of what I am and I still carry the IIITH alumnus tag to every conference, scanning the author’s list for familiar faculty. I find keeping that connection to be vital”, says the researcher who recently gave a guest talk at IIITH’s summer school.
A dream tenure in Germany
Industry experience garnered at Microsoft and at a Bangalore-based startup would prime Sowmya for the next step in her research journey. She moved to Germany for her PhD in Computational Linguistics from Eberhard Karls University of Tubingen (2015) on a Marie Curie Fellowship. “My stint in Germany was most enjoyable and I had the freedom to pursue my passion in reading, writing, attending talks and workshops”, recalls Sowmya who graduated summa cum laude. “There were plenty of interdisciplinary collaborations since my mentor was in a project involving psychologists, education researchers and cognitive scientists”. One memorable project involved economic researchers from the Queensland University of Technology, where specific NLP techniques were used, to analyse how university patents differed from industry patents. The foundation for this collaboration began during her PhD. The study got a mention in the New York Times and the Project Head gave an invited talk at the US Patents Office.
After two and a half years as a tenure track (assistant) professor at Iowa State University, Sowmya relocated to Canada with her husband Sriram, a software engineer. She worked in the software industry as a senior data scientist at “The Globe and Mail” (Toronto) and Abacus Next, before joining her current role at Canada’s National Research Council.
Exciting projects at NRC
Sowmya subscribes to the phrase, ‘If you love your job, you’ll never work a day in your life’, “chiefly because my job at NRC allows me to pursue both research-focused projects which form the main part of my work as well as the more application-based ones supported by NRC’s IRAP program.”
Sowmya co-authored Practical NLP, with a team that included IIITH Alumni Harshit Surana and Anuj Gupta. The comprehensive guide to building real world NLP Systems was published by O’Reilly in August 2021. She was expecting her child during the book writing and the book was published when Sahasra Malathi, her daughter was a year old. The work was translated into 4 languages – Chinese, Japanese, Polish and a simplified Chinese version. “It’s amazing that we continue to get royalties every month for that book, in the age of AI”, chuckles Sowmya who has co-authored 40 publications so far. “I still have people telling me that they found the book very useful. I also wrote a chapter on ML and Linguistics in the Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, a multi volume work by Wiley publishers
Sowmya Writes… on everything she wants to
Sowmya landed on her catchy blog title – ‘Sowmya Writes on everything she wants to’ on her first day in IIIT Hyderabad. “Though I was blogging during my B.Tech days, it was at IIITH that I figured out how to type in Telugu. I didn’t have a specific interest and wrote about whatever grabbed my attention”.
Translation happened by accident, in B. Tech first year, when the scholar did some translations for the Writers club. “Initially I translated film reviews from English for a Telugu website called Navatarangam. At some point, someone suggested that I should translate a whole book and that went well. I translated a book of film essays by Satyajit Ray, that was published by Navatarangam Publications. A few years later, during my PhD in Germany, Gita Ramaswamy, founder of Hyderabad Book Trust suggested that I translate Kondapalli Koteswaramma’s autobiography into English. Though I was reticent about writing fluently in literary English, we decided to try one chapter and that gave me the confidence to finish the book. It was published in 2015 by Zubaan books titled Sharp knife of memory and subsequently the book was translated into many Indian languages through the English translation”, she observes.
Her website Pustakam.net, launched in 2009 is a crowd-run website, where people share their book reviews and “we interview eminent Telugu literary personalities, authors and publishers”, she remarks. “Our most memorable interviews were with the founders of Project Gutenberg, and with Amish Tripathi the author of the Meluha series, before he got very famous. Over the past 15 years, we have amassed thousands of articles written in Telugu, from different countries. Endapalli Bharathi writes about life in her village, near Madanapalle in Andhra Pradesh. My English translation of her short stories is due to be published by Hyderabad-based Southside books, sometime next year”.
Decoding the learning trajectory
Sowmya’s early years in Kurnool were carefree. She played tennis at inter school and inter-district competitions and women’s cricket till 10th standard. She was the recipient of the Pratibha scholarship, awarded by the AP State government for intermediate-course toppers. She grew up, surrounded by books. Coming from a family that valued erudition, it was normal practice for everyone to be sitting together over a Sunday, leafing through a bunch of newspapers, bonding over a south Indian breakfast from a nice restaurant. The tragic demise of her father, a University chemistry professor prompted her mother who is a banker, to move with her family to Hyderabad, to be closer to her parents.
The eternal optimist enjoyed her short travels to different European countries during her PhD days, especially to Prague in the Czech Republic with its student-friendly and affordable hotels. “Ulm in Germany, the birthplace of Albert Einstein was 2 hours away and a favorite destination. The river Danube flows through the city and you have great views from its tall church”, she recollects.
Today, the multi-tasker’s reading choices include biographies and short stories. She is presently powering through autobiographies by Indra Nooyi and cricketer R. Ashwin. “We generally listened to film or instrumental music, but nowadays, our playlist is all baby tunes”, muses the mother of a 5-year-old. “It’s a regular working woman’s life for me – some cooking, office work and into this mix is some coding, attending meetings, reading and writing. I rise early, at 4am and usually have at least one and a half hours to myself when nobody else is awake. I have been fortunate that my office is flexible and I work a hybrid model”.
The avowed NLP researcher plans to infuse a little bit of science fiction fantasy into her future stories, weaving in AI and recent advancements like large language models, to spice up her literary work.