Fighting Discrimination with AI
Pujaa Rajan’s Journey from Wall Street to Silicon Valley
Pujaa Rajan always loved to read. Growing up in rural Nebraska, she immersed herself in literature from a young age, fascinated by how books could teach her about the lives and accomplishments of others. Though Pujaa also excelled at math and science in high school, she never imagined that one day she would combine her passions by teaching computers how to read.
While studying mathematics at Cornell University, Pujaa realized that while she loved math, the classes were too theoretical for her. Pujaa began exploring majors that would allow her to apply the concepts she was learning to the real world, which led her to Cornell’s Information Science department. There, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to help computers understand and process human language — called natural language processing, or “NLP” for short — immediately caught Pujaa’s attention.
“Reading is my favorite thing to do. If humans know how to read, computers should be able to do that too.”
As she became involved with NLP research, Pujaa realized the discipline’s power to quantify social justice issues. For example, recent NLP research from Cornell has revealed that professors use different word choices when writing recommendations for men and women, which may impact how graduate school admissions officers evaluate men’s and women’s candidacies. For her senior honors thesis, Pujaa studied political polarization on Twitter by conducting NLP analysis on online discourse, including how Twitter users were using the platform to interact with politicians.
“Tweets that are recommended tend to be the ones that are most extreme, which isn’t always a good thing. People get more and more polarized and have less productive conversations. Social media companies may thrive off of angry engagement from people, but how is this impacting children, and how is it impacting people’s everyday moods?”
In 2017, after graduating from Cornell with honors, Pujaa joined BlackRock Asset Management full time as the only female developer on her team. As one of the world’s largest investment management firms, BlackRock both receives and generates a huge volume of proprietary data each day. Developers on the data science team are responsible for generating insights from these datasets to help drive investment strategy for the more than $6 trillion in assets under the firm’s management.
With some Wall Street experience under her belt, Pujaa began to think about how she could maximize the impact of her skills. Her experiences in NLP research motivated her to help combat bias and discrimination in AI, and with this goal in mind, she moved to San Francisco to make the leap into the technology industry.
“I wanted to take my skills to a place where I could impact more people. Tech is great because [everyone talks] a lot about scaling and being able to impact everyone.”
In San Francisco, Pujaa completed an Artificial Intelligence Fellowship with Insight Data Science before landing a role at Node.io, a startup where she still works today as a Deep Learning Engineer. Though much of the work the startup does is proprietary, she says that she “enjoys being on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence” and “working on something that no one has an answer to yet.” Pujaa’s work involves applying AI to different datasets to see what insights she can derive from them, which combines her interests in math, statistics, and programming.
Outside of her day job, Pujaa is passionate about giving back to the AI community by helping to increase diversity and inclusion within the field. She is the founder of the San Francisco chapter of Women In AI, a global nonprofit that works towards gender inclusivity in AI by hosting talks, fireside chats, and networking events to help connect women in the field. Pujaa is also a frequent speaker on AI and NLP at tech conferences, where she aims not only to disseminate her technical knowledge, but also to show other women that they belong at these conferences as well.
“Research shows that women don’t feel as included as men do at tech conferences; that they are less likely to come back, and are less likely to engage with a male speaker. It makes me feel good that I’m able to pass on my knowledge and information and also give women a chance to feel like they deserve to be heard.”
Pujaa’s path to her current role may not have been a straight line, but she has ultimately ended up where she is meant to be. Her advice for other young women is to be sure that they have a job they are truly excited about, and if they have not found it yet, to start building that opportunity for themselves.
“If you’re not working on what you want [to be working on], then try to fix that — work with your manager or your company to find a way to utilize your interests, or start looking for opportunities outside your workplace. When you work on things that you want to be working on, excitement will eventually translate to career success.”
This story was written by Charlotte Kiang, Wogrammer Journalism Fellow. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
