We spoke with Prof. Balaraman Ravindran from IIT Madras. He is a worldwide authority on Reinforcement learning. Our conversations span from Reinforcement learning to Graphs to Grad school in India.

Welcome to the ML India Podcast, where we speak with people in India that are doing really cool things with data. Our guest today is Dr Preethi Jyothi, who leads the Computational Speech and Language Technologies lab at IIT Bombay. Prior to joining IIT Bombay, she was a post-doc at the Beckman Institute at UIUC and is an authority on accents and speech processing systems. We had a great conversation spanning her experience at IIT Bombay, and how she manages the intricacies of ML Research Methodology.

In this episode of the ML India Podcast, we talk to Dr Monojit Choudhry a Principal Researcher from Microsoft Research India about Low Resource NLP, his experiences at ACL2020 and what Microsoft Research looks for while hiring. Since the recording of this episode, his paper at ACL has gained a lot of attention and was even highlighted in Sebastian Ruder's newsletter. https://ruder.io/nlp-beyond-english/. You can read the original paper at https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.09095  0:00 Intro 1:06 Monojit Introduction and his current work  5:20 Impressions on Virtual ACL 2020  12:20 Challenges in Low Resource NLP  24:10 Open Problems in Zero Shot Multilingual Transfer Learning  34:10 The environment of Social Computing Research in India  37:26 Linguistic Bias and how bias is different in India  43:09 The Research Environment at MSR India  47:49 What MSR Looks for when hiring researchers  52:35 A Golden Question for Junior Researchers looking to get into NLP  55:56 Panini Linguistics Olympiad