Arsha Nagrani (she/her)
Arsha is a PhD student at the VGG lab in the University of Oxford, UK. She was born in Mumbai, India, and lived around the world in Hong Kong, Singapore, Mumbai, Cambridge, and Oxford before finally landing in California as a research intern at Google. Her work is mostly focused on using machine learning to understand videos for applications such as video retrieval, automatic movie descriptions for the blind, and face/speech recognition.
Arsha was recently part of the organizing committee for the Women in Computer Vision workshop at CVPR, the largest computer vision conference for academics. As part of the organizing team, she helped organize a mentoring dinner for over 130 people, matched young women in the field to senior mentors, and organized keynote speeches, as well as a panel to discuss diversity-related issues in computer vision. The organizing team she was on worked across 5 different time zones and managed to raise over $100K to provide travel grants to 50 young mentees.
Source of inspiration: Ruth Bader Ginsburg for being a force to be reckoned with and raising a family, getting top grades in a competitive degree, and looking after a sick partner all at once. It gives Arsha hope that it’s possible to do anything and everything.
Book Recommendation: Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling and Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin