AI Nabanita Roy

Submission
Our Company ACI Worldwide is a payments tech company established in 1975 with its European headquarters located in Limerick. It employs just over 4000 people in 34 countries across the globe. We serve 19 of the top 20 banks in the world and 80000+ merchants/shops both directly and indirectly via PSPs. ACI’s Data Science presence in Limerick began in 2019 and, to date, has proved to be an award-winning team and achieved a critical patent in that short time, which has advanced machine learning in the fraud prevention space. It continues to innovate and grow year after year, showcasing the advancements of AI in the fintech industry

About Nabanita
Nabanita is a member of ACI Worldwide’s Data Science team, a company specialising in delivering payment software and solutions that power the global economy. She has 4+ years of experience as a Data Scientist in the fintech domain and three years as a Systems Engineer in the semiconductor manufacturing domain. Nabanita completed her MSc in Computer Science (Intelligent Systems) from Trinity College Dublin in 2018, after which she began her career in the blooming data industry, smoothly transitioning from the information technology sector.

Her role as Data Scientist and Data Science Advocate
Nabanita is the Education Lead at Women in AI Ireland, where she shapes educational initiatives to help individuals acquire, improve and practice skills related to artificial intelligence (AI). A regular contributor to technical blogs on Medium and has spoken at conferences like EuroPython, PyCon and PyData, where she hosted talks, tutorials and participated in panel discussions. As a mentor and a tutor, Nabanita has conducted boot camps and workshops on Python, Data Science and Natural Language Processing for women transitioning into AI and data science from a different domain or looking to join the workforce after a career break.

Awards and Achievements:
• Team lead for ACI Worldwide’s project on automatic code generation use-case that won an Emerging Technology Award earlier this year.
• Selected in a cohort of 25 women for Money20/20’s RiseUp 2022 (EMEA), a leadership training program designed to empower women with tools and techniques to accelerate their career
•  Finalist at Diversity in Tech Awards 2021 in association with Amazon Web Services in the International Diversity Role Model Award category                                                                             •  Finalist at Women in IT Awards 2021 in the Advocate of the Year category
•  Received Data Scientist Award at Diversity in Tech Awards 2020 in association with Microsoft for Start-ups

Contributions to ACI Worldwide
Nabanita is the team lead for a new innovative technology that uses AI to write code bases for unit testing on existing code repositories. Her energy to research, even when obstacles are in her path, is truly an inspiration to watch. This is a very technical domain, with the potential for a patent on the methodology used.

Besides leading the research and brainstorming possible avenues for the implementations, Nabanita has contributed significantly in incrementally building out the POCs to bring this new technology to market. Even with this busy schedule, she makes time to mentor one of our associate Data Scientists who recently started contributing to the implementation of the project. Nabanita’s passion for the project is evident, particularly when presenting to the business.

She is often heard talking to others about how she can learn and teach more about NLP and develop leadership skills in project management. A quote of hers, ‘Besides, this is one of those projects that reinstates that artificial intelligence is not only machine learning.’ It is an honour to watch someone so young contributing to AI in a way that improves and changes it for the future.

Volunteering and Community Work
Nabanita is very well known within the Women in AI organisation and active in the Irish Chapter. She has been very focused on the learning and education side of the organisation, and within a short period, gained the respect to being named Education lead. The responsibility of that role is to develop and assist in delivering programs that can help women launch their careers in the data industry.

‘WaiPRACTIC’E is a program which has given many non-AI talents, especially women, to get a taste of how Data Science or AI projects work. Additionally, WaiPRACTICE Showcase Sessions train the mentees and develop them into future mentors by providing additional support. As the Education Lead in WAI Ireland, Nabanita has been involved in ideating, organising and executing educational initiatives like WaiPRACTICE, and WaiTUTORIALS. In the last few years, Nabanita has acquired leadership, mentorship and organising skills from volunteering while collaborating with leading AI professionals from around the world while working at WAI. As a mentor, has helped over 50 learners get started and build a proven portfolio securing jobs in the data world.

In Nabanitas’s own words: ‘As an immigrant myself, I am completely aware of the difficulties one must face during a job search, and it is a privilege for me to share the knowledge I have acquired through my first-hand experience. From formatting resumes to sharing reusable coding strategies for interviewing at multiple companies, I have given my best in supporting people who need it.’

Nabanita regularly posts technical blogs on Towards Data Science with a motive to stay updated with the exponential advancements in AI and help others to get started with hands-on data science techniques for analysis and data modelling, NLP techniques.

Public/Conference Talks:
• EuroPython 2022 (Dublin): [Panel Discussion] Diversity and Inclusion in Python and Tech Communities
• PyCon Sri Lanka 2022: [Talk] Word Embeddings for Text Classification
• PyData Global Conference 2021: [Tutorial] Getting Started with Text Classification: Predict if Tweets are about Real Disasters
• PyData Global Conference 2021: [Panel Discussion] Career Guidance in Data Science, Open-Source contributions, and Building Data Science Portfolio
• EuroPython Conference 2021: [Talk] Leveraging Linked Data using Python and SPARQL
• PyLadies Dublin: [Talk] Scraping Wikipedia using SPARQL and DBPedia (May 2021)
• PyLadies Dublin: [Talk] Fraud detection with ML (Oct 2020)

Online Portfolio/Links:
1. Medium: https://medium.com/@nroy0110 2 . GitHub: https://github.com/royn5618

Nabanita’s long-term goal is to become a leader in the field of AI and influence more women to join the AI workforce to build sustainable, ethical and unbiased solutions.