Dr Shivali Agarwal is a Senior Researcher at IBM Research, India. She leads research on applying AI and software engineering techniques for the modernization of enterprise legacy applications for Hybrid Cloud environments. She joined IBM Research in 2008, soon after completing her PhD in Programming Languages from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, and since then, has made significant contributions to optimize and automate the IT Operations for IBM’s service delivery business. Her work has been recognized within IBM with the topmost technical award. She has more than 24 conference publications, book chapters and journal papers and holds 16 patents to her credit. 

Shivani, can you please take us through your AI journey?

My AI journey began in 2011 when my team was approached to analyze IT service incidents data to recommend automation and optimization opportunities in ticket routing to customer service agents. This led to building a series of solutions that leveraged Machine Learning and NLP techniques for IT service operations which resulted in a cost-saving of millions of dollars for the business. In 2017, I started working on conversational agents with a focus on bootstrapping such agents using automatic knowledge extraction from client documents, and thereafter enable such agents to learn continuously from the user interactions. This too led to significant business and scientific impact. 

As of 2021, I am working on bringing together AI and software engineering techniques to solve the problem of the modernization of legacy enterprise applications. I also had the privilege of presenting and publishing my work at top AI conferences like KDD, AAAI, ICSOS, SCC. 

What are the major challenges you faced as a woman in reaching where you are right now?

Most women struggle to strike a balance between work and personal life, and other responsibilities. Even I have been through this phase. Over the years, I have gradually mastered the art of prioritization and I am happy to have struck a good balance.

Another challenge or rather inhibition that women have is the hesitation to build or grow their professional network. And I have realized that with small extra efforts I can reach out to people easily, and almost always, other people are more than willing to connect too. 

Women also shy away from being vocal about their work and contributions, eventually missing out on opportunities. 

What made you interested in AI?

The power of AI in making sense of huge amounts of data and being able to assist humans for tasks that require huge amounts of knowledge ingestion is what interested me. And as I was working on real-world problems, I realized that AI is a powerful tool that can be applied effectively for cognitive tasks that humans find monotonous and error-prone, or difficult due to the scale involved.

What's your area of expertise in AI and why chose that one?

I am an expert in building AI solutions for IT operations services business. I have worked on building AI solutions for ticket dispatch, ticket resolution recommendation, document understanding and many more real-world problems which use an array of AI techniques. Over time, I have acquired an in-depth working knowledge of various supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques and a strong hold on NLP (natural language processing) techniques. My expertise has been driven by the problems that I have addressed for the business during my career as a researcher. I have been fortunate enough to get the opportunities to tackle problems that challenge and excite the researcher in me.

What's the one thing that you see AI transforming completely?

I think it will be IT operations. I strongly believe that the way IT operations are managed will see a complete transformation as AI makes in-roads in log analysis, fault detection and prediction, automated resolution, workload management, service orchestration and whatnot. We have already seen the transformations through chatbots and virtual assistants. But as Cloud platforms become the norm and software applications are designed to leverage the agility and flexibility of such platforms, there is a lot more in store for AI.

Your biggest AI nightmare?

Humans should not lose humanity and start thinking like machines in trying to make machines behave like humans!

What's your advice for other women who wants to pursue a similar journey?

1. Follow your interests and instincts. Always ask yourself what you are trying to solve, whom will it help and how will it help.
2. The field of AI is evolving very fast. It is extremely important to keep yourself abreast of recent developments in academia and industry. Continuous up-skilling has become mandatory in these times.
3. Networking is something that will give you rich dividends. Invest in it. Never shy away from attending events that have networking opportunities. Do not miss an opportunity to speak about your interests, achievements, possible areas of collaboration or mentoring requirements in such events.
4. Culturally, women of our generation have been taught to always be humble. While humility is a great virtue, it should not deter us from speaking about our achievements and the exploratory ideas in a larger audience or whenever presented with an opportunity. This is the only way that more opportunities will knock at your door.
5. Learn the art of prioritization early in your career as it will help in balancing work and family as you start taking on more responsible roles.