Working on the Latest Technology in Purposeful AI Projects for the Greater Good

Aruna Sri Turlapati from India completed several Omdena challenges, upon which she became an Omdena Top Talent to work on paid gigs with companies. Already having 20+ years of industry experience, through Omdena, she has gained skills in AI and machine learning while contributing to Tech for Social Good.

“Omdena is a global community entity that enables to work on the latest technology and purposeful projects for a larger good. Data science and data enthusiasts can enhance their technical and management skills by volunteering to work on 8-week challenges along with a global team. In addition, Omdena provides paid top talent projects if you have successfully completed challenges.” 

What is your background?

I have a bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering, Acharya Nagarjuna University. I also got my post-graduate diploma in machine learning and AI from the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, India.

I am a software professional with about 20 years of experience in systems, web, mobile applications, real-time embedded systems, and backend software. I have been into data science for the last 4 years. I worked in startup environments, and I was involved in architecture, design, development, and deployment to production. I have taken a break from the IT industry and moved into data science because I had the desire to work on social impact and SDG [Sustainable Development Goals] projects for a long time. Omdena helped me to achieve this dream. I worked on tech for good and tech for business projects, but social impact projects are more satisfying. 

When and how did you join Omdena? 

I’ve started with Omdena in 2020 to contribute to social impact projects. I worked as a machine learning engineer and collaborated with a team of 50 members with a wide range of expertise in various domains. The project involved detecting illegal dumpsites and building an image-based shopping product classifier. The team worked on data collection, annotation using Lablebox, pre-processing, augmentation, and developing the model using InceptionNet, MaskRCNN, and deployment.

Could you highlight some projects you took part in? Which are the most important, and challenging for you?

• Comparing Semantic and Instance Segmentation for Weed and Crop Detection

This project had challenges of real-time and device constraints. As I have experience in embedded systems and C++, I enjoyed working on this project with computer vision as well as optimization techniques on Nvidia DNN, and CUDA libraries. As I do organic gardening, I was thrilled to see the application used for the elimination of weeds in carrot fields.

I have been working as a consultant for many years. This job suits me well as I get ample time for my family, my hobbies like organic gardening, and community service like Rain Water Harvesting. 

•  Cancer Drugs Survival Analysis to Support Affordability of Immunotherapy Treatments

I worked as a tech mentor and I guided my team on the AWS environment, reviews, discussion on models, and pipeline. The challenges helped me to work with global teams of collaborators on end-to-end AI/ML pipelines to solve real-world problems. 

In addition, I participated in several paid Omdena Top Talent projects:

• Deploying a Medical Model to the Cloud
• Re-identification of Cattle Using Computer Vision
• Accelerating Solar Adoption in Egypt

The talent projects for startups are more solution-oriented and enable the collaborators to work with innovative startups that aim to solve a specific problem. 

For example, I designed and implemented a building and solar panel detection solution for Egypt area using Google Static API, OSM Buildings, AWS Sagemaker Ground Truth, Object segmentation, AWS Lambda, and AWS API Gateway.

What was the biggest obstacle you have recently overcome?

While I have diverse software development experience, AI/ML  is a relatively new area. Omdena projects helped me to gain skills in this area as well as able to contribute to tech for Social Good Sector.

How does the Omdena experience help you in your career?

Omdena Talent projects are more focused on the ETL pipeline and deployment of complete AI solutions on cloud platforms. Customer engagement helps in tuning the solution to the requirements at hand. These projects helped me to acquire skills on cloud services, delivering high-quality end-to-end solutions, in addition to communication and management skills.

How did your worldview change? What brought you the most happiness?

Omdena is a global community that enables to work on the latest technology and purposeful projects for a larger good. Data science and data enthusiasts can enhance their technical and management skills by volunteering to work on 8-week challenges along with a global team. In addition, Omdena provides paid top talent projects if you have successfully completed challenges. 

Omdena strives to provide a supportive, professional, and democratic space for collaborators to execute their ideas within the scope of the project that helps collaborators towards an enriching experience. During my tenure with Omdena, I have found excellent young engineers who could come out with wonderful ideas and lead the execution of tasks to meet the project goals. Omdena also provides a nurturing atmosphere for budding AI professionals with a variety of courses in Omdena school. Finally, the talent projects provide more focused approaches for deployable solutions while working with the start-ups. Omdena is a great thriving entity for AI and data professionals to enhance their skills and work in a team. It also boosts their abilities to contribute to social impact projects. It also can lead to meaningful applications, and businesses. Solving ground-level problems in healthcare, agriculture, and climate areas is the need of the hour while leveraging technology