Twisha Naik

I've been in the machine learning field for around 7 to 8 years, and my journey has been shaped by continuous learning and adaptation to evolving technology. After completing my undergrad, I worked for one year at a startup in India where I was involved in different machine learning algorithms and research work. That experience got me interested in machine learning, which led me to come to the United States for my master's degree, where I specialized in the machine learning track. For the last 5 years, I've been with Adobe as part of the search and recommendations team. I was always interested in the natural language processing part, and the search team was a perfect fit for me. I started with different embedding models and different positions to the large language models, which are inevitable these days, just keeping up with the growing technology. I work with the search team on projects that span different Adobe products, helping users get to their end state faster. We started with how-to queries, providing related URLs when users ask how to do a certain task with Adobe products, just like Google search. Then we transitioned into the LLM world, where instead of giving links, we give users the steps of how to do a certain task. Now I'm more in the search and guidance space, where we work on autocomplete and query suggestions for users looking for Adobe stock photos or building something on Adobe Express. One of my biggest achievements has been developing and training models for suggestions where you can actually see users' impact, like seeing the click rates getting increased from end users. I've had publications from 2019 till now, and being able to witness how machine learning has changed over the last 8 years and keep up with the existing technology has been incredible. I've been in the same team for 5 years now, which has given me the opportunity to mentor many new joinees and guide interns. Recently we published a few papers on the research we're doing, and as I'm building that profile, I'm being asked to be a reviewer at certain conferences and people come to me for reviewing their work or getting guidance. Being an immigrant and coming from a different country, settling in a new country from scratch, it takes a lot and it builds you in a different way. It shapes your personality and who you are.