Haritha Sreedharan Nair is currently working as a Product Manager at Microsoft IDC, Bengaluru, parallelly pursuing a Masters in English Literature from Indira Gandhi National Open University. She spends most of her time developing tech products, reading and finding mundane muses to romanticize, or contributing to multiple social initiatives.

Technology

Haritha completed her Bachelors and Masters in Information Technology from IIIT, Gwalior [2015-2020]. She is deeply interested in the fundamentals of algorithms, graph theory, and intelligent systems.

Pursuing her interest in open source, in 2018, Haritha was chosen as a student developer for the prestigious Google Summer of Code program as part of a cohort of 1264 students from over 62 countries from over 5000+ applicants from 101 countries. As a contributor for the open-source organization mlpack, she implemented Neural Collaborative Filtering, a model which uses neural networks to provide enhanced recommendations in recommendation systems.

Building upon her open source journey, Haritha developed an interest in computer vision and machine learning research. Her Bachelors thesis focused on enabling damage recovery on autonomous systems. The work was accepted as a full paper at ACM India Joint International Conference on Data Science & Management of Data – 7th CoDS and 25th COMAD.

Her Master’s thesis focused on AutoML, proposed a new architecture, Multimodal Neural Architecture Search (MNAS), to enable neural architecture search for multimodal data. The project aimed to take a step closer to Artificial General Intelligence, making it feasible for AI systems to understand multimodality, as humans do, in a resource-constrained environment. Her work was accepted as a full paper by the prestigious journal – Expert Systems with Applications.

Rather than being a hard-core engineer, Haritha prefers to look at tech ventures from the angle of social relevance and enjoys putting together the big picture. She often takes the lead on projects, researches the project life cycle, prioritizes components, and weaves the story of how we can use technical products to better humanity. Her enthusiasm in putting together solutions has led her to lead and win multiple case study contests at the national level, like Brand-Aid [IIT BHU, 2016], Detour [IIT Roorkee, 2018], etc.

Literature

An admirer of Virginia Woolf, Haritha focuses on stream-of-consciousness writing, primarily in English. Her writings can be found at her personal blog and website, the recurring themes being imagery, feminism, philosophy, political and social commentary. Originally from Kerala, she spent her childhood in Dubai, UAE, and a large part of her adult life in multiple cities, instilling a fascination with cities in her, which often features in her works. A fan of mystery and thriller works, Haritha has recently developed a taste for epic fantasy novels and can usually be found devouring enormous series of the genre. To enhance her knowledge of classic literature and contemporary studies in the same, she is currently pursuing a Masters in English Literature, with a focus on comparative literature, from India’s largest open university – IGNOU.

She has won several literary contests like Spin a Yarn [IIT Delhi, 2017] and has served as the chief editor of Abhishar. Her poems – ‘Half Lives’ and ‘Take over’, and short-story ‘A weekend getaway’ have been published in anthologies.

Society

Haritha considers it equally essential to uplift those around her along with her growth. During her university days, she took the mantle of Abhigyan Abhikaushalam Students’ Forum (AASF), a forum aimed at equipping students with essential technical skills and creating a holistic environment for growth. As part of AASF, she played the role of Managerial event coordinator, Technical Head, and Github and website maintainer, over a span of 4 years. She has experience both being a team player and leading a team of 25+ members. During her four-year term at AASF, she helped AASF expand to two more institutes and established focus groups for development and competitive programming.

She also mentored and taught several students from rural India on personality development and computer science through Student Gyaan Movement. Her mentees have achieved significant personal career growth, which is a constant matter of pride for her.

Haritha is an active member of Microsoft’s Early in Career community in her professional life, leading various forums for the EiC community internationally. She consistently contributes to Microsoft India’s philanthropy initiatives and mentors students across multiple countries and continents. She finds the blurring of geographical boundaries in matters of mentorship and growth to be of utmost importance.