Meet A Data Scientist: Dr. Smrati Gupta

Data Circles is excited to present the next entry in our new series, “Meet A Data Scientist!”

“Meet a Data Scientist” is dedicated to recognizing the amazing women powering the Puget Sound area’s data science community, spotlighting their journey into the field, their incredible accomplishments, and the weighty challenges that they faced along the way. This lies at the heart of Data Circles’ mission of inspiring women to enter the data science field by showcasing its many incredible role models.

Do you know any marvelous women in data science? Send us a tip here!

From an undergraduate education in India to a role at Microsoft, Dr. Smrati Gupta, Principal Data Scientist at Microsoft Intelligent Conversation and Communication Cloud Team--, has excelled at everything she does. With a career spanning eleven years, in academia and industry, and across three continents, Dr. Gupta shares her story and important lessons she’s learned such as how to continue learning and how to thrive as a woman in tech.

As Dr. Smrati Gupta went onstage, she received a standing ovation. The audience was celebrating her for being the only woman among the top twenty-six students of their undergraduate class who had successfully completed an internship at Arcelor Mittal, Kazakhstan. For the first time, she felt aware of being the only woman in the room, but it would not be the last time she experienced this. As she navigated a career in technology where men outnumber women 5:1, she learned how to find her voice in a room full of men and succeed despite the lack of female role models.

Dr. Gupta’s success is an outcome of her unyielding drive for learning. After graduating as a valedictorian from India’s LNM Institute of Information Technology, she enrolled in a Master’s program in Telecommunications Engineering at the University of Barcelona where she was one of four women in a cohort of 120. Undeterred by this lack of representation, she kept learning until she mastered another degree--a Doctorate--and another language, Spanish. Even today, Dr. Gupta continues learning by always being enrolled in at least one course.

“I have found conscious effort towards Continuous Learning to be powerful and humbling- whether it is revisiting the basics or learning something new- always provides fresh perspective.”

As a testament to her accomplishments in graduate school, Dr. Gupta was hired as a senior research engineer at CA Technologies in Barcelona. Within the short span of two years, she was promoted to principal research scientist owing to her prolific work with collaborators across the European Union, which also included mentoring several graduate students from graduate schools all over Spain. To this day, Dr. Gupta remains passionate about mentoring and continues to mentor students from the University of Barcelona in an unofficial capacity. 

Up until 2017, Dr. Gupta did not have the official title of a data scientist but her projects, like building recommendation engines for selecting optimum deployment protocols, were nonetheless squarely in the field, which in turn helped her build a portfolio that saw her promoted to a Principal Data Scientist position within the company, which in turn facilitated a move to yet another new country in the United States. To be successful in her new role, she leveraged the tools which she had honed in previous roles, like root-cause analysis and anomaly detection. In fact, her work resulted in a suite of patents for anomaly detection. To date, Dr. Gupta has filed for 14 patents and continues to develop more from her cutting edge data science work.

In 2019, Dr. Gupta left CA Technologies to take the role of a Lead Data Scientist at Microsoft Xbox where she would lead research and productization of data science and machine learning features in products. This was a rare moment in her career as she had a female manager; one who proved to be a strong mentor who helped Dr. Gupta in becoming comfortable with taking space on the table and voicing her opinions. Dr. Gupta felt that this mentorship was timely and important since she was mid-career at the time, a point in the career ladder when many women drop out. 

“Highlighting Female leaders and role models is fundamental to break the cycle of gender imbalance and encourage women in tech”

Apart from strong mentorship, the multidisciplinary nature of Dr. Gupta’s work has kept her focused and engaged. For example, she worked with designers and machine learning researchers to develop new experiences for gamers like personalized recommendations for games. Empowered by strong mentorship and impactful projects, Dr. Gupta quickly reached new milestones. While her contributions to publications, books, and patents continued to grow, a wonderful testimony to her work on recommendation engines in Gaming  was when it was presented to Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO. She has recently moved to Intelligent Conversations and Communication Cloud Team within Microsoft, that helps provide backend services to products like Microsoft Teams and Skype. Her role involves Capacity Planning and Demand Forecasting to support a high quality service provisioning during this pandemic. 

Dr. Gupta feels fortunate to have worked on a diverse set of data science problems in an exceptionally rich handful of years. This has helped her create a personal brand--a data scientist who brings experiences from three continents and multiple product spaces and is willing to dive deep for her team, all while pushing the field forward with cutting edge work. 

As such, she strongly recommends that every data scientist work on their own personal brand, specifically by being active and creating content on LinkedIn or their personal blogs, developing work that will inevitably become their trademark and garner notice. It’s something that she wishes that she herself could find more time for. For women in the field, she encourages them to be vocal, but also to not judge themselves harshly if they prove to be wrong; she wants women to be brave.

“If you have a seat at the table, it is because you have earned it.”

If you’d like to see Smrati in action, don’t miss her tech talk from the WiDS Puget Sound 2020 Conference entitled “Design Principles for Personalization with Ethics” here.