Interview with Ritu Sharma, CEO, Formulate AI

We thank Ritu Sharma from Formulate AI for taking part in this interview and sharing several insights, including:

  • Her Data Science Journey
  • Breakthroughs in the Data Science and AI world
  • The Power of Formulation and how it applies to the educational journey of Data & AI
  • Advise for aspiring data scientists

#The Data Science Journey

At what point did you realise that you wanted to pursue a career in data science, and how did you get into it?

I am Ritu Sharma, Founder, and CEO of Formulate AI. I come from an educational service career background and while mentoring students, I realized the role and importance of AI education and the current gaps in the market. Students want to build some kind of app, they are fascinated by technology and the problem is they cannot get the right kind of mentoring. The mentor/Mentee ratio is very bad, especially if you see the data science world. I understand this pain of my students and started learning Data Science from different online sources source and it stuck me to that I need to solve this Mentor/Mentee ratio problem not just for my school but for all possible students across the globe hence I started Formulate AI with that vision. 

In your opinion, what have been the most relevant breakthroughs in data science impacting our world in the last 1-2 years, and what trends do you see emerging going forward?

I am a big fan of GANs and EdgeML.

  • Looking at the concepts of GANs adds a lot of creativity when you want to deal with creatives. I would love to see GANs doing a better job than human designers. 
  • On one side world is moving toward more data & high computing resources, data scientists are building models using GPUs and TPUs but there are challenges when you want to apply these models in scenarios when it has hardware limitations. I got amazed by the way people have solved it using EdgeML algorithms. The algorithm running on the register stage is like ‘WoW’

What skills and attitudes do you look for when hiring data scientists?

I look forward to following things in general for hiring a data scientist. 

  1. Data-driven mindset  
  2. Ability to formulate a problem in data science 
  3. Intuition

What advice would you give to other business leaders who would like to step into realising data science use cases?

I will say don’t wait for data to arrive and then build the data science team. Hire the Data Scientist on the first day and ask him what data needs to be collected from the onset so that you can build your use cases. 


#The Power of Formulation

What is the Power of Formulation and how does Data Science & AI play a major role?

I strongly believe Formulation is the key. Using the power of formulation, you can represent a problem of the Data Science and AI domain in mathematical terms which can be solved using machine learning algorithms. We have also written a blog explaining what the Power of Formulation means to us. I would recommend you read this and share your thoughts. 

What in your opinion is the best strategy to empower teachers and students in the areas of Data Science & AI?

Doing unique mini projects and capstone projects can help very well. We have already done it for 50+ teachers/students and it has worked. 

Can the Power of Formulation address the teacher to student ratio in terms of Data Science Education?

Yes, it does. In fact, the Mentor/Mentee ratio problem is getting solve very well by True Mentor. True Mentor also came as an outcome of our brainstorming formulation on solving the Mentor/Mentee ratio problem. 

The good part is that every single capstone we do under the True Mentor platform requires problem formulation as the first step. 


#For Data Science Aspirants

What are some resources you would recommend to aspiring data scientists?

  • As a student, if you want to start your AI journey, it is highly recommended to join Formulate AI’s ‘The Learn Program‘.
  • As a professional, if you want to start your journey, I will recommend the True Mentor Platform by Formulate AI.

Tag one or two data science leaders that you would like to see answer these questions.

Krishna Kumar Tiwari a 40 Under 40 Data Scientist in India, is an inspiration to me and has helped me a lot in my data science journey. 

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