STEM Day 2022: Celebrating Arria’s technical superstars

Today, November 8th is National STEM Day! Its intent is to promote education and careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, and here at Arria NLG we enthusiastically support the STEM Day mission. With the global shortage in digital skills — including in areas such as artificial intelligence — it has never been more important to encourage young people, or those looking to learn new skills, to explore the opportunities in a STEM career. At Arria, we are lucky to have an organization filled with employees highly skilled in many STEM disciplines. Arria is also blessed to have a high percentage of STEM-skilled women, including our CEO Sharon Daniels , our EVP of Customer & Partner Success Cathy Hebert , our EVP of Global Business Development Lyndsee Manna , and many more profoundly intelligent women on our team. In celebration of STEM Day, we are putting the spotlight on two of our staff, Meriam Moujahid, NLP Engineer, and Stephanie Inglis, Software Engineer.?

Meriam Moujahid has over a decade of technical experience working in technology roles around the globe. In 2019, Meriam completed her Msc. in Human robotic interaction at Heriot-Watt University before taking up a researcher role at Edinburgh University. Joining Arria NLG in 2021, Meriam has been working on our conversational AI (Artificial Intelligence) technology, Arria Answers . ?

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When did you first decide on a career in technology? ?

I have always been genuinely interested in technology, there is nothing more satisfying than solving a problem that has been around for a while that no one else knows how to solve.?

What attracted you to the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP)???

At Arria, we empower businesses to process data and deliver information in natural languages. As an NLP Engineer, I design and build systems that can?understand human language. I do that by creating different algorithms and machine learning models to improve the ability of computers to process and analyze natural language data. The ambition behind my work is to enhance the interaction between humans and artificial agents.?

What advice do you have for women wanting to study and work in technology and engineering??

Organizations thrive on diversity and balance, and women have always played a key role in engineering and tech. My advice for women wanting to study and work in technology and engineering is to start now! Because there has never been a better time to begin a career path in this field and more of us are needed for new innovative thinking. It is now an exciting time to fully explore our potential and stretch our comfort zone.?

??Stephanie Inglis achieved a First Class (Hons) Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, in 2014 and went on to complete her PhD in 2020 at the University of Aberdeen. Joining Arria NLG in early 2021, Stephanie works with the Solutions team as a software engineer.??

When did you first decide on a career in technology??

When I was young and my parents were at work, I spent my days with my grandparents. My Grandad taught me how to do puzzles in the newspapers, and we would watch Countdown every evening - the UK maths and language quiz show. Those years fueled my interest in logic and the English language. Once we got a computer at home, I was fascinated by what it could do. Attending high school, computing was the one subject I always got A’s in, and I really enjoyed exploring what computers had to offer, so I just kept going from high school to undergraduate to Ph.D. level. Now, I am enjoying using computers to generate language for a living. So, there was not a defining moment. It was just a natural progression.?

What attracted you to the field of Natural Language Generation (NLG)??

In my undergraduate course, we had an Artificial Intelligence module that covered a wide variety of topics. There were two lectures on parse trees, where a sentence is broken down into its parts of speech and represented in a tree structure. I found this alternative way of thinking about language fascinating, and the content of the lectures stuck with me. When it came to my undergraduate 4th dissertation, I ended up working on a project that generated puzzles using sentence templates, which I later learned is a simplistic form of NLG. I was keen to break the sentences down further to the syntactic level of parts of speech, however, my supervisor kept insisting there was not enough time to go into that level of detail in a 6-month project. I finally understood this properly once I started my Ph.D. in NLG! So again, it came down to just being interested in the topic and naturally pursuing it.?

What advice do you have for women wanting to study and work in technology and engineering??

Ignore those who say you are not good enough or try to tell you that it's not for you. Listen to yourself, stand by what you want to do, and pursue it unapologetically.?

Those of us lucky enough to work at Arria get to spend our workdays immersed in technology that is transforming the way organizations process data and deliver information. Our work is fascinating every single day. We encourage you to consider a career in STEM, and if you’re already working in STEM – check out our careers page .?