Page 32 - The Indian EYE 031524

NORTH AMERICAN Newsline MARCH 15, 2024 | The Indian Eye 32

SADHANA LOLLA

MIT senior named 2024 Gates

Cambridge Scholar

IT senior Sadhana Lolla
has won the prestigious
MGates Cambridge Schol-
arship, which offers students an op-
portunity to pursue graduate study in
the field of their choice at Cambridge
University in the UK.
Established in 2000, the Gates
Cambridge Scholarship offers full- At a ceremony earlier this week, the “Class of 2024” made up of high
cost post-graduate scholarships to
outstanding applicants from coun- achievers across the arts, sports, entrepreneurship and medicine were hon-
oured following a day-long conference entitled ‘The Future of Education’.
tries outside of the U.K. The mission “I am extremely proud of the UK-India partnership and the Achievers
of the scholarship is to build a global Honors highlights the strong outcomes that can arise through partnership,”
network of future leaders committed said Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
to improving the lives of others. Akhtar, the acclaimed writer-filmmaker behind box-office hits such as
Lolla, a senior from Clarksburg,
Maryland, is majoring in computer ‘Luck By Chance’ and ‘Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara’ and most recently ‘The
Archies’, was conferred the Living Legend Award in recognition of her work
science and minoring in mathemat-
ics and literature. At Cambridge, she in furthering an understanding of India on the global stage. She spoke of her
degree in literature and sociology giving her a strong footing for her filmmak-
will pursue an MPhil in technology ing career.
policy. “I genuinely believe that literature and sociology have helped me im-
Lolla aims to lead conversations
on deploying and developing tech- mensely in making movies, and writing and telling stories,” Akhtar said. Also
recognised in the field of Arts, Culture and Entertainment this year was UK-
nology for marginalized communi- based chef Asma Khan, behind the women-led Darjeeling Express restaurant
ties, such as the rural Indian village in London. The King’s College London alumna started out in the field of law
that her family calls home, while also but has since made a mark for herself in the culinary space, including as a
conducting research in embodied in-
telligence. cookery writer behind bestselling recipe books on Indian cuisine.
At MIT, Lolla conducts research on safe and trustworthy robotics and
deep learning at the Distributed Robotics Laboratory with Professor Daniela SAI PRANEETH
Rus. Her research has spanned debiasing strategies for autonomous vehicles
and accelerating robotic design processes. At Microsoft Research and Themis Shuttler joins US club as
AI, she works on creating uncertainty-aware frameworks for deep learning,
which has impacts across computational biology, language modeling, and ro- head coach
botics. She has presented her work at the Neural Information Processing Sys-
tems (NeurIPS) conference and the International Conference on Machine
Learning (ICML).
Outside of research, Lolla leads initiatives to make computer science ed-
ucation more accessible globally. She is an instructor for class 6.s191 (MIT
Introduction to Deep Learning), one of the largest AI courses in the world,
which reaches millions of students annually. She serves as the curriculum lead
for Momentum AI, the only U.S. program that teaches AI to underserved stu-
dents for free, and she has taught hundreds of students in Northern Scotland
as part of the MIT Global Teaching Labs program.

ZOYA AKHTAR & ASMA KHAN

Filmmaker and chef win India-

UK Achievers Honors

ilmmaker Zoya Akhtar and British Indian chef Asma Khan were among
the winners of the annual India-UK Achievers Honors in London. The orld Championships bronze medalist B Sai Praneeth, the 31-year-
Faward recognizes the achievements of Indian students and alumni who old from Hyderabad, will now head for a coaching career in the
have pursued an international program of study. WUSA. Praneeth decided to end his active playing career after battling
The initiative, by the National Indian Students and Alumni Union (NIS- nagging injuries since the Tokyo Games, ending a fairly successful career. He
AU) UK, in partnership with the British Council in India and the UK govern- won the 2017 Singapore Open. The Indian badminton player competed at the
ment’s Department for Business and Trade, was launched last year with the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and is a bronze medal winner at the BWF World Cham-
aim of celebrating bilateral educational ties. Continued on next page... >>

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