Hi! I am Meghana Holla - I am a recent graduate with a Master's degree in Computer Science from Virginia Tech, where I had the privilege of working under the guidance of Dr. Ismini Lourentzou. At Virginia Tech, I was a member of the PLAN (Perception + LANguage) Lab and the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics. My Master's thesis "Commonsense for Zero Shot Natural Language Video Localization delved into exploring the intersection commonsense knowledge and video-language understanding. I earned my Bachelor's in Computer Science and Engineering, specializing in Data Science, from PES University, Bangalore, India. Currently, I'm an AI Engineer at Bloomberg AI in New York City, where I am contributing to the development of Bloomberg's AI-powered real-time bond pricing solution - IBVAL.

Research Focus
My research focuses on application of neural and symbolic methods to problems in language (textual) modality as well as those at the intersection of language and vision. Specifically, I am interested in exploring the adoption of commonsense understanding and reasoning to vision+language tasks. One could summarize my research focus as:
Language + Vision + Knowledge
Master's Research
During my Masters, I primarily worked on:
  1. Commonsense-driven grounding of natural language queries to raw video data: Researching neuro-symbolic methodologies for language grounding in raw videos (Accepted to AAAI'24!🎉)
  2. Semantic contrastive pre-training: Multimodal pre-training using multimodal transformers
Academic Service
Reviewer : ICLR'24, ACM PETRA'23, EMNLP'22

News
Dec 2023
My work on commonsense for natural language video localization is accepted at AAAI 2024! 🚀
May 2023
Successfully defended my Master's Thesis! What an amazing journey! 👩‍🎓
Apr 2023
Presented at the Amazon - VT Initiative for Efficient and Robust Machine Learning event. 🌟
Apr 2023
Honored to be selected as the Paul E. Torgersen Research Excellence Award winner! 🏆
Jun 2022
Received the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) 2022 Student Scholarship - Thanks CS@VT!
May 2022
Started my Summer Internship as an ML Intern @ Bloomberg LP, New York. Exciting journey ahead! 🌆
Aug 2021
Joined the MS in Computer Science program at Virginia Tech. Thrilled to begin this new chapter! 📚🚀

Publications

Commonsense for Zero-Shot Natural Language Video Localization - AAAI 2024
Meghana Holla and Ismini Lourentzou
📝
Dialog Driven Face Construction using GANs - ICTAI 2020
Malaika Vijay, Meghana, Nishant Aklecha, Ramamoorthy Srinath
📝 📁
Detection of Emphasis Words in Short Texts – A Context Aware Label Distribution Learning Approach - ICAICR 2020
Meghana, Bhaskarjyoti Das
📝 📁
Polarity Estimation in a Signed Social Graph Using Graph Features - SCEECS 2020
Meghana Holla, Nishant Aklecha, Ornella I. Dsouza and Bhaskarjyoti Das
📝
On Detectors and Descriptors based Techniques for Face Recognition - ICCIDS 2018
Vinay A, Nishant Aklecha, Meghana, K.N. Balasubramanya Murthy, S Natarajan
📝

Experience

Teaching

CS1114 - Introduction to Software Design by Prof. Dwight Barnette Spring 2022
CS2505 - Computer Organization I by Prof. William McQuain and Prof. David McPherson Fall 2022; Fall 2021

Research

Sept 2021 - Present

PLAN (Perception + LANguage) Lab, Virginia Tech

Graduate Research Assistant

Research: Investigating self-supervised methods for language grounding in videos by leveraging background commonsense knowledge.
Aug 2017 - Dec 2019

Center for Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence, PES University

Undergraduate Research Assistant

Research: Facial Recognition driven by keypoint feature detectors and descriptors; Semantic Segmentation of clothing images

Professional Experience

May 2022 - Aug 2022

Bloomberg LP, New York

ML Intern

🛠 PyTorch, Python
Aug 2020 - Aug 2021

Morgan Stanley, Bangalore

Technology Associate

🛠 Python, Java, Apache Solr, Lucidworks Fusion, Kafka, KSQL
Jan 2020 - Jun 2020

Morgan Stanley, Bangalore

Technology Analyst Intern

🛠 Python (Flask), Angular, DB2
May 2019 - Jul 2019

Morgan Stanley, Bangalore

Summer Analyst

🛠 Java, Angular, D3.js
July 2018 - Aug 2018

MapmyIndia, Bangalore

Machine Learning Intern

🛠 Python, Tensoflow, Linux

Selected Projects

VEQA: Visual Question Answering from the lens of Visual Entailment | 🖥 🛠 Python PyTorch 🔠 Language + Vision Multimodal Understanding

Formulated Visual Question Answering (VQA) as a Visual Entailment (VE) task by using an image as the premise and joint representation of question and answer as a hypothesis.

Performed detailed experiments using both VQA and VE datasets to assess their inherent properties.

Identified and interpreted robustness and latent biases in multimodal datasets and models for VE/VQA.

Dialog-Driven Face Generation + Modification | 📝 🛠 Python Tensorflow 🔠 Language + Vision Image Generation

Designed and developed a description-driven face generation module capable of generating and making corrections to a face through iterative natural language feedback

Additionally developed an end-to-end pipeline a speech-to-text module for ergonomic interfacing

The multi-pass nature enables a dialog-based communication with the generator model

Published at the 32nd IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI 2020) held in Baltimore, MD (Acceptance rate: 25%)

Emphasis Detection in Short Texts | 📝 🛠 Python Keras 🔠 Sequence Lableling Natural Language Understanding

Proposed a methodology for token-wise estimation of degree of emphasis using BiLSTM-CRF with Label Distribution Learning

Published at the 4th International Conference on Advanced Informatics for Computing Research (ICAICR 2020)

Purpose-aware Trip Duration Predcition in Bike-Sharing | 🖥 📝 🛠 Python Scikit Learn 🔠 Machine Learning Graph Theory

Designed a methodology for duration prediction in bike-sharing context, which is more change-agostic than traditional station-level prediction methods

Employed a combination of geographic clustering and purpose-aware categorization of stations in bike-sharing context