Sunita Sarawagi facts for kids

Sunita Sarawagi is a brilliant Indian computer scientist. She is known for her amazing work with computers, especially in how they store and understand information. She helps computers learn from data and understand human language. She works as a top professor at IIT Bombay, a very famous university in India.

Sunita Sarawagi's Journey in Computer Science

Sunita Sarawagi loved computers from a young age. She studied computer science at IIT Kharagpur in India and finished in 1991. After that, she went to the University of California, Berkeley in the United States. There, she continued her studies in computer science. She worked with a famous database expert named Michael Stonebraker.

Her College Degrees

Sunita earned two more degrees at Berkeley. She got her master's degree in 1993. Her master's project was about organizing large amounts of data efficiently. Then, she completed her Ph.D. in 1996. Her Ph.D. research was about how computers can quickly find information in very large databases.

Working and Teaching

After finishing her studies, Sunita worked as a researcher for IBM Research. This is a big company that invents new computer technologies. She worked at their center in San Jose, California. In 1999, she moved back to India. She became a professor at IIT Bombay. She started as an assistant professor. Then, she became an associate professor in 2003. In 2014, she became a full professor. This means she is one of the most experienced teachers and researchers there. Since 2020, she has also led a special center at IIT Bombay. This center focuses on machine intelligence and data science. It helps computers become smarter and understand more information.

Awards and Special Honors

Sunita Sarawagi has received many important awards for her work. These awards show how much her research has helped the world of computer science.

Major Awards in Engineering

In 2019, Sunita won the Infosys Prize in Engineering and Computer Science. This is a very big award in India. She won it because of her important research in databases, data mining, machine learning, and natural language processing. Her work has helped computers understand and use information better.

Recognized by Her Universities

In the same year, her first university, IIT Kharagpur, gave her a special award. It was called the Distinguished Alumni Award. This award is for former students who have done amazing things. IIT Bombay, where she teaches, also gave her an award. It was the Prof. H. H. Mathur Excellence Award in Applied Sciences.

Top Honors in Computer Science

Sunita was also chosen to be part of the Indian National Academy of Engineering in 2013. This is a group of the best engineers in India. In 2021, she was elected as an ACM Fellow. This is a very high honor from the Association for Computing Machinery. She received this for her contributions to how computers learn from information. Her work helps computers analyze, extract, and combine information in smart ways.