Bahar Salehi is a Senior Data Scientist at Go1. Before joining Go1, Bahar has worked across industries and for companies including Telstra and SEEK. She’s deeply passionate about coaching data scientists to find effective solutions for loosely defined problems. As an expert in the field, we put these Fast Five questions to Bahar about her passion for AI.
What appealed to you most about a career that involves AI?
I never get bored in this field as there is always something new and fascinating to learn. A career in AI means that you are at the edge of innovations and you face problems that needs the scientific process to solve (i.e., collect data, analyse, build, test, and iterate). Becoming comfortable with finding answers to loosely defined problems is what appeals me the most in my AI career.
What aspect of AI are you most interested in or passionate about?
Data is the fuel for AI and machine learning and I love looking into data. Once I get the insights I need, and a data story to tell, then I wear my problem-solving hat, which is the other interesting part of my work. At the end of the day, using data, AI, and machine learning algorithms to make life easier on a large scale, is what makes me happy and excited to come to work every day.
In your daily life, what are the positive impacts of AI that you see playing out in our society?
AI has improved our lives in different aspects. The top to that come to mind are:
- Personalisation:
Every person has their unique desires, approaches, and way of life. With the help of AI, companies can bring better choices to their customers rather than forcing them to choose pre-defined paths. Aligned with that, at Go1 we are on a mission to build more accurate personalised learning recommendations using AI. Because after all, everyone has their own unique learning path!
- Scaling manual work:
AI is helping to replace a lot of dangerous, boring, and complex manual work in a scalable way. In other words, we let the robots deal with the repetitive tasks so we have more time to do what we enjoy the most. This helps the society to make better informed decisions, do the jobs easier, and be more productive.
Why do you think it is important to empower young Australians with access to AI education?
The amount of generated data is growing daily in our society and the more data we have the more we can do with AI. However, data doesn’t have value by itself. It needs to be cleaned, processed, and interpreted. Therefore, we need more experts to know how to properly use data to build those magnificent AI tools that can bring value to society. By empowering our young Australians with proper AI education, we contribute to data and AI democratisation, which means the AI strengths are not only available to a small subset of the population, but the whole world.
What advice would you give to young Australians who want to learn more about and eventually work in AI?
We have gained a lot in AI, but the technology is still at the early stages and we will need to do a lot of trial and error to do even more amazing things. There are still a lot of questions that nobody has an answer for. So, my advice is to embrace yourself with constant learning, as well as getting used to the scientific process.
Learn more about Bahar and her role at Go1 by following her on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bahar-salehi/
Go1 is a proud corporate supporter of the Day of AI Australia.
