Sneha Mehta Named 2020 Twitch Research Fellow

Sneha Mehta, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science, as well as a member of the Discovery Analytics Center at Virginia Tech, has been named a 2020 Twitch Research Fellow.

Mehta was one of five students across the country to receive the $10,000 award to support her academic research and an offer to connect with a team at Twitch for a full-time paid internship at Twitch HQ. 

Mehta’s research involves information extraction and sentiment analysis from text streams using natural language processing and machine learning. She is advised by Naren Ramakrishnan, the Thomas L. Phillips Professor of Engineering in the Department of Computer Science and Director of Discovery Analytics Center.

For two consecutive summers beginning in 2018, Mehta has served as a machine learning interns at Netflix headquarters in Los Gatos, California. Most recently, she served as an intern on the Globalization Data Science and Engineering team. In this role, she conceptualized and trained deep neural network models to improve the performance of black box machine translation systems upto 4 BLEU on 10 low-resource languages.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a master’s degree in mathematics from BITS Pilani University in India.