Inspiring women in AI: Dr. Maria Mestre

What AI-related projects are you currently working on?

I am working on adding alternative text to the images in our e-books to make them accessible, as publishers need to comply with EU regulations.

This is a great use-case for AI as it achieves great accuracy while being very efficient.

What inspired you to pursue a career in AI and related fields?

I was always passionate about bridging the gap between natural language and machines.

I did a PhD in applied statistics but only started working on text data in my first job at a startup many years ago. I liked the area from the beginning and have always worked extracting meaning from text in one way or another for the last 10+ years.

What recent or potential breakthroughs in AI are you most excited about?

I am currently very excited about open-source AI models and new techniques to train them on your own data.

Generic models are great across a large variety of tasks, but you hit a wall once you're trying to get very high accuracy on a specific task or you're trying to make the model conform to your style or your standards.

New techniques such as the ones used by OpenAI or DeepSeek to train their models will open a way for any company to start training models on their own data, instead of using proprietary generic ones.

What potential risks or downsides of AI development concern you?

We don't have good established ways of evaluating certain AI tasks, so measuring things like bias or accuracy is not always a simple task.

Another issue is that these models still sometimes generate wrong "made up" answers, so it's very important to spend time and effort adding appropriate guardrails to minimize errors as much as possible.

What challenges have you faced as a woman in the AI field, and how have you overcome them?

I wouldn't say this is specific to being a woman, but more about being a parent. The field is moving very fast, and it is sometimes hard to keep up with the literature and all the breakthroughs in the field.

Something new comes up every day, and it can be a challenge to keep up if you have a busy family life (or anything that keeps you busy outside of work, really!).

I always try to carve out some time to read papers and stay up-to-date with the field, and my team is very supportive of this.

What advice would you give to young women considering a career in AI?

In order to start working in AI, it's important to have a foundation in programming and data science. It's one thing to understand how to use these new tools, but you also need to know how to run experiments, apply it on data, evaluate the results, and package the model into an application that can be used by people. So the AI model is just one piece of the larger puzzle.

There are a lot of resources online, so taking online courses and having personal side-projects are great ways to learn!

What advice would you give to other women for getting started with using AI in their research, work, or life?

Picking a project that is close to your heart is a very motivating way to get started. There are a lot of tools provided by companies, but if you want to get hands-on experience with building AI applications, it's better to get stuck in and build it yourself.

At work, it's good to assess how these technologies can make you more productive and give them a shot.