Shrestha is a Master’s student working at the intersection of natural language processing and computational sociology, with a primary interest in multi-modal interactive systems and the creation of comprehensive multimodal datasets. Her research will explore and evaluate large language models, with the goal of advancing socially aware dialogue understanding systems that embrace diverse voices and perspectives. Previously she was an applied scientist at Microsoft, where her research focused primarily on interactive grounded language understanding in a collaborative environment (IGLU). She earned a master’s degree in data science/machine learning from UC Berkeley where her research delved into the innovative design of participatory methodologies for natural disaster risk reduction, preceded by a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Manipal Institute of Technology.