Anant Nawalgaria, Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Engineer and Poet

I write about whatever inspires me – in general, I have written poems on a variety of different topics ranging from world peace to birthday and romantic ones. The one common theme underlying almost all of my poems is that they all tend to rhyme with the ABAB rhyming scheme.

My name is Anant Nawalgaria, I am a passionate tech-savvy problem solver, and I currently work in the field of Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning at Google Munich. Previously, I worked in the same field in Amazon.

I currently live in Munich, but was originally born in India. I grew up across many different cultures and countries, including Singapore, Indonesia, and more. My affinity is for German culture: my friends are here, as well the safety and beauty of the town – I am loving it here ever since!

I first became interested in poetry at around the age of 11 – it was originally my brother who used to write poems, and he inspired me to try my hand at them myself. Some of my favourite poets and main inspirations are Robert Frost and Edgar Allan Poe.

When I’m writing poetry, I first find a topic that inspires me; then I conjure visual imagery about it in my mind. Because I am quite a visual person, with a strong visual memory, I love to think in pictures. Therefore, I use poetry as a medium to paint with my words. Based on the imagery it evokes, I try to write down a draft in an ABAB rhyming fashion, editing along the way. This is also followed by a final edit and polishing towards the end.

My favourite experience with poetry was several years back in an onsite interview – I was put on the spot and asked to compose a short ode on the interview itself. That was certainly interesting. Furthermore, in retrospect, I find the situations which amused me quite inspiring: everything from dreams, news, people, and dancing classes.

I think the role of the poet in society has changed with the advances in technology. I believe primarily that with the widespread use of the internet and digitization of creative media, it has become increasingly easy to find poems as a reference and also publish your own poems on a blog. This has lowered the barrier to entry, thus enabling everyone to try their hands – this is a great boon for our society!

I do see similarities between poetry and my current occupation – they both require structure, creativity, and visual thinking. In fact, there has even been research around training Machine Learning models to generate poetry (might look into that later!).

Poetry has been a benefit to my technological career. To a certain extent, poetry has also helped me improve my soft skills and vocabulary, thereby aiding with communication. It also makes for a nice “fun fact of the day” at work.

My advice to anyone interested in writing poetry is to first read a lot of poems to get some idea and decide on the style of poetry you would like to write. Then, find a topic that you feel strongly about, conjure pictures of it in your mind, and describe it in a poetic flow.

There is always more than tech – I believe creativity is critical to tech, especially in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. This is evidenced by the fact that a lot of State of the Art breakthroughs have been propelled by a mixture of scientific knowledge compounded by a streak of creativity.