Dena Mujtaba is a senior R&D engineer on Kitware’s Computer Vision Team, where she develops robust solutions in the areas of natural language processing, large language models, foundation models, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Her work focuses on building and evaluating algorithms that extract meaning from textual and multi-modal data, as well as enabling reasoning over the extracted information.

Before joining Kitware, Dena was a Graduate Research Assistant at Michigan State University. Her research focused on deep learning for natural language processing, automatic speech recognition, and algorithmic fairness. She also collaborated on building a mobile app and backend infrastructure to support speech recognition for people who stutter, utilizing tools such as PyTorch, Flask, and PostgreSQL. Prior to her graduate studies, she worked as a software engineer at Coetic, where she developed web applications using Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, and Elixir, and managed data pipelines and backend systems.

Dena is completing her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at Michigan State University. Her dissertation focuses on multimodal fairness in deep-learning-based algorithms for hiring. She also holds a Master of Science in electrical engineering and a Bachelor of Science in computer engineering, both from Michigan State University.

Awards

• Harriett B. Rigas Memorial Endowment for Undergraduate and Graduate Women presented by Michigan State University, August 2018