Nikita Gupta on Using AI and ML to Bring Documents to Life

When Nikita Gupta was in ninth grade, she came across one of her older sister’s school books. The simple title grabbed her attention: Artificial Intelligence. From that moment on, she was obsessed with figuring out how to make machines think.

Years later, while studying at IIIT in Delhi, India, she worked on various machine learning problems, including breast cancer detection, automated driving, and face detection in video. While attending the Grace Hopper Celebration in India (GHCI), she found herself being wowed by Adobe, a company that’s just as intrigued by machine learning as Nikita is. It was the perfect match.

“When I came to Adobe, everybody was so excited about machine learning,” Nikita says. “They’re trying to solve so many different problems with machine learning and artificial intelligence, so I knew it was going to be a great experience for me.”

After a summer internship on the Adobe Acrobat Document Cloud team, Nikita was offered a full-time position as a software development engineer. She accepted and returned to Adobe after graduating in 2017.

For Nikita, one big perk of the job was that she got to continue the challenging work she had done during her internship: figuring out how to use Adobe Sensei’s artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) framework to solve the problem of turning scanned documents into live text.

“Everybody is taking photos of documents with their smartphones, but to a camera, a document is just an image. The camera doesn’t know what part of the document is text or pictures or how it’s supposed to flow when you resize it,” Nikita says. “Our work is making it possible to automatically turn those images of documents into editable, accessible documents. We’re using Adobe Sensei to bring these documents to life.”

That means users will be able to do things like copy and paste text, and resize and reflow documents from one screen size to the next, no matter what kind of document it is—a report, a menu, an itemized bill, anything.

An example of the work that Nikita and her team makes possible.

Nikita says the most exciting thing about her work at Adobe is the way it bridges the theoretical and the practical.

“When we’re trying to solve a problem, we do the research and come up with different solutions—and then we start to develop those solutions,” Nikita says. “If you’re just learning about the theoretical aspects of a problem but never trying to implement solutions, you don’t get full insight into the problems. At Adobe, we get the best of both worlds.”

She also gets to see her work go into production quickly—something pure researchers may not experience. She says the fast-paced environment suits her personality and gives her the sense that she’s part of something both meaningful and fun.

“At a purely research-based company, people tend to take things slowly and you can start to lose momentum, which isn’t good for personal growth,” Nikita says. “At Adobe, you’re always excited and it motivates you to keep moving forward.”

Interested in joining the Adobe team? Check out available career opportunities at Adobe or read more stories about Adobe careers.