Living a 'hybrid life' through remote work

Unnati Patel, 27, is a part-time programmer for an American firm on a Nasa project.

- Rohini Mohan

A job that lets her work remotely across continents but never too far from a home-cooked meal and warm friends is the "hybrid life" Ms Unnati Patel, 27, dreams of.

The US-educated freelance programmer specialising in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) now lives in Bengaluru in south India.

She is currently working remotely as a part-time programmer for an American firm on a Nasa "open science" project that helps scientific agencies share research and code safely for collaboration and communication.

She is also part of Turing's Dream, an "AI hackhouse" running a six-week residency for coders and researchers in Bengaluru to network and collaborate.

There, she is working on using AI to enable novel, positive discoveries in image searches. "I am playing with a fashion dataset, and looking to see if I can optimise for 'serendipity' in searches. Put simply, if I upload a picture, can it throw up others like it?" she said.

It has been quite a leap for someone who never used computers till she was in college.