{"id":205738,"date":"2023-03-24T15:12:28","date_gmt":"2023-03-24T19:12:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/linguistics\/?p=205738"},"modified":"2023-03-24T15:12:28","modified_gmt":"2023-03-24T19:12:28","slug":"montclair-graduate-student-building-7-5-million-ai-company","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/linguistics\/2023\/03\/24\/montclair-graduate-student-building-7-5-million-ai-company\/","title":{"rendered":"Montclair Graduate Student Building $7.5 Million AI Company"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Raz Besaleli isn\u2019t on the Montclair State University campus participating in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) Lab, tutoring fellow linguistics students or helping professors with their courses by grading assignments and attending office hours, she\u2019s working on her master\u2019s in Computational Linguistics<\/a> \u2013 or helping run a multimillion-dollar AI company she helped co-found.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all in a day\u2019s work for Besaleli, a founding NLP research scientist at Seek AI<\/a>, which recently landed $7.5 million in pre-seed and seed funding, according to a company press release. Besaleli estimates that on a weekly basis, she puts in 60 hours at her job and 20 at Montclair. \u201cI don\u2019t get much sleep but that\u2019s OK, I\u2019m doing what I love,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Seek AI, Besaleli says, provides \u201ca natural language interface for a company\u2019s data. The idea is that you should be able to ask any question that you want, in natural language, and it will pull the data for you from your databases. The motivation behind this is that companies often have to either hire a lot of data analysts to just write this code called structured query language or SQL to pull this data from what are often very messy databases.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey often find a lot of the time consumed writing something that we believe could be automated,\u201d Besaleli says. \u201cSo, at the core of it, we are building code-generation models that will be able to generate code, given natural language that will interact with your database for you. We\u2019re streamlining the process of finding answers at a company and streamlining the way that it\u2019s done.\u201d<\/p>\n

Results, she says, could be complete in minutes versus days. Still, Besaleli says, Seek AI\u2019s objective is not to replace data analysts. \u201cOur goal is to make their jobs easier so that they can do more meaningful work,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Besaleli adds that \u201cThe generative AI space is very, very new. Even six months ago, we didn\u2019t have the capacity to do what we\u2019re doing now. It\u2019s a very, very rapidly growing field.\u201d<\/p>\n

Already, the SoHo-based Seek AI has more than a dozen pilots with tech, fintech and consumer brands customers ranging from startups to Fortune 100 companies. Seek AI will use the funding infusion to \u201caccelerate product development and support its mission of making data accessible to anyone in an organization via a natural language interface,\u201d the press release states.<\/p>\n

As a co-founder, Besaleli played a role in obtaining that funding. \u201cRaz would do investor pitches with me and speak about the underlying technology behind Seek,\u201d says Seek AI Founder and CEO Sarah Nagy.<\/p>\n

Nagy says she had no qualms about Besaleli still being a graduate student when they started working together. \u201cI was really impressed by Raz\u2019s background in linguistics, combined with her technical chops working with transformer models in PyTorch [an open source machine-learning framework that accelerates research prototyping to production deployment]. She also had co-founded a startup before, in the aerospace industry, which was incredibly impressive. On top of all that, she had a great attitude: eager to learn, get her hands dirty, and work hard to build Seek. Once I had known her for a few weeks, I knew I had to get her in the boat.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the time she and Besaleli met, Nagy says, \u201cI had built a very small prototype of an AI model and was facing the challenge of scaling the model and getting it to work with real-world data. Raz came up with several innovations that solved these challenges and helped propel Seek to be the leader in our space.\u201d<\/p>\n

While ChatGPT has entered the artificial intelligence lexicon thanks to tons of media attention, Besaleli says there\u2019s a big difference between that tool and the capabilities of Seek AI. \u201cWe use a model like ChatGPT in our systems, but the scope of our systems are much, much larger. ChatGPT is just a model, and it can generate SQL but from a very, very limited scope,\u201d she says, adding, \u201cWhat we do is a little different because we\u2019re also a repository, a centralized location for all the questions that that business asks. We\u2019re very much focused on information retrieval, not just generating code.\u201d<\/p>\n

\""Professor
Linguistics and Computer Science Professor Anna Feldman, who chairs the Linguistics department, was a key factor in Raz Besaleli choosing to enroll in the Computational Linguistics master\u2019s program at Montclair.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Besaleli is already an expert on the subject. She recently was the only student alongside three Montclair professors on the faculty panel \u201cChatGPT and the Future of AI<\/a>\u201d at the Feliciano School of Business. She sat alongside her research advisor and Computer Science Professor Jing Peng, Linguistics department chair and Computer Science Professor Anna Feldman, and Writing Studies Associate Professor Ronald Brooks Jr.<\/p>\n

When Besaleli was weighing her options about which school to attend, the Annapolis, Maryland, native looked at universities in the U.S., as well as the University of Reykjavik in Iceland. Ultimately, she chose to study at Montclair largely because of Feldman. \u201cI was interested in her research, and we just got along really well.\u201d Besaleli adds that affordability also was a factor in her decision.<\/p>\n

Feldman says she was unaware that she played a role in Besaleli\u2019s choosing to attend graduate school in New Jersey. \u201cBut I\u2019m happy Raz joined our program,\u201d she says. \u201cWe really enjoy having her at Montclair.\u201d<\/p>\n

Montclair is one of the few universities in the country that offer a Master of Science in Computational Linguistics \u2013 and the only university in New Jersey. \u201cIt\u2019s also special because it\u2019s truly interdisciplinary, housed in both Linguistics and Computer Science, and gives our students a strong background in both computer science and linguistics,\u201d says Feldman.<\/p>\n

Besaleli, Feldman adds, is an excellent student. \u201cShe never takes any facts for granted; she always wants to challenge ideas and verify claims. She worked with me on a project trying to discover historical semantic shifts in Modern Hebrew and discovered very interesting patterns,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\""A
Computer Science Professor Jing Peng (center) seen here at the Natural Language Processing Lab, serves as Raz Besaleli\u2019s research advisor.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With the guidance of Peng, Feldman says Besaleli is \u201cexploring how large language models can translate SQL queries into plain English. [SQL is a domain-specific language used for managing data held in relational databases, and SQL queries have a specific structure.] Raz would like to find out whether generating an SQL query from a text description requires a lot more context than the other way around.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for the future, Besaleli expects to graduate in May \u201cif everything works out and if I have time to write my final projects,\u201d she says, laughing. She certainly doesn\u2019t have to worry about the job market, and she\u2019ll be able to devote her attention to Seek AI.<\/p>\n

\u201cI see this revolutionizing the way that people interact with their databases,\u201d she says, \u201cand I hope that we can just make life as easy as possible for those in the data space, so that they can do the things that are important and that they want to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\""Students
Raz Besaleli (second from left) participates in the Natural Language Processing Lab with other students as Linguistics department chair and Computer Science Professor Anna Feldman looks on.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Feldman says the Seek AI platform \u201cis a great product that uses sophisticated natural language processing techniques and machine learning to allow users to use natural language commands to query databases\u2026. As for Raz\u2019s future, life is an adventure, and I hope Raz will continue building AI applications for social good.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Nagy is looking forward to navigating Seek AI\u2019s future alongside her co-founder. \u201cRaz is, by many accounts, a genius,\u201d says Nagy, \u201cand I am excited to continue to work with her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Story by Staff Writer Sylvia A. Martinez<\/a>. Photos by John J. LaRosa<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Raz Besaleli successfully navigating Computational Linguistics master\u2019s degree, rapidly changing artificial intelligence landscape<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":205740,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-205738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-students","category-7_homepage-news-and-events","category-259_linguistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/linguistics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/linguistics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/linguistics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/linguistics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/linguistics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205738"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/linguistics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205738\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":205744,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/linguistics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205738\/revisions\/205744"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/linguistics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/205740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/linguistics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/linguistics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/linguistics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}