ZARREEN NAOWAL REZA
[This is me right now]
I am working as a AI Research Scientist in Volta Charging, where I delight in working at the intersection of data science, applied machine learning using cutting-edge technology and doing high-quality research to produce innovative ML solutions for EV charging stations. Aside my role as a AI scientist, I have been working with one of the leading Privacy-preserving AI organizations called OpenMined. I have been an active part of different teams in OpenMined including the writing team, education and learning team, Differential Privacy and Federated Learning research team etc. I also developed and instructed a course on Federated Learning published by OpenMined. This course is part of their Private AI series which is funded by PyTorch, FacebookAI etc. I am also a Leadership Fellow of a non-profit gloabal organization called Women Who Code Inc. where I lead the Data Science Track in organizing free events, workshops and building a community that helps women excel in STEM roles.
List of My Public Talks
- WIDSVan 2022: End to end ML Orchestration for Private Data
- The Role of Public Speaking in Career Growth – Women Who Code CONNECT Forward 2021
- Privacy-Preserving AI – Perform Data Science on Data You Cannot See – Presented in Women Who Code CONNECT REIMAGINE 2021
- Climbing up the ladder through open-source contribution – Presented in Software Freedom Day 2021
- Private Medical Deep Learning with Federated Learning & Differential Privacy | OpenMined PriCon 2020
- 3 Minute Thesis Competition – My Master’s Thesis in 3 Minutes
- OpenVINO for Speech and Audio – Presented in Intel Edge AI Scholarship Challenge 2020 Study Jam
[This was me when I just started this blog!]
I am studying in Master’s in Computer Science in the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada with a specialisation in Artificial Intelligence in Computer Vision. I am conducting industrial research in this domain as part of my dissertation. I also have decent research background in traditional image processing, Natural Language Processing and Reinforcement Learning. As a reward of my performance, I have been accepted to NSERC CREATE On-Duty program as a highly qualified student (more info).
I, along with two fellow students, participated in Thales Student Innovation Championship 2018 in Artificial Intelligence and won the 3rd prize worth of CAD$5000. The competition was based on an open-ended challenge related to natural language processing. In this competition, 52 teams from different universities all over Canada participated from which top 8 finalists were invited to present in front of judges in Montreal. Judges panel consisted of lead AI researchers, project managers, directors of Engineering Canada etc. Here is the link where you will find more information and picture about our winning.
My talk at 3-Minute Thesis Competition. For details, please check my blog here.

I also get myself engaged with community activities and try to contribute to the society. It not only enrich my knowledge but also helps me to emerge as a better human being. Recently I have been a mentor of Technovation Challenge 2018, which is the world’s largest tech entrepreneurship program for girls. Apart from working as an online mentor, I have directly mentored two teams of high school girls in the Assumption Catholic High School in Windsor, Ontario. I helped them with the following: i) identifying a problem in their community ii) develop a mobile application to solve that problem iii) pitch their idea iv) business/market aspect analysis v) launch app etc.
Although my friends don’t agree, I consider myself as a a connoisseur of music! But at least they trust me as a connoisseur of food!
Follow me in the followings
Twitter: twitter.com/ZarreenNReza
Github: github.com/znreza/
LinkedIn: zarreen-naowal-reza
Email: zarreen.naowal.reza@gmail.com