Alisha Arora

Hi, I'm Alisha Arora! I’m passionate about building AI systems at the frontier, from language and world models to applied machine learning that pushes what’s possible & solve global problems in healthcare, climate, and beyond. I am a Systems Design Engineering student at the University of Waterloo, Canada’s top engineering school. 💡 Currently at Shopify, I’m part of the Recommendations team, building transformer-based models and improving recall through advanced semantic tokenization for large-scale product discovery. 👩🏻‍💻 Previously, at TELUS, I led AI-driven climate initiatives, developing computer vision models to monitor deforestation and natural disaster impacts, optimizing LLMs for energy efficiency through pruning and quantization, and building a full-stack carbon capture approximation platform. At MIT’s AI Lab, I conducted ML research under Dr. Ghosh, developing machine learning models to investigate the relationship between the gut microbiome and schizophrenia. At Procter & Gamble, I built both back-end and front-end systems for the Always YOU app, a menstrual and well-being tracker created in collaboration with Thrive Global. At Microsoft, I developed and optimized deep learning models (RNNs and GAMs) across 20,000+ maternal health records, improving prediction accuracy for Sudden Unexpected Infant Death (SUID) by 27%. 🌐 Beyond engineering, I co-founded The HopeSisters, a non-profit supporting foster children and seniors, delivering 5,000+ HopeBags and 12,000+ handwritten HopeCards during the pandemic—recognized on national television and by government officials. 🏆 My passion for responsible AI innovation and social impact has led to recognition as one of Canada’s Top 100 Most Powerful Women, a World Economic Forum AI Council Member, and a UNICEF Youth Ambassador. I also created a patent-pending suicidal ideation detection model for social media, awarded Microsoft Canada’s Young AI Innovator of the Year. My work has been featured by Forbes, Microsoft, and presented to audiences of over 30,000 at global tech events. 📩 Happy to connect: alisha.arora@uwaterloo.ca