Savas Parastatidis, MSc., PhD.
I build products that enhance our lives through the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI). I work on technologies that support the natural interaction between humans and AI-powered experiences. I am a Software Engineer at Meta‘s Reality Lab Research providing technical leadership and overall architecture guidance. I was a Senior Principal Engineer in Amazon‘s Alexa AI and Microsoft Cortana’s architect & co-creator amongst other roles.
I am interested in application experiences that understand natural language, can engage in conversations, provide answers, anticipate and proactively complete tasks on behalf of users, are personalized, and react to changes in the world’s information streams. I enjoy working on scalable and reliable systems in support of natural human-digital agent interactions. I am passionate about digital agents, large-scale distributed systems, knowledge representation and reasoning, reactive computing, cloud computing, graph stores, web services, system architecture, software design and engineering.
Short bio (updated Feb 2023): I currently work for Meta‘s Reality Lab Research. I was part of the Alexa AI organization where I helped advance the state of the art in natural human-agent interactions. Previously, I worked for Microsoft as the overall Architect of Cortana, which I helped start as a co-founder and the first engineer of the project, back in 2012. As the team’s Architect, I had an overarching role that spanned disciplines such as user experiences, services/platform design, system architecture, technical coordination, software engineering, vision definition, and strategy.I also worked for Facebook’s Applied Machine Learning group where I lead the work on a language and conversational understanding platform, one that processes all of Facebook’s posts and comments.
I love working in the personal digital assistant space. I believe that a new set of conversational and anticipatory/proactive experiences will fundamentally change the ways in which humans consume information and complete tasks, all through the use of technology. The requirements span various fields of computer science such as natural user interfaces, semantics, knowledge representation and reasoning, the Web (check out my book “REST in Practice“), large-scale systems/services, stream processing/reactive computing, machine learning, and much more.
For more details about my career and studies, have a look at my CV.