Savas Parastatidis – CV
Please also refer to my LinkedIn profile.
Last updated: Jan 2024
About
I work on the application of Artificial Intelligence in experiences that help humans do more. My technical interests span AI agents, hybrid device-cloud machine perception systems, multimodal input/output, continuous sensing and machine perception for augmented/mixed reality, large-scale/high-performance distributed systems, knowledge representation and reasoning, reactive computing, cloud computing.
Profile
- Technical leadership and execution in multiple projects such as Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, Xbox One + Kinect, Reactor distributed stream processing system, Facebook’s natural and conversational understanding platform.
- Management of research & development projects and teams.
- Co-author of the popular “REST in Practice” book.
- PhD and post-doctoral research in software-based support for high-performance, distributed-memory, parallel architectures.
Professional Experience
Meta, Feb 2023 – present, Reality Labs Research, Software Engineer
Overall coordination, system design, and execution for an LLM-based prototype system that supports continuous sensing experiences with vision understanding, language understanding, eye tracking, object referencing, EMG-detected gestures, and more. I aligned the execution across a multi-disciplinary team, set up and drove the software engineering process, and was hands-on with the development of the system.
Magnit, Nov 2022 – Feb 2023, Software Engineer @ Meta, Reality Labs Research
Contract assignment while exploring the mutual match with the specific team at Meta.
Amazon, Mar 2019 – Jun 2022, Sr. Principal Engineer, Alexa AI
Provided technical leadership across Alexa. Initiated and delivered Alexa’s multi-skill experiences. Designed and delivered the Alexa Conversations Description Language (ACDL) and related developer-facing tooling. Designed and championed Alexa Schema as the shared ontology across all of Alexa. Initiated a re-architecture of Alexa to support natural, multi-modal interactions (ongoing). Led Alexa’s 180+ community of Principal and Distinguished engineers and scientists.
Microsoft, May 2016 – Jan 2019, Partner Software Architect, Cortana
Oversaw Cortana’s overall architecture, ensured technology alignment across the product. Led the design and implementation of the next generation interaction management engine. Oversaw the protocol and implementation for the Invoke Speaker, the Cortana-Alexa integration, and Cortana in Skype. Led initiatives to support user-centric experiences such as a user-centric (vs device-centric) notification service and single user profile across Microsoft’s products.
Facebook, Jan 2015 – May 2016, Software Engineer
Designed the language understanding platform that processed every post and comment on Facebook to recognize recommendation/direction requests, congratulation messages, and others. Built the language annotation experience. Prototyped a digital friend.
Microsoft, Dec 2011 – Dec 2014, Principal Software Architect, Cortana & Information Platform and Experiences
Prototyped, together with researchers, the cloud-based experience that became Cortana. Co-founded the Cortana initiative. Architected and coordinated the technical design across teams for the set of services that powered the Cortana experience on phones. Contributed to growing the Cortana cloud organization from a single employee (me) to hundreds. Coordinated Cortana’s cloud services design across multiple teams of thousands. Designed and oversaw the technical execution on key systems such as the Reactor distributed stream processing engine (processed billions of events per day), Personal Data Platform, frontend service, conversational understanding, and more. Delivered the architecture of the voice-based search experience for Xbox + Kinect. Software engineering work on the first version of Bing’s runtime orchestration engine. Highlight: Awarded third “gold star” which was Microsoft’s recognition for high achievement and impact.
Microsoft, 2008 – Nov 2011, Principal Software Engineer
Prototyped cloud-based infrastructure for big data, compute-intensive workloads for high-performance scenarios using the dryad dataflow computational model (more general version of map-reduce). Invented and prototyped a NoSQL “active” store to support the reactive/stream processing and actor-based computational models. Engineering work on the first version of Bing’s runtime orchestration engine. Semantic search prototype for Bing. Highlight: Awarded second “Gold Star” and ranked as “top performer” for the prototyping work.
Microsoft, 2006 – 2008, Principal Software Architect
Worked on technologies, services, and tools to help scientists and researchers be more productive and efficient. Architected, prototyped, and led a team of 20 that implemented Zentity (a graph store to manage an organization’s research output). Technical lead for External Research’s “Cloud Computing for Science” vision, implementation, and deployment. Program management of the Microsoft-Intel joined Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers initiative. Design and development of various plugins for Office for researchers (released as open source). Leading collaborations with scientists worldwide. Highlight: Awarded “Gold Star” and ranked as “top performer” for my impact.
Microsoft, Sep 2005 – 2006, Program Manager
Editor of two key Web Services (WS-*) specifications on behalf of Microsoft. Design and prototyping work on “Oslo”, a declarative, data-oriented programming language.
Newcastle University, Jan 2003 – Sep 2005, Chief Software Architect and Principal Research Associate
Research in the areas of service-oriented, distributed, high-performance computing with an emphasis on Internet-scale architectures. The focal point was the articulation of architectural principles for Internet-scale computing and how they could be applied using Web Services technologies in service of eScience applications. Architecture and design of the North-East Regional eScience Center’s research projects. Standardization work in the Web Services and Grid Computing organizations.
Greek Arm Forces, Sep 2005 – 2006, Private
Fulfillment of the military service duty (awarded a distinction of honor).
Hewlett-Packard, Sep 2005 – 2006, Senior Software Engineer
Co-investigator in an R&D team in Transactions for Web Services. Principal role in the research, design, and implementation of the XML Transaction Service (XTS) the prototype on which the HP-WTS 1.0 product was based.
Newcastle University, Sep 2000 – Nov 2001, Research Associate
Post-doctoral research in parallel, high-performance computing using clusters of workstations and object-oriented, visual programming languages for parallel computing.
Education
Newcastle University, Oct 1996 – Sep 2000, PhD in Computing Science
Title of PhD thesis: Run-time Support for Parallel Object-Oriented Computing. The research work involved the implementation of an all-in software object-based DSM system, novel object caching techniques for distributed systems, and a new lazy task creation technique. The thesis dealt with design and implementation issues in the areas of load-balancing, high-speed communications, and clustering.
Newcastle University Oct 1995 – Sep 1996, MSc in Computer Software and System Design
Achieved highest marks in year. Dissertation work was in the area of run time support for mobile agents.
Alexander Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki (today International Hellenic University), Oct 1991 – Sep 1995, BSc in Information Technology
Second in class. Final-year project on DNS and sendmail was awarded with distinction.
Selected Publications
- REST in Practice (book), Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis, Ian Robinson, O’Reilly, 2010, http://restinpractice.com
- A platfrom for all that we know: creating a knowledge-driven research infrastructure, Savas Parastatidis, invited chapter in the book “The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery“
- A “smart” cyberinfrastructure for research, Savas Parastatidis, Evely Viegas, Tony Hey, Communications of the ACM, volume 52, issue 12, Dec 2009
- Protocol-based Integration using SSDL and π-calculus Simon Woodman et al., Chapter in ’Workflows for e-Science’, Taylor et al (eds), Springer, 2007
- Asynchronous Messaging between Web Services Using SSDL Savas Parastatidis et al., IEEE Internet Computing, 10(1), p26-39, 2006
- WS-GAF: A Framework for Building Grid Applications Using Web Services Savas Parastatidis et al., Journal of Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 17(2-4), p391-417, 2005
For a more complete list of publications please visit my publications page.
Professional Memberships
- Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), since 1996
- IEEE Computer, since 1996
- Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), since 199
Community Participation
Workshop Organizer
- Manycore Computing Workshop 07
- Building Service Based Grids – GGF 11
- Experiences and Future Challenges in Building Grids from
- Open Standards – UK e-Science AHM 2004
- Service Grids: Current Activity & Middleware Requirements
- e-Science Workflow Services
Journal Reviewer/Editor (sample)
- ACM Transactions on Internet
- IEEE Distributed Systems Online
- International Journal of Business Process Integration and
- Management, special issue on ‘Middleware for Web Services’
- Journal of Web Services Research, Guest Editor
- Journal of Web Services Research, Review Board Member
Conference Program Committee Member (sample)
- WWW 2006, 2007
- Grid 2006: 7th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Grid Computing
- Cluster Computing and Grid 2005, 2006, 2007