Categories: Artificial IntelligencePersonal Assistants

One Assistant, Personalized, Device Ubiquity, All Services

I couldn’t agree more with Viv‘s principles as articulated by Dag Kittlaus in his presentation earlier today. I met with the Viv team about 2 years ago. I was very impressed by their leadership team and their work. However, Facebook managed to persuade me to join them instead.

I totally subscribe to the vision of a single digital companion that follows the user across devices, across environments and contexts. Natural user interfaces will be the norm for interacting with services and information/knowledge.

The opportunities, challenges, and possibilities fascinate me!

Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about