Categories: CortanaFacebookMicrosoft

Cortana, I am back!

I had a great time at Facebook. I learned a lot, wrote lots of code, and worked on conversational understanding technologies. I can’t wait to see what the team will do next.

Facebook is a unique organization, with an extraordinary culture. The engineering infrastructure is unbelievable and it enables developers to move really fast. I loved it. I met some great people there.

Even though I was having fun, I did miss the great team responsible for Cortana and Mike Calcagno’s leadership. So when Mike, Marcus, Jon, and Amit took me out for dinner few weeks ago and asked me to return home in order to do even crazier things with Cortana, I couldn’t resist. So… back at Microsoft… starting Tuesday, May 17th.

Looking forward to reconnecting with the Cortana team and to starting the exploration of more crazy ideas around user-centricity and digital companions/friends, enhanced/augmented reality, and AI as the enabling force behind natural human-computer interaction and “ambient intelligence” experiences. There is sooooo much work to do!!!

Very very excited 🙂

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