Categories: AlexaAmazonArtificial IntelligenceCortanaMicrosoft

New Adventure – Alexa AI

Today (4 Mar 2019) is going to be my first day with Amazon. I will be joining the “Alexa AI” team.

I continue to be a huge fan of Cortana and the work that the team has done/will do. I will continue to cheer for her success in the direction that Microsoft is taking her. I believe that there are going to be multiple digital agents in our lives, with different levels of expertise, different experiences, different personalities. We will interact with the agent that makes sense for the task at hand. Cortana will continue to be in my life.

I know that there is a lot that I need to learn first in my new role as part of the Alexa AI team. The discussions with Alexa’s leadership team have been fantastic. There is an appetite to advance the state-of-the-art in digital assistants and a matching investment for doing that. I have so much to learn, new colleagues to meet, and new technologies to build. I can’t wait to start!

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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