Break from work

Hi all… It’s been a while since I posted on this blog.

It’s been an interesting summer for me. I resigned from Amazon to take a break from work. I’ve been traveling, reading for fun, studying math and machine learning, and re-charging. I have been working on natural language/conversational systems for about 11 years now. It was time for a change. I have been thinking about what could possibly keep me busy and offer me opportunities to learn for the next decade or so. I have some ideas but I am still in “break from work” mode so that will be a topic for some future post 🙂

Some highlights from my break so far…

I went on a 5,000mi motorcycle trip back in May-Jun. I am now compiling the videos and photos into a story that I will share soon.
I also attended my first ever Formula 1 Grand Prix. That was in Montreal, Canada, back in June. What a great experience!
We went to Florida for Mary’s family reunion. It’s always great to spend time with family in the sun even though I don’t like Florida that much. I played lots of tennis while there and learned a lot.
Then my own family visited from Greece for almost 3 weeks (parents, brother, sister-in-law, nephews). It was awesome spending all my time with them. We had a blast. We even visited California. My nephews loved Disneyland and Legoland 🙂

I feel very fortunate that I can afford to take such a long break from work.

And here’s how I dreamed of my break using Open AI’s Dall-E 🙂 (“silhouette of a man looking at a huge moon while on a beach at night”).

silhouette of a man looking at a huge moon while on a beach at night

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