Savas Parastatidis, MSc., PhD.
I am passionate about leveraging Artificial Intelligence to amplify human capabilities by seamlessly integrating physical and digital contexts. My work focuses on creating intuitive, natural user experiences that bridge the gap between technology and everyday life.
With over 20 years of experience as a technical leader in product delivery and advanced technology R&D, I thrive at the intersection of innovation and execution. Throughout my career, I have contributed to shaping the future of AI-powered products and cutting-edge technologies through impactful roles at industry leaders like Meta’s Reality Labs, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Microsoft’s Research.
I am interested in application experiences that understand natural language, can engage in conversations, provide answers, anticipate and proactively complete tasks on behalf of users, are personalized, and react to changes in the world’s information streams. I enjoy working on scalable and reliable systems in support of natural human-digital agent interactions. I am passionate about digital agents, large-scale distributed systems, knowledge representation and reasoning, reactive computing, cloud computing, graph stores, web services, system architecture, software design and engineering.
Short bio (updated Feb 2025): I worked for Meta‘s Reality Lab on future technologies for always-on sensing, egocentric capture, and Contextual AI-based experiences. I was part of the Alexa AI organization where I helped advance the state of the art in natural human-agent interactions. Previously, I worked for Microsoft as the overall Architect of Cortana, which I helped start as a co-founder and the first engineer of the project, back in 2012. As the team’s Architect, I had an overarching role that spanned disciplines such as user experiences, services/platform design, system architecture, technical coordination, software engineering, vision definition, and strategy.I also worked for Facebook’s Applied Machine Learning group where I lead the work on a language and conversational understanding platform, one that processes all of Facebook’s posts and comments.
I love working in the personal digital assistant space. I believe that a new set of conversational and anticipatory/proactive experiences will fundamentally change the ways in which humans consume information and complete tasks, all through the use of technology. The requirements span various fields of computer science such as natural user interfaces, semantics, knowledge representation and reasoning, the Web (check out my book “REST in Practice“), large-scale systems/services, stream processing/reactive computing, machine learning, and much more.
For more details about my career and studies, have a look at my CV.