Shankar Ananthakrishnan
Director, Applied Science (Alexa AI) at Amazon
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolShankar Ananthakrishnan is a seasoned applied science leader with two decades of research and technical leadership, currently directing Alexa AI’s language understanding strategy at Amazon. He builds and scales multidisciplinary teams that turn state-of-the-art deep learning research in NLU/NLP into production voice experiences, with a track record across spoken language understanding, semantic parsing, and fairness/privacy work. His earlier research career spans influential speech and machine translation projects at BBN and a highly cited PhD on prosody from USC, informing robust real-world speech systems like Echo and DARPA translation platforms. Known for bridging academia and product, he routinely moves novel algorithms from papers into deployed services at massive scale. Based in Cambridge, MA, he combines hands-on ML expertise with hiring and organizational leadership, actively recruiting applied scientists and ML engineers. An early contributor to mobile and VR-era graphics on GitHub during his master’s studies, he brings a broad systems perspective beyond core NLP.
9 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
M.Sc., Electrical Engineering, M.Sc., Electrical Engineering at University of Southern CaliforniaB.Eng., Electronic & Telecommunication Engineering, B.Eng., Electronic & Telecommunication Engineering at University of Mumbai
Github Skills (9)
oculus-quest4
openvr4
virtual-reality3
oculus3
arcore3
unity3d3
rendering3
sdk3
android2
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
ananthaks/DXR-PhotonMapper
Nov 2018 - Dec 2018
Contributions:84 commits, 67 pushes, 1 branch in 1 month
ananthaks/unity-projects
Jan 2018 - Sep 2018
Contributions:28 pushes, 1 branch in 8 months
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