Shankar Ananthakrishnan is currently the Director of Applied Science at Amazon, where they lead the vision and AI strategy for Alexa's language understanding technology. With over 20 years of hands-on and technical leadership experience, Shankar previously held positions as a Senior Manager and Senior Scientist at Amazon, and also contributed as a Research Assistant at the University of Southern California. Their doctoral research made significant contributions to prosody modeling and was widely cited in the speech community. Shankar also has a background in developing statistical techniques for Arabic ASR during their internship at AT&T Labs and has led notable projects in speech-to-speech translation at BBN Technologies. Shankar holds a Ph.D. and an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering, all from the University of Southern California and the University of Mumbai.
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