Ruhi Sarikaya is a Vice President at Amazon. He  joined Amazon Alexa team in 2016 to build and lead the Alexa Intelligent Decisions organization within Alexa AI.  With his team, he has been building products, features and core AI capabilities, around ranking, relevance, natural language understanding, recommendations, dialog management, contextual understanding, personalization, metrics and analytics for Alexa.  Prior to that, he was a principal science manager and the founder of the language understanding and dialog systems group at Microsoft between 2011 and 2016. With his group, he built natural language understanding and dialog management capabilities of Cortana, Xbox One, Bots and the underlying platform supporting both 1st and 3rdparty. Before Microsoft, he was a research staff member and team lead in the Human Language Technologies Group at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center for ten years. Prior to IBM, he worked as a researcher at the Center for Spoken Language Research (CSLR) at the University of Colorado at Boulder for two years.  He received his Ph.D. degree from Duke University, NC in 2001 in electrical and computer engineering.  He has published over 130 technical papers in refereed journal and conference proceedings and, is inventor of over 85 granted/pending patents. He has been regularly giving keynotes in major speech, language, AI and Web conferences.

Dr. Sarikaya's expertise spans product development, business operations and research focusing on machine learning, artificial  intelligence, all aspects of speech and natural language processing including natural language  understanding, dialog management, ranking and relevance, search systems, speech recognition, personalization, and recommendation systems.

Dr. Sarikaya is a fellow of the IEEE and is named an IEEE SPS Distinguished Industry Speaker.

For more information please visit: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruhisarikaya