Biography

Shankar Ananthakrishnan has 22 years of hands-on and technical leadership experience in a broad range of speech, language, and machine learning technologies. Shankar received his B.Eng. in Electronic & Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Mumbai, India, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees, both in Electrical Engineering, from the University of Southern California. He is currently a Director of Applied Science at Amazon AGI, driving R&D efforts in core foundation models. Previously, Shankar led a range of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) efforts at Amazon Alexa, and various NLP/Machine Translation initiatives at Raytheon BBN Technologies. Shankar's research interests are broadly centered around large language models & generative AI, speech recognition, statistical machine translation of text and speech, natural language understanding, and related areas in statistical pattern recognition and machine learning. He has published over 50 papers in peer-reviewed conferences and journals, and is the recipient of best paper awards at leading conferences, including ICASSP 2005 and Interspeech 2010. Specialties: speech recognition, statistical machine translation, speech translation, natural language processing, natural language understanding, language modeling, pattern recognition, machine learning.

Research Interests

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