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Leading five Linguistic Engineering teams to support AI products with ML-based natural language processing across input modalities and a full stack or natural language technologies (including ASR, language understanding, dialog strategies, NLG, TTS).

Linguistic Engineering Manager

Microsoft

Leading the design and development of intelligent and personal digital assistant experiences in close collaboration with Design, Platform, and Partner teams.

Principal Program Manager

Working in the Cortana team on the design and execution of new personalized speech user experiences for AI agents. User data and DSAT analytics help reveal pain points while Microsoft's technology ecosystem offers unique and differentiating opportunities for seamless, natural AI interactions for our end users. My perspective places the possible user experience at the helm of the journey along our road map.

Senior Program Manager

Leading the Quality & Metrics pillar for Microsoft Speech Services, I have developed a quality framework, including an accelerated data pipeline which measures all aspects of Microsoft Speech quality and provides relevant, actionable, data-driven guidance to our science teams.

When I started my work, accuracy metrics had been produced on a monthly basis. Careful orchestration and automation allowed us to deliver complex insights on annotated judgments daily and with high integrity.
I have become the primary authority for SR quality metrics and consult product PMs on all aspects of quality measurements, starting with suggested KPI, required instrumentation, etc.
I have devised innovative metrics approaches to measure the "immeasurable" as well as the quality of our ground truth and produced interactive PowerBI dashboards which served to inform release decisions as well as exploratory analysis.

My team's mission was all about enhancing Microsoft's capabilities as a data driven organization. This required an end to end strategy which spans the full spectrum of the data life cycle, including infrastructure, analytics, and a supportive data culture.
This is the evolution of the data strategy I had started 2 years prior, originally with limited scope, had finally been staffed and budgeted to support all of Microsoft engineering. One of the most meaningful results of the role I had played was the collaborative creation of Microsoft's Data & Applied Sciences Discipline.

Sr. Program Manager

Services Engineering Team - Big Data
As a member of a centralized engineering organization within Microsoft, it is our mission to educate, consult, and enable engineers with state of the art (shared) technologies. My team has a special focus on teams who work on cloud services (which by now spans every division at Microsoft). Within this team I drive our support strategy for the Big Data space. I have worked with a small team of Software Developers to create an end-2-end on-prem Hadoop pipeline for large-scale data analytics. I also investigated the requirements, cost, and viability of setting up a Hadoop cluster on Azure, and compared them to other (internally available) big data solutions.
Based on our hands-on experience of setting up the big data pipeline, I started a focused data strategy initiative, developing a consultancy program around all aspects of data analytics from initial instrumentation, choice infrastructure, tooling, and orchestration, to the final decision making based on gained insights and derived predictions.

Sr. Lead Program Manager

My responsibilities included technical transfers of Microsoft Research technology into shipping products and services.
It required an excellent understanding of the cultural and operational differences between research and product teams, along with the ability to facilitate successful and collaborative partnerships between those divisions.
Further responsibilities included the representation of Microsoft Research to external Microsoft customers and the content management of the annual Research event TechFest (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/techfest2011/default.aspx) as a way to create company-wide visibility of current MSR advancements to all of Microsoft.Received my 5th patent for the collaboration on an automated linguistic search integration into Word documents.

Research Program Manager

Microsoft Research - Machine Translation Incubation:  
Identified and designed a series of front-end interfaces and cross-product integration points for our new in-house developed Machine Translation web service www.microsofttranslator.com (aka Bing Translator).
The Bing translator has been localized into 30+ other markets and I worked closely with the Internationalization team to ensure region-appropriate front-end design.
I oversaw every aspect of the front-end release (in close collaboration with the backend team), proactively worked with the legal department and geopolitical operations to identify and respond to exceptional geopolitical matters (such as the Chinese URL filtering requirement). I worked closely with designers on the visual execution of my UX specs and sat with developers to ensure the intended functional implementation. Additionally, I oversaw the instrumentation of our site traffic tracking and instructed colleagues on the setup/usage of the dashboards.
I also served as the classical feature PM for this V1 service, keeping dev and test on track and unblocked as their scrum master.

Released access/integration points:
Bing Translator
(see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Translator) 
Web page translation with Bilingual Viewer (featuring synchronized scrolling and navigation, reference highlighting, choice of views).
Messenger
TBot, messenger translation bot
 
Office
Microsoft Translator Installer for Office
 
Internet Explorer 8
Translation Accelerator for Internet Explorer
 
Windows Live Toolbar
Translate pages with Windows Live Toolbar

Widget
Microsoft Translator web page translation widget

Sr. User Experience Program Manager

Design and development of natural language technology to be used for text analysis, proofing, search, handwriting and speech recognition. Leading the program management responsible for language scalability.
Shipped multilingual word breakers, spellers, and grammar checkers to Microsoft Office, Windows, Hotmail, and more.; Tools & Content team PM lead: 
 Hired and established new 6-person team. Mentored transition to PM role for former dev and testers.
 Shipped language-related content and tools (the latter in collaboration with vendors, developers, and testers). 
 Managed overall group's budget for our projects and provided our group's input into a 5-year budget projection.
 Promoted to level 64 in recognition of my scope and contributions.

Senior Lead Program Manager

Lead SDE (management):  Hired and built a team of computational linguists; trained new hires and managed higher-level direct reports. Received Microsoft "Goldstar" Stock Award for distinguished people management skills. People management ratings have consistently been "exceeding expectations".

German word breaker:  Implemented German word breaking component for intranet-search; strategically led an at-risk project to success.

Replacing the tier 1 spell checkers with our own product: I suggested the core strategic infrastructure for our spell-checking approach, including a semi-static approach to enable verification of productive word-structures (compounds and clitics). I filed (and contributed to) 3 patents for this. My team reached or surpassed all shipping requirements.
Expanding word breaking & expansive stemming to 24 new languages: My team successfully piloted a new approach towards the expansion into new languages.

Computational Linguist (Dev Lead)

German grammar checker:  Implementation of grammatical error detection and correction rules ("green squiggles"), shipped with OfficeXP and later versions. Resulted in a filed patent for a complex case error correction method and my promotion to be a team lead.

Computational Linguist (Software Development Engineer)

IBM Germany

Telecommunication Management System for Customers: 
Implemented C++ user-interface for a topology application;
Supervised a team of 4 for major documentation project and led training for new developers.
Extensive interaction with external clients.

Software Developer

Computer assisted language learning system: Implementation of a tutoring module generating appropriate and dynamic system responses to user input (in PROLOG). 
German spelling reform converter: Fully responsible for a browser-independent interactive user interface, realized in JavaScript as intranet-solution for an IBM-internal server.

Research Consultant - Computational Linguist

25 years of experience in the software industry, currently working at Facebook on Computational Linguistics in the context of AI.

I have a master's degree in Computational Linguistics & AI and extensive experiences in UX Design, Speech Recognition, Search, Cloud Services Engineering, and Agile methods to lead teams through the SDLC, half of my tenure as a successful manager.

My Insights profile (red>blue>yellow>green) sets me up as an energetic (=obsessed) data-driven and action oriented achiever who understands the nitty gritty in order to reach big picture goals.

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