Neel Sundaresan

About

I am a Vice President of AI and Engineering in Cloud&AI. My group focuses on all aspects of Data and AI for cloud developer productivity. My first love in computer science was writing compiler compilers, program generators and program generator generators. I was taught to believe “Why write code when you can generate them? and why write the generators when you can generate the generators?” Later, I wandered off to write compilers for high performance scientific computing system. I took another turn to build internet search engines, XML tools, and CRM products. I enjoyed the fact that I could see language structures and opportunities to build compilers within these applications. I was a research manager at IBM Almaden Research Center.  Later I ran the research labs at eBay where I had to privilege of working on everything from commerce search, distributed systems , and fraud detection to Computer Vision and Digitial Economics. I have come full circle back to my first love of programming language systems but this time instead of grammars working with data and AI. I am glad that there is so much to learn and so much more to contribute. Here, I focus on research in areas related to developer productivity. These include AI for Code, AI for Azure, AI for security and performance, among others. I also manage the data platform team that handles one of the largest data platform, processing and curation for business insights. Other areas include Azure Notebooks developer tools, and DevAI (a platform for delivering end-to-end AI) and PROSE (Program Synthesis).

As the innovation in large scale AI grows at a break-neck speed, it has also opened up opportunities for addressing questions on transparency, trust, intelligence, bias and diversity. I believe there are huge opportunities for research and technical, social and economic impact of research in these areas.

I am proud of my creation of the Inspire! program about a decade for first generation STEM girls and boys who are financially disadvantaged to pursue career in STEM through mentorship, access, and scholarship. Our cohorts have done so well and make us proud. I continue to do my bit in this area when and where I can. Some stories can be found here, here,  (opens in new tab) here,  and here.  (opens in new tab)

Link to my publications are here (opens in new tab) and here. (opens in new tab) You can find my patents here (opens in new tab).