Shobana Balakrishnan

About

I am a Principal Program Manager in Experiences and Device division working on the Substrate AI Platform for Office data. For the last 2+ years have been involved in large scale machine learning on email and conversation data and was the PM and force behind building “Smart Reply” in Outlook (Web) and Skype consumer and the more general Reply Assistance space – ex., reply to a task. Along with building the deep learning modeling and experimentation agility expertise within Office on data that we cannot look at (as it is customer content and strictly eyes-off), I have been driving the compliant offline experimentation platfom with Partners in Azure AI. This is a journey we are on and by no means done. I am interested in bringing Reinforcement learning capability to the platform and privacy preserving techniques to enable easier model building, hypothesis testing and validation.