Shobana Balakrishnan

About Shobana Balakrishnan

I have spent the last 30 years of my career in technology straddling between research and development. I continue to integrate the latest research in products and services throughout my career at Microsoft in Windows, Server, Bing, Office, and Azure and now M365. I am currently working on enabling building turnkey AI solutions for enterprises leveraging their private data within the enterprise in a compliant and privacy preserving manner using foundational models (LLMs and multi-modal). Prior to this I worked on Singularity an AI aware PaaS which is part of our core Azure offering. I have worked as a producer of AI technology from the early days of deep learning/transformers including features like Smart Reply in Outlook, Viva Topics, Meeting Recommendations and defining how we operationalize AI within our M365 core services. I\'ve also spent 9 years in Research (MSR) productizing viable research technology as well as managing incubations in the area of exa scale storage, data center network operations management, and a fun Garage project to search over your photo collection before Google Photos was born. I have experience in large scale systems working on High Performance Computing and have some experience with VLSI design with my work at Intel. In all my work my strengths have been to come up with innovative ways to solve problems where no prior path has been chartered, working across people with different skill sets and vocabulary to bridge the divide, and bringing new technologies into mainstream product at scale amanging risks. I am an engineering leader who values working with creative people collaboratively to solve challenging problems.

Experience

1. Board Member

   King County Library System Foundation

   Dec 2018 — Present

Education

• University of Houston

  M.S, Electrical Engg; Digital Systems

  1986 — 1988

• J.N.T.U. College of Engg

  B.S, Electronics and Communication Engg

  1981 — 1985

• The Ohio State University

  Ph.D, Computer Engineering; Parallel Computing

  1990 — 1996