👋 Hi, I’m Akash. I’m currently working on meeting transcription as a Sr. Applied Scientist at Microsoft. I’m part of an R&D team responsible for shipping state-of-art speech recognition models to Azure Cognitive Service APIs (used by Twitter), or to add AI magic to Microsoft products like Teams + AI-assisted recaps of meetings. In this role I need to be tuned in to fast-evolving research, exercise judgement in connecting user experience with research/technology readiness and keep building & experimenting until I can ship high-quality models that improve the user experience.

🐋 In my first year at the Microsoft global hackathon as an ode to the stunning beauty of the Pacific Northwest, I co-founded OrcaHello. OrcaHello is an open-source AI-assisted Southern Resident Killer Whale (SRKW) acoustic monitoring & alert system. Since it went live in September 2020, OrcaHello has enabled 24x7 monitoring of 3 hydrophones in the Puget Sound with a 400x reduction in moderation time to ~10min/day. So far, it has detected over 60 expert-validated SRKW events and issued alerts to authorities such as the Port of Seattle.

I entered the code world ~7yrs ago via an unconventional career arc from a past life as a Chemical Engineer (minored in Control Systems, the math of which I still use!). Connecting the dots so far is a belief in my ability to learn, product-minded instincts to bridge engineering and end-user worlds and a hunger to make some magic :)