Karthik Raghunathan is a scientist at Microsoft, Silicon Valley, working on Speech and Natural Language Processing. Since first being introduced to the field in 2006, he has worked on diverse problems such as spoken dialog systems, machine translation, text normalization, coreference resolution, and speech-based information retrieval, leading to publications in esteemed conferences such as SIGIR, EMNLP, and AAAI. He has also had the privilege to be mentored by and work with some of the best minds in Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, such as Prof. Christopher Manning, Prof. Daniel Jurafsky, and Dr. Ron Kaplan.

Karthik currently works at the Bing Speech and Language Sciences group at Microsoft, where he builds speech-enabled conversational understanding systems for various Microsoft products such as the Xbox gaming console and the Windows Phone mobile operating system. He employs various techniques from speech processing, Natural Language Processing, machine learning, and data mining to improve systems that perform automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding. The products he has recently worked on at Microsoft include the new improved Kinect sensor for Xbox One and the Cortana digital assistant in Windows Phone 8.1. In his previous roles at Microsoft, Karthik worked on shallow dependency parsing and semantic understanding of web queries in the Bing Search team and on statistical spellchecking and grammar checking in the Microsoft Office team.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Karthik graduated with an MS degree in Computer Science (specializing in Artificial Intelligence), with a distinction in Research in Natural Language Processing from Stanford University. While the focus of his graduate research thesis was coreference resolution (the coreference tool from his thesis is available as part of the Stanford CoreNLP Java package), he also worked on the problems of statistical machine translation (leading Stanford's efforts for the GALE 3 Chinese-English MT bakeoff), slang normalization in text messages (codeveloping the Stanford SMS Translator), and situated spoken dialog systems in robots (helped in developing speech packages, now available as part of the open source Robot Operating System (ROS)).

Karthik's undergraduate work at the National Institute of Technology, Calicut, focused on building NLP systems for Indian languages. He worked on restricted domain-spoken dialog systems for Tamil, Telugu, and Hindi in collaboration with IIIT, Hyderabad. He also interned with Microsoft Research India on a project that dealt with scaling statistical machine translation for resource-scarce languages.

Karthik Raghunathan maintains a homepage at nlp.stanford.edu/~rkarthik/ and can be reached at <[email protected]>.

Altaf Rahman is currently a research scientist at Yahoo Labs in California, USA. He works on search queries, understanding problems such as query tagging, query interpretation ranking, vertical search triggering, module ranking, and others. He earned his PhD degree from The University of Texas at Dallas on Natural Language Processing. His dissertation was on the conference resolution problem. Dr. Rahman has publications in major NLP conferences with over 200 citations. He has also worked on other NLP problems: Named Entity Recognition, Part of Speech Tagging, Statistical Parsers, Semantic Classifier, and so on. Earlier, he worked as a research intern in IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Université Paris Diderot, and Google.