Ahmed H. Awadallah

About

I am passionate about using AI and Machine Learning to create intelligent user experiences that connect people to information. I am Principal Research Manager at Microsoft Research at Redmond, where I lead the Language and Information Technologies team. The team focuses on understanding how people interact with information and enabling machines to understand and communicate in natural language and assist with task completion. We push the state-of-the-art in several areas while also making impact on real-world problems by transferring and shipping technologies into several products such as Bing, Cortana, Office 365, and Dynamics 365.

My research research interests are at the intersection of machine learning, natural language processing, and information access & retrieval. My earlier work spanned several topics including information extraction, sentiment analysis and understanding, measuring and improving Web search systems. More recently, my research has focused on building NLP systems with limited annotated data (transfer learning, learning with weak supervision, learning from user interactions) and building natural language interfaces to services and data.

Prior to joining Microsoft, I earned my Ph.D. from the department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. Before that, I worked as a research engineer at IBM where I focused on building information extraction systems from unstructured text. I published 80+ peer-reviewed papers and I am an  inventor on 25 (granted and pending) patents. I served as SPC/PC member of several technical conferences including ACL, EMNLP, COLING, KDD, SIGIR, WSDM, Neurips and many more.

Latest:

• Received the 2020 Karen Spärck Jones Award presented by the British Computer Society (BCS).  This award is given to researchers within 10 years of their PhD who have contributed significantly to  natural language processing and information retrieval.
• Co-organizing the first Workshop on Natural Language Interfaces: Challenges and Opportunities at ACL 2020 in Seattle.
• Invited Talk at the WSDM 2020 User Modelling Workshop: Leveraging Behavioral Data to Improve Workplace Productivity
• Leading a new collaboration with Yale on Improving Productivity with Text Summarization as part of the Microsoft Productivity Research program.
• Check out the Task Intelligence workshop at WSDM 2019
•  Check out the slides from WWW 2018 and CIKM 2017 tutorials  on Understanding User Needs & Tasks