Anish Acharya

I was born and raised in Kolkata, the cultural capital of India (Also home to 3 of the 5 Nobel laureates (Citizens) India has produced, or 4 of the 9 Indian Origin Nobel Laureates. After my undergraduate studies at Jadavpur University, Kolkata working on Signal Processing, Control Systems, Nonlinear Dynamical Systems; I moved to the US and joined Univ. of California Irvine for MS studies in 2013. During my MS I was a visiting research scholar at TTIC, hosted by Prof. David McAllester, also worked as an intern at Toyota Research in North America (TRINA) where we were developing stereo algorithms to make driverless cars work. I also interned at this wonderful start-up FEM in (Now sold to Nielsen).

Post grad school, I joined Amazon Alexa AI in June 2016 after briefly working as a data scientist at eBay inc and Schlumberger.
I was an Applied Scientist in the Natural Language Understanding group of Amazon Alexa Conversational AI Core ML group at Amazon Lab 126. Here I spent 3 wonderful years of life proposing, designing, implementing core Alexa NLU models (Named Entity Recognition, Intent Classification, Entity Resolution, Domain Classification, Compressed DNN) Notable Live Launches of models owned by me: Communications (Alexa Calling), Timers, Alarms, Reminders, Calendar, Echo Show. I was also a leading scientist to launch Alexa Conversations.

In 2019, I decided to move back to academia and joined UT Austin for PhD studies co-advised by Professor Inderjit Singh Dhillon and Professor Sujay Sanghavi. During my PhD I have done industrial internships at Microsoft (2019) and Meta (2020, 2021) . I am also awarded 100,000$ funding from Meta to support my PhD studies.