About

Shivani Poddar is an accomplished Engineering Manager at Google Research, with a wealth of experience in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. She has previously served as the Machine Learning Tech Lead for the Meeting Assistant team at Workplace, Facebook, where she spearheaded the development of conversational AI for remote collaboration. Shivani also played a pivotal role in building and launching the foundational machine learning and AI stack for Facebook Portal, leading product and engineering development across social graph technology for ML, deep personalization for a smarter calling experience. Shivani was the first-ever student at Carnegie Mellon to be funded by the Amazon Alexa Prize, where she and her team built a social chatbot that was eventually deployed to tens of thousands of users through Amazon Alexa. During her time at CMU, she pursued research in the field of Natural Language Generation, Reinforcement Learning for chatbots, and multimodal machine learning. Shivani is also a prominent speaker on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Consumers as well as Enterprises, covering topics such as Diversity and Bias in AI, Future of Work, and Immersive Multimodal Assistants. She is a mentor for young aspirants looking to become the next innovators in the field and regularly volunteers in resume building workshops, panels for hiring, and Q&As on LinkedIn. Shivani's current role at Google involves building teams and products to make Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence tech fair and inclusive. Her past experiences include serving as a Tech Lead (Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence) and Software Engineer II at Facebook, where she led the Machine Learning team for the development of Assistive Technology in Workplace and worked on building User State Models for Conversational Assistants. Shivani holds a Master's degree in Language Technologies and Artificial Intelligence from Carnegie Mellon University, along with a Masters by Research in Computational Humanities - Psychology from the International Institute of Information Technology. She also has a Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.) in Computer Science from the same institute. Shivani's technical expertise includes Senior Software Engineer, ML, AI, Software Engineer, Research Scientist, Reinforcement Learning, Data Scientist, and infra. With 4.61 years of relevant experience, Shivani is a highly respected and sought-after professional in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.