About

Skanda Vasudevan is a Machine Learning Scientist at Amazon with close to 5 years of experience in applying Machine Learning/AI to real-world problems. He is a versatile ML practitioner who prefers working on problems with different settings and areas of AI. He has worked in areas such as NLP, Speech, Recommender Systems, Predictive analytics and recently causal modeling for behavioral data modeling. Skanda's long-term interests include Reasoning in AI, Role of Memories in Learning, Meta learning, and Structure Enriched Learning Systems. At Amazon, Skanda is working on applying Machine Learning to business problems. He has worked on key projects such as extracting product information from external websites to help build Amazon Catalog. Skanda developed Deep Learning supervised solutions to extract the attributes from all product pages in the external site. He has also worked on the Alexa Speech Recognition Team, where he worked on different components in a typical large-scale ASR system. Skanda has spent a considerable chunk of time towards prototyping/experimenting with the latest developments in the field of ASR such as end-end Neural based Speech Recognition. He has worked on attention-based models for speech recognition, CTC based models, and recently Neural Transducer approaches. Skanda is currently exploring the application of causal modeling to estimate different costs for Amazon Ad display. Before joining Amazon, Skanda worked as a Data Scientist at Indix, where he generated embeddings of products based on the images and titles. He also worked at Xerox as a Research Intern, where he experimented with novel ways of applying multi-view techniques to estimate charging demand of electric vehicles. Skanda holds a Master's Degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and a Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) in Computer Science from SVU College of Engineering. He also completed his 12th from Sri Chaitanya Junior College, Tirupati, and SSC from Kings English Medium School. Skanda's tech stack includes ML, Research Scientist, AI, Deep Learning, NLP, Neural Networks, Web, and Data Scientist. With 8.53 years of relevant experience, Skanda is an expert in his field and is passionate about solving complex problems using Machine Learning and AI.