October Luncheon Meeting (Goleta) 10/09/19

Amazon Alexa’s software and devices use many tools from the artificial intelligence toolkit--voice recognition, natural language processing, natural language generation, machine learning, big data, and advanced search technologies. Santa Barbara's Alexa development group started as a company called Graphiq, which Amazon purchased in 2017 for its knowledge graph technology. Their software structures human knowledge in a hierarchical form and retrieves precise answers to complex questions. Find out what challenges are being solved locally to make Alexa smarter.

Ivan Bercovich leads Amazon’s Santa Barbara office and bills himself as a "knowledge engineering enthusiast." He began working as a software developer at Graphiq in 2011, where he rose to VP of Engineering by the time the company was acquired by Amazon. He has been involved with several startups and advised various organizations, including UCSB's Center for Financial Mathematics and Actuarial Research and Surfline Wavetrak (surf forecasting and reports). He previously worked at Cisco as a Design Engineer. Bercovich has a dual BS in Electrical Engineering and Financial Mathematics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a fraction of a PhD in Financial Mathematics from UCSB.