The Grainger College of Engineering
Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Ruhi Sarikaya

Ruhi Sarikaya
Ruhi Sarikaya he/him/his
Adjunct Research Professor

Education

  • Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University, PhD (2001)
  • Electrical and Computer Engineering, Clemson University, MS (1997)
  • Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Bilkent University, BS (1995)

Biography

Ruhi Sarikaya is Vice President of Alexa AI at Amazon leading Alexa AI organization including engineering, science and product management. With his team, he has been building Alexa Runtime, LLMs, personalization, proactivity, recommendations, and autonomy models and services, metrics and analytics for Alexa+. Prior to that, he was a principal science manager and the founder of the language understanding and dialog systems group at Microsoft between 2011 and 2016. With his group, he built natural language understanding and dialog management capabilities of Cortana and Xbox One. Before Microsoft, he was a research staff member and team lead in the Human Language Technologies Group at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center for ten years. Prior to IBM, he worked as a researcher at the Center for Spoken Language Research (CSLR) at the University of Colorado at Boulder for two years. He received his Ph.D. degree from Duke University in 2001 in electrical and computer engineering. He has published over 135 technical papers in refereed journal and conference proceedings and, is inventor of over 90 granted/pending patents. He serves on the advisory boards of several universities and engineering departments. He is also the executive sponsor of the Amazon-UIUC partnership. Dr. Sarikaya is a frequent keynote speaker at major conferences in speech, language, AI, and web technologies. Dr. Sarikaya is a fellow of the IEEE and is named an IEEE SPS Distinguished Industry Speaker.

Research Interests

  • Artificial Intelligence,  LLMs, Conversational and Multimodal AI, Personalization, Search Systems,  Agentic AI and Autonomy, Speech Recognition.

Articles in Conference Proceedings

News Notes